thousand serfs toiled, by palaces, and by gold to the amount of seventeen million roubles. Such it was to be in the good books of Catherine II., Empress of Russia.
With riches and power, Gregory’s ambition grew until he dreamt of sitting on the throne itself by Catherine’s side; and in her foolish infatuation even this prize might have been his, had not wiser counsels come to her rescue. “The Empress,” said Panine to her, “can do what she likes; but Madame Orloff can never be Empress of Russia.” And thus Gregory’s greatest ambition was happily nipped in the bud.
The man who had played his cards with such skill and discretion in the early days of his love-making had now, his head swollen by pride and power, grown reckless. If he could not be Emperor in name, he would at least wield the sceptre. The woman to whom he owed all was, he thought, but a puppet in his hands, as ready to do his bidding as any of his minions. But through all her dallying Catherine’s smiles masked an iron will. In heart she was a woman; in brain and will-power, a man. And Orloff, like many another favourite, was to learn the lesson to his cost.
The time came when she could no longer tolerate his airs and assumptions. There was only one Empress, but lovers were plentiful, and she already had an eye on his successor. And thus it was that one day the swollen Orloff was sent on a diplomatic mission to arrange peace between Russia and Turkey. When she bade him good-bye she called him her “angel of peace,” but she knew that it was her angel’s farewell to his paradise.
How the Ambassador, instead of making peace, stirred up the embers of war into fresh flame is a matter of history. But he was not long left to work such mad mischief. While he was swaggering at a Jassy fete, in a costume ablaze with diamonds worth a million roubles, news came to him of a good-looking young lieutenant who was not only installed in his place by Catherine’s side, but was actually occupying his own apartments. Within an hour he was racing back to St Petersburg, resting neither night nor day until he had covered the thousand leagues that separated him from the capital.
Before, however, his sweating horses could enter it, he was stopped by Catherine’s emissaries and ordered to repair to the Imperial Palace at Gatshina. And then he realised that his sun had indeed come to its setting. His honours were soon stripped from him, and although he was allowed to keep his lands, his gold and jewels, the spoils of Cupid, the diamond-framed miniature, was taken away to adorn the breast of his successor, the lieutenant.
Under this cloud of disfavour Orloff conducted himself with such resignation–none knew better than he how futile it was to fight–that Catherine, before many months had passed, not only recalled him to Court, but secured for him a Princedom of the Holy Empire. “As for Prince Gregory,” she said amiably, “he is free to go or stay, to hunt, to drink, or to gamble. I intend to live according to my own pleasure, and in entire independence.”
After a tragically brief wedded life with a beautiful girl-cousin, who died of consumption, Orloff returned to St Petersburg to spend the last few months of his life, “broken-hearted and mad.” And to his last hour his clouded brain was tortured with visions of the “avenging shade of the murdered Peter.”
CHAPTER XV
A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CINDERELLA
It was to all seeming a strange whim that caused Cardinal Mazarin, one day in the year 1653, to summon his nieces, daughters of his sister, Hieronyme Mancini, from their obscurity in Italy to bask in the sunshine of his splendours in Paris.
At the time of this odd caprice, Richelieu’s crafty successor had reached the zenith of his power. His was the most potent and splendid figure in all Europe that did not wear a crown. He was the avowed favourite and lover of Anne of Austria, Queen of France, to whose vanity he had paid such skilful court–indeed it was common rumour that she had actually given him her hand in secret marriage. The boy-King, Louis XIV., was a puppet in his strong hands. He was, in fact, the dictator of France, whose smiles the greatest courtiers tried to win, and before whose frowns they trembled.
In contrast to such magnificence, his sister, Madame Mancini, was the wife of a petty Italian baron, who was struggling to bring up her five daughters on a pathetically scanty purse–as far removed from her magnificent brother as a moth from a star. There was, on the face of things, every reason why the great and all-powerful Cardinal should leave his nieces to their genteel poverty; and we can imagine both the astonishment and delight with which Madame Mancini received the summons to Paris which meant such a revolution in life for her and her daughters.
If the Mancini girls had no heritage of money, they had at least the dower of beauty. Each of the five gave promise of a rare loveliness–with the solitary exception of Marie, Madame’s third daughter, who at fourteen was singularly unattractive even for that awkward age. Tall, thin, and angular, without a vestige of grace either of figure or movement, she had a sallow face out of which two great black eyes looked gloomily, and a mouth wide and thin-lipped. She was, in addition, shy and slow-witted to the verge of stupidity. Marie, in fact, was quite hopeless, the “ugly duckling” of a good-looking family, and for this reason an object of dislike and resentment to her mother.
Certainly, said Madame, Marie must be left behind. Her other daughters would be a source of pride to their uncle; he could secure great matches for them, but Marie–pah! she would bring discredit on the whole family. And so it was decided in conclave that the “ugly duckling” should be left in a nunnery–the only fit place for her. But Marie happily had a spirit of her own. She would not be left behind, she declared; and if she must go to a nunnery, why there were nunneries in plenty in France to which they could send her. And Marie had her way.
She was not, however, to escape the cloister after all, for to a Paris nunnery she was consigned when her Cardinal uncle had set eyes on her. “Let her have a year or two there,” was his verdict, “and, who knows, she may blossom into a beauty yet. At any rate she can put on flesh and not be the scarecrow she is.” And thus, while her more favoured sisters were revelling in the gaieties of Court life, Marie was sent to tell her beads and to spend Spartan days among the nuns.
Nearly two years passed before Mazarin expressed a wish to see his ugly niece again; and it was indeed a very different Marie who now made her curtsy to him. Gone were the angular figure, the awkward movements, the sallow face, the slow wits. Time and the healthy life of the cloisters had done their work well. What the Cardinal now saw was a girl of seventeen, of exquisitely modelled figure, graceful and self-possessed; a face piquant and full of animation, illuminated by a pair of glorious dark eyes, and with a dazzling smile which revealed the prettiest teeth in France. Above all, and what delighted the Cardinal most, she had now a sprightly wit, and a quite brilliant gift of conversation. It was thus a smiling and gratified Cardinal who gave greeting to his niece, now as fair as her sisters and more fascinating than any of them. There was no doubt that he could find a high-placed husband for her, and thus–for this was, in fact, his motive for rescuing his pretty nieces from their obscurity–make his position secure by powerful family alliances.
It was not long before Mazarin fixed on a suitor in the person of Armande de la Porte, son of the Marquis de la Meilleraye, one of the most powerful nobles in France. But alas for his scheming! Armande’s heart had already been caught while Marie was reciting her matins and vespers: He had lost it utterly to her beautiful sister, Hortense; he vowed that he would marry no other, and that if Hortense could not be his wife he would prefer to die. Thus Marie was rescued from a union which brought her sister so much misery in later years, and for a time she was condemned to spend unhappy months with her mother at the Louvre.
To this period of her life Marie Mancini could never look back without a shudder. “My mother,” she says, “who, I think, had always hated me, was more unbearable than ever. She treated me, although I was no longer ugly, with the utmost aversion and cruelty. My sisters went to Court and were fussed and feted. I was kept always at home, in our miserable lodgings, an unhappy Cinderella.”
But Fortune did not long hide his face from Cinderella. Her “Prince Charming” was coming–in the guise of the handsome young King, Louis XIV. himself. It was one day while visiting Madame Mancini in her lodgings at the Louvre that Louis first saw the girl who was to play such havoc with his heart; and at the first sight of those melting dark eyes and that intoxicating smile he was undone. He came again and again–always under the pretext of visiting Madame, and happy beyond expression if he could exchange a few words with her daughter, Marie; until he soon counted a day worse than lost that did not bring him the stolen sweetness of a meeting.
When, a few weeks later, Madame Mancini died, and Marie was recalled to Court by her uncle, her life was completely changed for her. Louis had now abundant opportunities of seeking her side; and excellent use he made of them. The two young people were inseparable, much to the alarm of the Cardinal and Madame Mere, the Queen. The young King was never happy out of her sight; he danced with her (and none could dance more divinely than Marie); he listened as she sang to him with a voice whose sweetness thrilled him; they read the same books together in blissful solitude; she taught him her native Italian, and entranced him by the brilliance of her wit; and when, after a slight illness, he heard of her anxious inquiries and her tears of sympathy, his conquest was complete. He vowed that she and no other should be his wife and Queen of France.
But these halcyon days were not to last long. It was no part of Mazarin’s scheming that a niece of his should sit on the throne. The prospect was dazzling, it is true, but it would inevitably mean his own downfall, so strongly would such an alliance be resented by friends as well as enemies; and Anne of Austria was as little in the mood to be deposed by such an obscure person as the “Mancini girl.” Thus it was that Queen and Cardinal joined hands to nip the young romance in the bud.
A Royal bride must be found for Louis, and that quickly; and negotiations were soon on foot to secure as his wife Margaret, Princess of Savoy. In vain did the boy-King storm and protest; equally futile were Marie’s tearful pleadings to her uncle. The fiat had gone forth. Louis must have a Royal bride; and she was already about to leave Italy on her bridal progress to France.
It was, we may be sure, with a heavy heart that Marie joined the cavalcade which, with its gorgeous procession of equipages, its gaily mounted courtiers, and its brave escort of soldiery, swept out of Paris on its stately progress to Lyons, to meet the Queen-to-be. But there was no escape from the humiliation, for she must accompany Anne of Austria, as one of her retinue of maids-of-honour. Arrived too soon at Lyons, Louis rides on to give first greeting to his bride, who is now within a day’s journey; and returns with a smiling face to announce to his mother that he finds the Princess pleasing to his eye, and to describe, with boyish enthusiasm, her grace and graciousness, her magnificent eyes, her beautiful hair, and the delicate olive of her complexion, while Marie’s heart sinks at the recital. Could this be the lover who, but a few days ago, had been at her feet, vowing that she was the only bride in all the world for him?
When he seeks her side and shamefacedly makes excuses for his seeming recreancy, she bids him marry his “ugly bride” in accents of scorn, and then bursts into tears, which she only consents to wipe away when he declares that his heart will always be hers and that he will never marry the Italian Princess.
But Margaret of Savoy was not after all to be Queen of France. She was, as it proved, merely a pawn in the Cardinal’s deep game. It was a Spanish alliance that he sought for his young King; and when, at the eleventh hour, an ambassador came hurriedly to Lyons to offer the Infanta’s hand, the Savoy Duke and his sister, the Princess, had perforce to return to Italy “empty-handed.”
There was at least a time of respite now for Louis and Marie, and as they rode back to Paris, side by side, chatting gaily and exchanging sweet confidences, the sun once more shone on the happiest young people in all France. Then followed a period of blissful days, of dances and fetes, in brilliant succession, in which the lovers were inseparable; above all, of long rambles together, when, “the world forgetting,” they could live in the happy present, whatever the future might have in store for them.
Meanwhile the negotiations for the Spanish marriage were ripening fast. Louis and Marie again appeal, first to the Cardinal, then to the Queen, to sanction their union, but to no purpose; both are inflexible. Their foolish romance must come to an end. As a last resource Marie flies to the King, with tender pleadings and tears, begging him not to desert her; to which he answers that no power on earth shall make him wed the Infanta. “You alone,” he swears, “shall wear the crown of Queen”; and in token of his love he buys for her the pearls that were the most treasured belongings of the exiled Stuart Queen, Henrietta Maria. The lovers part in tears, and the following day Marie receives orders to leave Paris and to retire to La Rochelle.
At every stage of her journey she was overtaken by messengers bearing letters from Louis, full of love and protestations of unflinching loyalty; and when Louis moved with his Court to Bayonne, the lovers met once more to mingle their tears. But Louis, ever fickle, was already wavering again. “If I must marry the Infanta,” he said, “I suppose I must. But I shall never love any but you.”
Marie now realised that this was to be the end. In face of a lover so weak, and a fate so inflexible, what could she do but submit? And it was with a proud but breaking heart that she wrote a few days later to tell Louis that she wished him not to write to her again and that she would not answer his letters. One June day news came to her that her lover was married and that “he was very much in love with the Infanta”; and even her pride, crushed as it was, could not restrain her from writing to her sister, Hortense, “Say everything you can that is horrid about him. Point out all his faults to me, that I may find relief for my aching heart.” When, a few months later, Marie saw the King again, he received her almost as a stranger, and had the bad taste to sing the praises of his Queen.
But Marie Mancini was the last girl in all France to wed herself long to grief or an outraged vanity. There were other lovers by the score among whom she could pick and choose. She was more lovely now than when the recreant Louis first succumbed to her charms–with a ripened witchery of black eyes, red lips, the flash of pearly teeth revealed by every dazzling smile, with glorious black hair, the grace of a fawn, and a “voluptuous fascination” which no man could resist.
Prince Charles of Lorraine was her veriest slave, but Mazarin would have none of him. Prince Colonna, Grand Constable of Naples, was more fortunate when he in turn came a-wooing. He bore the proudest name in Italy, and he had wealth, good-looks, and high connections to lend a glamour to his birth. The Cardinal smiled on his suit, and Marie, since she had no heart to give, willingly gave her hand.
Louis himself graced the wedding with his presence; and we are told, as the white-faced bride “said the ‘yes’ which was to bind her to a stranger, her eyes, with an indescribable expression, sought those of the King, who turned pale as he met them.”
Over the rest of Marie Mancini’s chequered life we must hasten. After a few years of wedded life with her Italian Prince, “Colonna’s early passion for his beautiful wife was succeeded by a distaste amounting to hatred. He disgusted her with his amours; and when she ventured to protest against his infidelity, he tried to poison her.” This crowning outrage determined Marie to fly, and, in company with her sister, Hortense, who had fled to her from the brutality of her own husband, she made her escape one dark night to Civita Vecchia, where a boat was awaiting the runaways.
Hotly pursued on land and sea, narrowly escaping shipwreck, braving hardships, hunger, and hourly danger of capture, the fugitives at last reached Marseilles where Marie (Hortense now seeking a refuge in Savoy) began those years of wandering and adventure, the story of which outstrips fiction.
Now we find her seeking asylum at convents from Aix to Madrid; now queening it at the Court of Savoy, with Duke Charles Emmanuel for lover; now she is dazzling Madrid with the Almirante of Castille and many another high-placed worshipper dancing attendance on her; and now she is in Rome, turning the heads of grave cardinals with her witcheries. Sometimes penniless and friendless, at others lapped in luxury; but carrying everywhere in her bosom the English pearls, the last gift of her false and frail Louis.
Thus, through the long, troubled years, until old-age crept on her, the Cardinal’s niece wandered, a fugitive, over the face of Europe, alternately caressed and buffeted by fortune, until “at long last” the end came and brought peace with it. As she lay dying in the house of a good Samaritan at Pisa, with no other hand to minister to her, she called for pen and paper, and with failing hand wrote her own epitaph, surely the most tragic ever penned–“Marie Mancini Colonna–Dust and Ashes.”
CHAPTER XVI
BIANCA, GRAND DUCHESS OF TUSCANY
More than three centuries have gone since Florence made merry over the death of her Grand Duchess, Bianca. It was an occasion for rejoicing; her name was bandied from lips to lips–“La Pessima Bianca”; jeers and laughter followed her to her unmarked grave in the Church of San Lorenzo. But through the ages her picture has come down to us as she strutted on the world’s stage in all her pride and beauty, with a vividness which few better women of her time retain.
It was in the year 1548, when our boy-King, the sixth Edward, was fresh to his crown, that Bianca Capello was cradled in the palace of her father, one of the greatest men of Venice, Senator and Privy Councillor. As a child she was as beautiful as she was wilful; the pride of her father, the despair of his wife, her stepmother–her little head full of romance, her heart full of rebellion against any kind of discipline or restraint.
Before she had left the schoolroom Capello’s daughter was, by common consent, the fairest girl in her native city, with a beauty riper than her years. Tall, and with a well-developed figure of singular grace, she carried her head as proudly as any Queen. Her fair hair fell in a rippling cascade far below her waist; her face, hands, and throat, we are told, were “white as lilies,” save for the delicate rose-colour that tinted her cheeks. Her eyes were large and dark, and of an almost dazzling brilliance; and her full, pouting lips were red and fragrant as a rose.
Such was Bianca Capello on the threshold of womanhood, as you may see her pictured to-day in Bronzino’s miniature at the British Museum, with a loveliness which set the hearts of the Venetian gallants a-flutter before our Shakespeare was in his cradle. She might, if she would, have mated with almost any noble in Tuscany, had not her foolish, wayward fancy fallen on Pietro Bonaventuri, a handsome young clerk in Salviati’s bank, whose eyes had often strayed from his ledgers to follow her as, in the company of her maid, the Senator’s daughter took her daily walk past his office window.
At sight of so fair a vision Pietro was undone; he fell violently in love with her long before he exchanged a word with her, and although no one knew better than he the gulf that separated the daughter of a nobleman and a Senator from the drudge of the quill, he determined to win her. Youth and good-looks such as his, with plenty of assurance to support them, had done as much for others, and they should do it for him. How they first met we know not, but we know that shortly after this momentous meeting Bianca had completely lost her heart to the knight of the quill, with the handsome face, the dark, flashing eyes, and the courtly manner.
Other meetings followed–secret rendezvous arranged by the duenna herself in return for liberal bribes–to keep which Bianca would steal out of her father’s palace at dead of night, leaving the door open behind her to ensure safe return before dawn. On one such occasion, so the story runs, Bianca returned to find the door closed against her by a too officious hand. She dared not wake the sleepers to gain admittance–that would be to expose her secret and to cover herself with disgrace–and in her fears and alarm she fled back to her lover.
However this may be, we know that, for some urgent reason or other, the young lovers disappeared one night together from Venice and made their way to Florence to find a refuge under the roof of Pietro’s parents. Here a terrible disillusion met Bianca at the threshold. Her husband–for, on the runaway journey, Pietro had secured the friendly services of a village priest to marry them–had told her that he was the son of noble parents, kin to his employers, the Salviatis. The home to which he now introduced her was little better than a hovel, with poverty looking out of its windows.
Here indeed was a sorry home-coming for the new-made bride, daughter of the great Capello! There was not even a drudge to do the housework, which Bianca was compelled to share with her bucolic mother-in-law. It is even said that she was compelled to do laundry-work in order to keep the domestic purse supplied. Her husband had forfeited his meagre salary; she had equally sacrificed the fortune left to her by her mother. Sordid, grinding poverty stared both in the face.
To return to her own home in Venice was impossible. So furious were her father and stepmother at her escapade that a large reward was advertised for the capture of her husband, “alive or dead,” and a sentence of death had been procured from the Council of Ten in the event of his arrest. More than this, a sentence of banishment was pronounced against Pietro and Bianca; the maid who had connived at their illicit wooing and flight paid for her treachery with her life; and Pietro’s uncle ended his days in a loathsome dungeon.
Such was the vengeance taken by Bartolomeo Capello. As for the runaways, they spent a long honeymoon in concealment and hourly dread of the fate that hung over them. It was well known, however, in Florence where they were in hiding; and curious crowds were drawn to the Bonaventuri hovel to catch a glimpse of the heroes of a scandal with which all Italy was ringing. Thus it was that Francesco de Medici first set eyes on the woman who was to play so great a part in his life.
There could be no greater contrast than that between Francesco de Medici, heir to the Tuscan Grand Dukedom, and the beautiful young wife of the bank-clerk, now playing the role of maid-of-all-work and charwoman. It is said that Francesco was a madman; and indeed what we know of him makes this description quite plausible. He was a man of black brow and violent temper, repelling alike in appearance and manner. He was, we are told, “more of a savage than a civilised human being.” His food was deluged with ginger and pepper; his favourite fare was raw eggs filled with red pepper, and raw onions, of which he ate enormous quantities. He drank iced water by the gallon, and slept between frozen sheets. He was a man, moreover, of evil life, familiar with every form of vicious indulgence. His only redeeming feature was a love of art, which enriched the galleries of Florence.
Such was the Medici–half-ogre, half-madman, who, riding one day through a Florence slum, saw at the window of a mean dwelling the beautiful face of Bianca Bonaventuri, and rode on leaving his heart behind. Here indeed was a dainty dish to set before his jaded appetite. The owner of that fair face, with the crimson lips and the black, flashing eyes, must be his. On the following day a great Court lady, the Marchesa Mondragone, presents herself at the Bonaventuri door, with smiles and gracious words, bearing an invitation to Court for the lady of the window. “Impossible,” bluntly answers Signora Bonaventuri; her daughter-in-law has no clothes fit to be seen at Court. “But,” persists the Marchesa, “that is a matter that can easily be arranged. It will be a pleasure to me to supply the necessary outfit, if the Signora and her daughter-in-law will but come to-morrow to the Mondragone Palace.” The bride, when consulted, is not unwilling; and the following day, in company with her mother-in-law, she is effusively received by the Marchesa, and is feasting her eyes on exquisite robes and the glitter of rare gems, among which she is invited to make her choice. A moment later Francesco enters, and with courtly grace is kissing the hand of his new divinity….
Then followed secret meetings such as marked Bianca’s first unhappy wooing in Venice–hours of rapture for the Tuscan Duke, of flattered submission by the runaway bride; and within a few weeks we find Bianca installed in a palace of her own with Francesco’s guards and equipage ever at its door, while his newly made bride, Giovanna, Archduchess of Austria, kept her lonely vigil in the apartments which so seldom saw her husband.
Francesco, indeed, had no eyes or thought for any but the lovely woman who had so completely enslaved him. As for her, condemn her as we must, much can be pleaded in extenuation of her conduct. She had been basely deceived and betrayed. On the one side was a life of sordid poverty and drudgery, with a husband for whom she had now nothing but dislike and contempt; on the other was the ardent homage of the future ruler of Tuscany, with its accompaniment of splendour, luxury, and power. A fig for love! ambition should now rule her life. She would drain the cup of pleasure, though the dregs might be bitter to the taste.
She was now in the very prime of her beauty, and a Queen in all but the name. Between her and her full Queendom were but two obstacles–her lover’s plain, unattractive wife, and her own worthless husband; and of these obstacles one was soon to be removed from her path.
Pietro, who had been made chamberlain to the Tuscan Court, was more than content that his wife should go her own way, so long as he was allowed to go his. He was kept very agreeably occupied with love affairs of his own. The richest widow in Florence, Cassandra Borgianni, was eager to lavish her smiles and favours on him; and the knowledge that two of his predecessors in her affection had fallen under the assassin’s knife only lent zest to a love adventure which was after his heart. Warnings of the fate that might await him in turn fell on deaf ears. When his wife ventured to point out the danger he retorted, “If you say another word I will cut your throat.” The following night as he was returning from a visit to the widow, a dagger was sheathed in his heart, and Pietro’s amorous race was run.
Such was the end of the bank-clerk and his eleventh-hour glories and love adventures. Now only Giovanna remained to block the way to the pinnacle of Bianca’s ambition; and her health was so frail that the waiting might not be long. Giovanna had provided no successor to her husband (who had now succeeded to his Grand Dukedom); if Bianca could succeed where the Grand Duchess had failed, she could at least ensure that a son of hers would one day rule over Tuscany.
Thus one August day in 1576 the news flashed round Florence that a male child had been born in the palace on the Via Maggiore. Francesco was in the “seventh heaven” of delight. Here at last was the long-looked-for inheritor of his honours–the son who was to perpetuate the glories of the Medici and to thwart his brother, the Cardinal, who had so confidently counted on the succession for himself. And Madame Bianca professed herself equally delighted, although her pleasure was qualified by fear.
She had played her part with consummate cleverness; but there were two women who knew the true story of the birth of the child, which had been smuggled into the palace from a Florence slum. One was the changeling’s mother, a woman of the people, whom a substantial bribe had induced to part with her new-born infant; the other was Bianca’s waiting woman. These witnesses to the imposture must be silenced effectually.
Hired assassins made short work of the mother. The waiting-maid was “left for dead” in a mountain-pass, to which she had been lured; but she survived long enough at least to communicate her secret to the Grand Duke’s brother, the Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici.
Bianca was now in a parlous plight. At any moment her enemy, the Cardinal, might betray her to her lover, and bring the carefully planned edifice of her fortunes tumbling about her ears. But she proved equal even to this emergency. Taking her courage in both hands, she herself confessed the fraud to the Grand Duke, who not only forgave her (so completely was he under the spell of her beauty) but insisted on calling the gutter-child his son.
The tables, however, were soon to be turned on her, for Giovanna, who had long despaired of providing an heir to her husband, gave birth a few months later to a male child. Florence was jubilant, for the Grand Duchess was as beloved as her rival was detested; and the christening of the heir was made the occasion of festivities and rejoicing. Bianca’s day of triumph seemed at last to be over. For a time she left Florence to hide her humiliation; but within a year she was back again, to be received with open arms of welcome by the Duke. During her absence she had made peace with her family, and when her father and brother came to Florence to visit her, they were received by Francesco with regal entertainments, and sent away loaded with presents and honours.
Bianca had now reached the zenith of her power and splendour. Before she had been back many months the Grand Duchess died, to the undisguised relief of her husband, who hastened from her funeral to the arms of her rival. Her position was now secure, unassailable; and before Giovanna had been two months in the family vault, Bianca was secretly married to her Grand ducal lover.
Florence was furious. But what mattered that? The Venetian Senate had recognised Bianca as a true daughter of the Republic. She was the legal wife of the ruler of Tuscany. She was Grand Duchess at last, and she meant all the world to know it. That she was cordially hated by her husband’s subjects, that the air was full of stories of her extravagance, her intemperance, and her cruelty, gave her no moment’s unhappiness. For eight years she reigned as Queen, wielding the sceptre her husband’s hands were too weak or indifferent to hold. Giovanna’s son had followed his mother to the grave; and the child of the slums, who had been so fruitlessly smuggled into her palace, had been legitimated.
The only thorn now left in her bed of roses was the enmity of the Grand Duke’s brother, the Cardinal; and her greatest ambition was to win him to her side. In the autumn of 1787 he was invited to Florence, and as the culmination of a series of festivities, a grand banquet was given, at which he had the place of honour, at her right hand. The feast was drawing near to its end. Bianca, with sparkling eyes and flushed face, looking lovelier than she had ever looked before, was at her happiest, for the Cardinal had at last succumbed to her bright eyes and honeyed words. It was the crowning moment of her many triumphs, when life left nothing more to desire.
Then it was, at the supreme moment, that tragedy in its most terrible form fell on the scene of festivity and mirth. While Bianca was smiling her sweetest on the Cardinal she was seized by violent pains, “her mouth foams, her face is distorted by agony; she shrieks aloud that she is dying. Francesco tries to go to her aid, but his steps are suddenly arrested. He too is seized by the same terrible anguish. A few hours later both she and he breathe their last breath.”
“Poison” was the word which ran through the palace and soon through Florence from blanched lips to blanched lips. Some said it was the Cardinal who had done the deed; others whispered stories of a poisoned tart designed by Bianca for the Cardinal, who refused to be tempted. Whereupon the Grand Duke had eaten of it, and Bianca, “seeing that her plot had so tragically miscarried, seized the tart from her husband’s hand and ate what was left of it.”
The truth will never be known. What we do know is that within a few hours of the last joke and the last drained glass of that fatal banquet the bodies of Francesco and Bianca were lying in death side by side in an adjacent room, the door of which was locked against the eyes of the curious–even against the physicians.
In the solemn lying-in-state that followed Bianca had no place. Francesco alone, by his brother’s orders, wore his crown in death. As for Bianca, her body was hurried away and flung into the common vault of San Lorenzo, with the light of two yellow wax torches to bear it company, and the jibes and jeers of Florence for its only requiem.
CHAPTER XVII
RICHELIEU, THE ROUE
In the drama of the French Court many a fine-feathered villain “struts his brief hour” on the stage, dazzling eyes by his splendour, and shocking a world none too easily shocked in those days of easy morals by his profligacy; but it would be difficult among all these gilded rakes to find a match for the Duc de Richelieu, who carried his villainies through little less than a century of life.
Born in 1696, when Louis XIV. had still nearly twenty years of his long reign before him, Louis Francois Armand Duplessis, Duc de Richelieu, survived to hear the rumblings which heralded the French Revolution ninety-two years later; and for three-quarters of a century to be known as the most accomplished and heartless roue in all France. Bearer of a great name, and inheritor of the splendours and riches of his great-uncle, the Cardinal, who was Louis XII.’s right-hand man, and, in his day, the most powerful subject in Europe, the Duc was born with the football of fortune at his feet; and probably no man who has ever lived so shamefully prostituted such magnificent opportunities and gifts.
As a boy, still in his teens, he had begun to play the role of Don Juan at the Court of the child-King, Louis XV. The most beautiful women at the Court, we are told, went crazy over the handsome boy, who bore the most splendid name in France; and thus early his head was turned by flatteries and attentions which followed him almost to the grave.
The young Duchesse de Bourgogne, the King’s mother, made love to him, to the scandal of the Court; and from Princesses of the Blood Royal to the humblest serving-maid, there was scarcely a woman at Court who would not have given her eyes for a smile from the Duc de Fronsac, as he was then known.
How he revelled in his conquests he makes abundantly clear in the Memoirs he left behind him–surely the most scandalous ever written–in which he recounts his love affairs, in long sequence, with a cold-blooded heartlessness which shocks the reader to-day, so long after lover and victims have been dust. He revels in describing the artifices by which he got the most unassailable of women into his power–such as the young and beautiful Madame Michelin, whose religious scruples proved such a frail barrier against the assaults of the young Lothario. He chuckles with a diabolical pride as he tells us how he played off one mistress against another; how he made one liaison pave the way to its successor; and how he abandoned each in turn when it had served its purpose, and betrayed, one after another, the women who had trusted to his nebulous sense of honour.
A profligate so tempted as the Duc de Richelieu was from his earliest years, one can understand, however much we may condemn; but for the man who conducted his love affairs with such heartlessness and dishonour no language has words of execration and contempt to describe him.
From his earliest youth there was no “game” too high for our Don Juan to fly at. Long before he had reached manhood he counted his lady-loves by the score; and among them were at least three Royal Princesses, Mademoiselle de Charolais, and two of the Regent’s own daughters, the Duchesse de Berry and Mademoiselle de Valois, later Duchess of Modena, who, in their jealousy, were ready to “tear each other’s eyes out” for love of the Duc. Quarrels between the rival ladies were of everyday occurrence; and even duels were by no means unknown.
When, for instance, the Duc wearied of the lovely Madame de Polignac, this lady was so inflamed by hatred of her successor in his affections, the Marquise de Nesle, that she challenged her to a duel to the death in the Bois de Boulogne. When Madame de Polignac, after a fierce exchange of shots, saw her rival stretched at her feet, she turned furiously on the wounded woman. “Go!” she shrieked. “I will teach you to walk in the footsteps of a woman like me! If I had the traitor here, I would blow his brains out!” Whereupon, Madame de Nesle, fainting as she was from loss of blood, retorted that her lover was worthy that even more noble blood than hers should be shed for him. “He is,” she said to the few onlookers who had hurried to the scene on hearing the shots, “the most amiable _seigneur_ of the Court. I am ready to shed for him the last drop of blood in my veins. All these ladies try to catch him, but I hope that the proofs I have given of my devotion will win him for myself without sharing with anyone. Why should I hide his name? He is the Duc de Richelieu–yes, the Duc de Richelieu, the eldest son of Venus and Mars!”
Such was the devotion which this heartless profligate won from some of the most beautiful and highly placed ladies of France. What was the secret of the spell he cast over them it is difficult to say. It is true that he was a handsome man, as his portraits show, but there were men quite as handsome at the French Court; he was courtly and accomplished, but he had many rivals as clever and as skilled in courtly arts as himself. His power must, one thinks, have lain in that strange magnetism which women seem so powerless to resist in men, and which outweighs all graces of mind and physical perfections.
The Duc’s career, however, was not one unbroken dallying with love. Thrice, at least, he was sent to cool his ardour within the walls of the Bastille–on one occasion as the result of a duel with the Comte de Gace. His lady-loves were desolate at the cruel fate which had overtaken their idol. They fell on their knees at the Regent’s feet, and, with tears streaming down their pretty cheeks, pleaded for his freedom. Two of the Royal Princesses, both disguised as Sisters of Charity, visited the prisoner daily in his dungeon, carrying with them delicacies to tempt his appetite, and consolation to cheer his captivity.
In vain did Duc and Comte both declare that they had never fought a duel; and when, in the absence of proof, the Regent insisted that their bodies should be examined for the convicting wounds, the impish Richelieu came triumphantly through the ordeal as the result of having his wounds covered with pink taffeta and skilfully painted!
It was a more serious matter that sent him again to the Bastille in 1718. False to his country as to the victims of his fascinations, he had been plotting with Spain, France’s bitterest enemy, for the seizure of the Regent and the carrying him off across the Pyrenees; and certain incriminating letters sent to him by Cardinal Alberoni had been intercepted, and were in the Regent’s hands. The Regent’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Valois, warned her lover of his danger, but too late. Before he could escape, he was arrested, and with an escort of archers was safely lodged in the Bastille.
Our Lothario was now indeed in a parlous plight. Lodged in the deepest and most loathsome dungeon of the Bastille–a dungeon so damp that within a few hours his clothes were saturated–without even a chair to sit on or a bed to lie on, with legions of hungry rats for company, he was now face to face with almost certain death. The Regent, whose love affairs he had thwarted a score of times, and who thus had no reason to love the profligate Duc, vowed that his head should pay the price of his treason.
Once more the Court ladies were reduced to hysterics and despair, and forgot their jealousies in a common appeal to the Regent for clemency. Mademoiselle de Valois was driven to distraction; and when tears and pleadings failed to soften her father’s heart, she declared in the hearing of the Court that she would commit suicide unless her lover was restored to liberty. In company with her rival, Mademoiselle de Charolais, she visited the dungeon in the dark night hours, taking flint and steel, candles and bonbons, to weep with the captive.
She squandered two hundred thousand livres in attempts to bribe his guards, but all to no purpose: and it was not until after six months of durance that the Regent at last yielded–moved partly by his daughter’s tears and threats and partly by the pleadings of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris–and the prisoner was released, on condition that the Cardinal and the Duchesse de Richelieu would be responsible for his custody and good behaviour.
A few days later we find the irresponsible Richelieu climbing over the garden-walls of his new “prison” at Conflans, racing through the darkness to Paris behind swift horses, and making love to the Regent’s own mistresses and his daughter!
But such facilities for dalliance with the Regent’s daughter were soon to be brought to an end. Mademoiselle de Valois, in order to ensure her lover’s freedom, had at last consented to accept the hand of the Duke of Modena, an alliance which she had long fought against; and before the Duc had been a free man again many weeks she paid this part of his ransom by going into exile, and to an odious wedded life, in a far corner of Italy–much, it may be imagined, to the Regent’s relief, for his daughters and their love affairs were ever a thorn in his side.
It was not long, however, before the new Duchess of Modena began to sigh for her distant lover, and to bombard him with letters begging him to come to her. “I cannot live without your love,” she wrote. “Come to me–only, come in disguise, so that no one can recognise you.”
This was indeed an adventure after the Lothario Duc’s heart–an adventure with love as its reward and danger as its spur. And thus it was that, a few weeks after the Duchess had sent her invitation, two travel-stained pedlars, with packs on their backs, entered the city of Modena to find customers for their books and phamphlets. At the small hostelry whose hospitality they sought the hawkers gave their names as Gasparini and Romano, names which masked the identities of the knight-errant Duc and his friend, La Fosse, respectively.
The following morning behold the itinerant hawkers in the palace grounds, their wares spread out to tempt the Court ladies on their way to Mass, when the Duchess herself passed their way and deigned to stop to converse graciously with the strangers. To her inquiries they answered that they came from Piedmont; and their curious jargon of French and Italian lent support to the story. After inspecting their wares she asked for a certain book. “Alas! Madame,” Gasparini answered, “I have not a copy here, but I have one at my inn.” And bidding him bring the volume to her at the palace, the great lady resumed her devout journey to Mass.
A few hours later Gasparini presented himself at the palace with the required volume, and was ushered into the august presence of the Duchess. A moment later, on the closing of the door, the Royal lady was in the “hawker’s” arms, her own flung around his neck, as with tears of joy she welcomed the lover who had come to her in such strange guise and at such risk.
A few stolen moments of happiness was all the lovers dared now to allow themselves. The Duke of Modena was in the palace, and the situation was full of danger. But on the morrow he was going away on a hunting expedition, and then–well, then they might meet without fear.
On the following day, the coast now clear, behold our “hawker” once more at the palace door, with a bundle of books under his arm for the inspection of Her Highness, and being ushered into the Duchess’s reading-room, full of souvenirs of the happy days they had spent together in distant Paris and Versailles. Among them, most prized of all, was a lock of his own hair, enshrined on a small altar, and surmounted by a crown of interlocked hearts. This lock, the Duchess told him, she had kissed and wept over every day since they had parted.
Each day now brought its hours of blissful meeting, so seemingly short that the Princess would throw her arms around her “hawker’s” neck and implore him to stay a little longer. One day, however, he tarried too long; the Duke returned unexpectedly from his hunting, and before the lovers could part, he had entered the room–just in time to see the pedlar bowing humbly in farewell to his Duchess, and to hear him assure her that he would call again with the further books she wished to see.
Certainly it was a strange spectacle to greet the eyes of a home-coming Duke–that of his lady closeted with a shabby pedlar of books; but at least there was nothing suspicious in it, and, getting into conversation with the “hawker,” the Duke found him quite an entertaining fellow, full of news of what was going on in the world outside his small duchy.
In his curious jargon of French and Italian, Gasparini had much to tell His Highness apart from book-talk. He entertained him with the latest scandals of the French Court; with gossip about well-known personages, from the Regent to Dubois. “And what about that rascal, the Duc de Richelieu?” asked the great man. “What tricks has he been up to lately?” “Oh,” answered Gasparini, with a wink at the Duchess, who was crimson with suppressed laughter, “he is one of my best customers. Ah, Monsieur le Duc, he is a gay dog. I hear that all the women at the Court are madly in love with him; that the Princesses adore him, and that he is driving all the husbands to distraction.”
“Is it as bad as that?” asked the Duke, with a laugh. “He is a more dangerous fellow even than I thought. And what is his latest game?”
“Oh,” answered the hawker, “I am told that he has made a wager that he will come to Modena, in spite of you; and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he does!”
“As for that,” said the Duke, with a chuckle, “I am not afraid. I defy him to do his worst; and I am willing to wager that I shall be a match for him. However,” he added, “you’re an entertaining fellow; so come and see me again whenever you please.”
And thus, by the wish of the Duchess’s husband himself, the ducal “hawker” became a daily visitor at the palace, entertaining His Highness with his chatter, and, when his back was turned, making love to his wife, and joining her in shrieks of laughter at his easy gullibility.
Thus many happy weeks passed, Gasparini, the pedlar, selling few volumes, but reaping a rich harvest of stolen pleasure, and revelling in an adventure which added such a new zest to a life sated with more humdrum love-making. But even the Duchess’s charms began to pall; the ladies he had left so disconsolate in Paris were inundating him with letters, begging him to return to them–letters, all forwarded to him from his chateau at Richelieu, where he was supposed to be in retreat. The lure was too strong for him; and, taking leave of the Duchess in floods of tears, he returned to his beloved Paris to fresh conquests.
And thus it was with the gay Duc until the century that followed that of his birth was drawing to its close; until its sun was beginning to set in the blood of that Revolution, which, if he had lived but one year longer, would surely have claimed him as one of its first victims. Three wives he led to the altar–the last when he had passed into the eighties–but no marital duty was allowed to interfere with the amours which filled his life; and to the last no pity ever gave a pang to the “conscience” which allowed him to pick and fling away his flowers at will, and to trample, one after another, on the hearts that yielded to his love and trusted to his honour.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE INDISCRETIONS OF A PRINCESS
It was an ill fate that brought Caroline, Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbuettel to England to be the bride of George, Prince of Wales, one April day in the year 1795; although probably no woman has ever set forth on her bridal journey with a lighter or prouder heart, for, as she said, “Am I not going to be the wife of the handsomest Prince in the world?” If she had any momentary doubt of this, a glance at the miniature she carried in her bosom reassured her; for the pictured face that smiled at her was handsome as that of an Apollo.
No wonder the Princess’s heart beat high with pride and pleasure during that last triumphal stage of her journey to her husband’s arms; for he was not only the handsomest man, with “the best shaped leg in Europe,” he was by common consent the “greatest gentleman” any Court could show. Picture him as he made his first appearance at a Court ball. “His coat,” we are told, “was of pink silk, with white cuffs; his waistcoat of white silk, embroidered with various-coloured foil and adorned with a profusion of French paste. And his hat was ornamented with two rows of steel beads, five thousand in number, with a button and a loop of the same metal, and cocked in a new military style.” See young “Florizel” as he makes his smiling and gracious progress through the avenues of courtiers; note the winsomeness of his smiles, the inimitable grace of his bows, his pleasant, courtly words of recognition, and say if ever Royalty assumed a form more agreeable to the eye and captivating to the senses.
“Florizel” was indeed the most splendid Prince in the world, and the most “perfect gentleman.” He was also, though his bride-to-be little knew it, the most dissolute man in Europe, the greatest gambler and voluptuary–a man who was as false to his friends as he was traitor to every woman who crossed his path, a man whom no appeal of honour or mercy could check in his selfish pursuit of pleasure.
“I look through all his life,” Thackeray says, “and recognise but a bow and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt’s best nutty brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black stock, under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then–nothing. French ballet-dancers, French cooks, horse-jockeys, buffoons, procuresses, tailors, boxers, fencing-masters, china, jewel and gimcrack-merchants–these were his real companions.”
Such was the husband Princess Caroline came so light-heartedly, with laughter on her lips, from Brunswick to wed, little dreaming of the disillusion and tears that were to await her on the very threshold of the life to which she had looked forward with such high hopes.
We get the first glimpse of Caroline some twelve years earlier, when Sir John Stanley, who was making the grand tour, spent a few weeks at her father’s Court. He speaks of her as a “beautiful girl of fourteen,” and adds, “I did think and dream of her day and night at Brunswick, and for a year afterwards I saw her for hours three or fours times a week, but as a star out of my reach.” Years later he met her again under sadly changed conditions. “One day only,” he writes, “when dining with her and her mother at Blackheath, she smiled at something which had pleased her, and for an instant only I could have fancied she had been the Caroline of fourteen years old–the lovely, pretty Caroline, the girl my eyes had so often rested on, with light and powdered hair hanging in curls on her neck, the lips from which only sweet words seemed as if they would flow, with looks animated, and always simply and modestly dressed.”
Lady Charlotte Campbell, too, gives us a glimpse of her in these early and happier years, before sorrow had laid its defacing hand on her. “The Princess was in her early youth a pretty girl,” Lady Charlotte says, “with fine light hair–very delicately formed features, and a fine complexion–quick, glancing, penetrating eyes, long cut and rather small in the head, which gave them much expression; and a remarkably delicately formed mouth.”
It was in no happy home that the Princess had been cradled one May day in 1768. Her father, Charles William, Duke of Brunswick, was an austere soldier, too much absorbed in his military life and his mistress, to give much thought to his daughters. Her mother, the Duchess Augusta, sister of our own George III., was weak and small-minded, too much occupied in self-indulgence and scandal-talking to trouble about the training of her children.
Princess Caroline herself draws an unattractive picture of her home-life, in answer to Lady Charlotte Campbell’s question, “Were you sorry to leave Brunswick?” “Not at all,” was the answer; “I was sick tired of it, though I was sorry to leave my fader. I loved my fader dearly, better than any oder person. But dere were some unlucky tings in our Court which made my position difficult. My fader was most entirely attached to a lady for thirty years, who was in fact his mistress. She was the beautifullest creature and the cleverest, but, though my fader continued to pay my moder all possible respect, my poor moder could not suffer this attachment. And de consequence was, I did not know what to do between them; when I was civil to one, I was scolded by the other, and was very tired of being shuttlecock between them.”
But in spite of these unfortunate home conditions Caroline appears to have spent a fairly happy girlhood, thanks to her exuberant spirits; and such faults as she developed were largely due to the lack of parental care, which left her training to servants. Thus she grew up with quite a shocking disregard of conventions, running wild like a young filly, and finding her pleasure and her companions in undesirable directions. Strange stories are told of her girlish love affairs, which seem to have been indiscreet if nothing worse, while her beauty drew to her many a high-placed wooer, including the Prince of Orange and Prince George of Darmstadt, to all of whom she seems to have turned a cold shoulder.
But the wilful Princess was not to be left mistress of her own destiny. One November day, in 1794, Lord Malmesbury arrived at the Brunswick Court to demand her hand for the Prince of Wales, whom his burden of debts and the necessity of providing an heir to the throne of England were at last driving reluctantly to the altar. And thus a new and dazzling future opened for her. To her parents nothing could have been more welcome than this prospect of a crown for their daughter; while to her it offered a release from a life that had become odious.
“The Princess Caroline much embarrassed on my first being presented to her,” Malmesbury enters in his diary–“pretty face, not expressive of softness–her figure not graceful, fine eyes, good hands, tolerable teeth, fair hair and light eyebrows, good bust, short, with what the French call ‘des epaules impertinentes,’ vastly happy with her future expectations.”
Such were Malmesbury’s first impressions of the future Queen of England, whom it was his duty to prepare for her exalted station–a duty which he seems to have taken very seriously, even to the regulating of her toilette and her manners. Thus, a few days after setting eyes on her, his diary records: “She _will_ call ladies whom she meets for the first time ‘Mon coeur, ma chere, ma petite,’ and I am obliged to rebuke and correct her.” He lectures her on her undignified habit of whispering and giggling, and impresses on her the necessity of greater care in her attire, on more constant and thorough ablution, more frequent changes of linen, the care of her teeth, and so on–all of which admonitions she seems to have taken in excellent part, with demure promises of amendment, until he is impelled to write, “Princess Caroline improves very much on a closer acquaintance–cheerful and loves laughing. If she can get rid of her gossiping habit she will do very well.”
Thus a few months passed at the Brunswick Court. The ceremonial of betrothal took place in December–“Princess Caroline much affected, but replies distinctly and well”; the marriage-contract was signed, and finally on 28th March the Princess embarked for England on her journey to the unseen husband whose good-looks and splendour have filled her with such high expectations. That she had not yet learnt discretion, in spite of all Malmesbury’s homilies, is proved by the fact that she spent the night on board in walking up and down the deck in the company of a handsome young naval officer, conduct which naturally gave cause for observation and suspicion in the affianced bride of the future King of England.
It was well, perhaps, that she had snatched these few hours of innocent pleasure: for her first meeting with her future husband was well calculated to scatter all her rosy dreams. Arrived at last at St James’s Palace, “I immediately notified the arrival to the King and Prince of Wales,” says Malmesbury; “the last came immediately. I accordingly introduced the Princess Caroline to him. She very properly attempted to kneel to him. He raised her gracefully enough, and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round and retired to a distant part of the apartment, and calling to me said: ‘Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’ I said, ‘Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?’ Upon which he, much out of humour, said with an oath: ‘No; I will go directly to the Queen,’ and away he went. The Princess, left during this short moment alone, was in a state of astonishment; and, on my joining her, said, ‘_Mon Dieu_, is the Prince always like that? I find him very fat, and not at all as handsome as his portrait.'”
Such was the Princess’s welcome to the arms of her handsome husband and to the Court over which she hoped to reign as Queen; nor did she receive much warmer hospitality from the Prince’s family. The Queen, who had designed a very different bride for her eldest son, received her with scarcely disguised enmity, while the King, although, as he afterwards proved, kindly disposed towards her, treated her at first with an amiable indifference. And certainly her attitude seems to have been calculated to create an unfavourable impression on her new relatives and on the Court generally.
At the banquet which followed her reception, Malmesbury says, “I was far from satisfied with the Princess’s behaviour. It was flippant, rattling, affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse, vulgar hints about Lady—-, who was present. The Prince was evidently disgusted, and this unfortunate dinner fixed his dislike, which, when left to herself, the Princess had not the talent to remove; but by still observing the same giddy manners and attempts at cleverness and coarse sarcasm, increased it till it became positive hatred.”
“What,” as Thackeray asks, “could be expected from a wedding which had such a beginning–from such a bridegroom and such a bride? Malmesbury tells us how the Prince reeled into the Chapel Royal to be married on the evening of Wednesday, the 8th of April; and how he hiccuped out his vows of fidelity.” “My brother,” John, Duke of Bedford, records, “was one of the two unmarried dukes who supported the Prince at the ceremony, and he had need of his support; for my brother told me the Prince was so drunk that he could scarcely support himself from falling. He told my brother that he had drunk several glasses of brandy to enable him to go through the ceremony. There is no doubt that it was a _compulsory_ marriage.”
With such an overture, we are not surprised to learn that the Royal bridegroom spent his wedding-night in a state of stupor on the floor of his bedroom; or that at dawn, when he had slept off the effects of his debauch, “pages heard cries proceeding from the nuptial chamber, and shortly afterwards saw the bridegroom rush out violently.”
Nor, we may be sure, was the Prince’s undisguised hatred of his bride in any way mitigated by the stories which Lady Jersey and others of hex rivals poured into his willing ears–stories of her attachment to a young German Prince whom she was not allowed to marry; of a mysterious illness, followed by a few weeks’ retreat; of that midnight promenade with the young naval officer; of assignations with Major Toebingen, the handsomest soldier in Europe, who so proudly wore the amethyst tie-pin she had presented to him–these and many another story which reflected none too well on her reputation before he had set eyes on her. But it needed no such whispered scandal to strengthen his hatred of a bride who personally repelled him, and who had been forced on him at a time when his heart was fully engaged with his lawful wedded wife, Mrs Fitzherbert, when it was not straying to Lady Jersey, to “Perdita” or others of his legion of lights-o’-love.
From the first day the ill-fated union was doomed. One violent scene succeeded another, until, before she had been two months a wife, the Prince declared that he would no longer live with her. He would only wait until her child was born; then he would formally and finally leave her. Thus, three months after the birth of the Princess Charlotte, the deed of separation was signed, and Caroline was at last free to escape from a Court which she had grown to detest, with good reason, and from a husband whose brutalities and infidelities filled her with loathing.
She carried with her, however, this consolation, that the “great, hearty people of England loved and pitied her.” “God bless you! we will bring your husband back to you,” was among the many cries that greeted her as she left the palace on her way to exile. But, to quote Thackeray again, “they could not bring that husband back; they could not cleanse that selfish heart. Was hers the only one he had wounded? Steeped in selfishness, impotent for faithful attachment and manly enduring love–had it not survived remorse, was it not accustomed to desertion?”
For a time the outcast Princess, with her infant daughter, led a retired life amid the peace and beauty of Blackheath, where she lived as simply as any bourgeoise, playing the “lady bountiful” to the poor among her neighbours. Her chief pleasure seems to have been to surround herself with cottage babies, converting Montague House into a “positive nursery, littered up with cradles, swaddling-bands, feeding bottles, and other things of the kind.”
But even to this rustic retirement watchful eyes and slanderous tongues followed her; and it was not long before stories were passing from mouth to mouth in the Court of strange doings at Blackheath. The Princess, it was said, had become very intimate with Sir John Douglas and his lady, her near neighbours, and more especially with Sydney Smith, a good-looking naval captain, who shared the Douglas home, a man, moreover, with whom she had had suspicious relations at her father’s Court many years earlier. It was rumoured that Captain Smith was a frequent and too welcome guest at Montague House, at hours when discreet ladies are not in the habit of receiving their male friends. Nor was the handsome captain the only friend thus unconventionally entertained. There was another good-looking naval officer, a Captain Manby, and also Sir Thomas Lawrence, the famous painter, both of whom were admitted to a suspicious intimacy with the Princess of Wales.
These rumours, sufficiently disquieting in themselves, were followed by stories of the concealed birth of a child, who had come mysteriously to swell the numbers of the Princess’s proteges of the creche. Even King George, whose sympathy with his heir’s ill-used wife was a matter of common knowledge, could not overlook a charge so grave as this. It must be investigated in the interests of the State, as well as of his family’s honour; and, by his orders, a Commission of Peers was appointed to examine into the matter and ascertain the truth.
The inquiry–the “Delicate Investigation” as it was appropriately called–opened in June, 1806, and witness after witness, from the Douglases to Robert Bidgood, a groom, gave evidence which more or less supported the charges of infidelity and concealment. The result of the investigation, however, was a verdict of acquittal, the Commissioners reporting that the Princess, although innocent, had been guilty of very indiscreet conduct–and this verdict the Privy Council confirmed.
For the Princess it was a triumphant vindication, which was hailed with acclamation throughout the country. Even the Royal family showed their satisfaction by formal visits of congratulation to the Princess, from the King himself to the Duke of Cumberland who conducted his sister-in-law on a visit to the Court.
But the days of Blackheath and the amateur nursery were at an end. The Princess returned to London, and found a more suitable home in Kensington Palace for some years, where she held her Court in rivalry of that of her husband at Carlton House. Here she was subjected to every affront and slight by the Prince and his set that the ingenuity of hatred could devise, and to crown her humiliation and isolation, her daughter Charlotte was taken from her and forbidden even to recognise her when their carriages passed in the street or park.
Can we wonder that, under such remorseless persecutions, the Princess became more and more defiant; that she gave herself up to a life of recklessness and extravagance; that, more and more isolated from her own world, she sought her pleasure and her companions in undesirable quarters, finding her chief intimates in a family of Italian musicians; or that finally, heart-broken and despairing, she determined once for all to shake off the dust of a land that had treated her so cruelly?
In August, 1814, with the approval of King and Parliament, the Princess left England to begin a career of amazing adventures and indiscretions, the story of which is one of the most remarkable in history.
CHAPTER XIX
THE INDISCRETIONS OF A PRINCESS–_continued_
When Caroline, Princess of Wales, shook the dust of England off her feet one August day in the year 1814, it was only natural that her steps should first turn towards the Brunswick home which held for her at least a few happy memories, and where she hoped to find in sympathy and old associations some salve for her wounded heart.
But the fever of restlessness was in her blood–the restlessness which was to make her a wanderer over the face of the earth for half a dozen years. The peace and solace she had looked for in Brunswick eluded her; and before many days had passed she was on her way through Switzerland to the sunny skies of Italy, where she could perhaps find in distraction and pleasure the anodyne which a life of retirement denied her. She was full of rebellion against fate, of hatred against her husband and his country which had treated her with such unmerited cruelty. She would defy fate; she would put a whole continent between herself and the nightmare life she had left behind, she hoped for ever. She would pursue and find pleasure at whatever cost.
In September, within five weeks of leaving England, we find her at Geneva, installed in a suite of rooms next to those occupied by Marie Louise, late Empress of France, a fugitive and exile like herself, and animated by the same spirit of reckless revolt against destiny–Marie Louise, we read, “making excursions like a lunatic on foot and on horseback, never even seeming to dream of making people remember that, before she became mixed up with a Corsican adventurer, she was an Archduchess”; the Princess of Wales, equally careless of her dignity and position, finding her pleasure in questionable company.
“From the inn where she was stopping she heard music, and, quite unaccompanied, immediately entered a neighbouring house and disappeared in the medley of dancers.” A few days later, at Lausanne, “she learned that a little ball was in progress at a house opposite the ‘Golden Lion,’ and she asked for an invitation. After dancing with everybody and anybody, she finished up by dancing a Savoyard dance, called a _fricassee_, with a nobody. Madame de Corsal, who blushed and wept for the rest of the company, declares that it has made her ill, and that she feels that the honour of England has been compromised.” Thus early did Caroline begin that career of indiscretion, to call it by no worse name, which made of her six years’ exile “a long suicide of her reputation.”
In October we find the Princess entering Milan, with her retinue of ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, equerry, page, courier, and coachman, and with William Austin for companion–a boy, now about thirteen, whom she treated as her son, and who was believed by many to be the child of her imprudence at Blackheath, although the Commission of the “Delicate Investigation” had pronounced that he was son of a poor woman at Deptford. At Milan, as indeed wherever she wandered in Italy, the “vagabond Princess” was received as a Queen. Count di Bellegarde, the Austrian Governor, was the first to pay homage to her; at the Scala Theatre, the same evening, her entry was greeted with thunders of applause, and whenever she appeared in the Milan streets it was to an accompaniment of doffed hats and cheers.
One of her first visits was to the studio of Giuseppe Bossi, the famous and handsome artist, whom she requested to paint her portrait. “On Thursday,” Bossi records, “I sketched her successfully in the character of a Muse; then on Friday she came to show me her arms, of which she was, not without reason, decidedly vain–she is a gay and whimsical woman, she seems to have a good heart; at times she is ennuyee through lack of occupation.” On one occasion when she met in the studio some French ladies, two of whom had been mistresses of the King of Westphalia, the poor artist was driven to distraction by the chatter, the singing, and dancing, in which the Princess especially displayed her agility, until, as he pathetically says, “the house seemed possessed of the devil, and you can imagine with what kind of ease it was possible for me to work.”
Before leaving Milan the Princess gave a grand banquet to Bellegarde and a number of the principal men of the city–a feast which was to have very important and serious consequences, for it was at this banquet that General Pino, one of her guests, introduced to Caroline a new courier, a man who, though she little dreamt it at the time, was destined to play a very baleful part in her life.
This new courier was a tall and strikingly handsome man, who had seen service in the Italian army, until a duel, in which he killed a superior officer, compelled him to leave it in disgrace. At the time he entered the Princess’s service he was a needy adventurer, whose scheming brain and utter lack of principle were in the market for the highest bidder. “He is,” said Baron Ompteda, “a sort of Apollo, of a superb and commanding appearance, more than six feet high; his physical beauty attracts all eyes. This man is called Pergami; he belongs to Milan, and has entered the Princess’s service. The Princess,” he significantly adds, “is shunned by all the English people of rank; her behaviour has created the most marked scandal.”
Such was the man with whose life that of the Princess of Wales was to be so intimately and disastrously linked, and whose relations with her were to be displayed to a shocked world but a few years later. It was indeed an evil fate that brought this “superb Apollo” of the crafty brain and conscienceless ambition into the life of the Princess at the high tide of her revolt against the world and its conventions.
When Caroline and her retinue set out from Milan for Tuscany it was in the wake of Pergami, who had ridden ahead to discharge his duties as _avant courier_; but before Rome was reached his intimacy and familiarity with his mistress were already the subject of whispered comments and shrugged shoulders. At a ball given in her honour at Rome by the banker Tortonia, the Princess shocked even the least prudish by the abandon of her dancing and the tenuity of her costume, which, we are told, consisted of “a single embroidered garment, fastened beneath the bosom, without the shadow of a corset and without sleeves.” And at Naples, where King Joachim Murat gave her a regal reception, with a sequel of fetes and gala-performances in honour of the wife of the Regent of England, she attended a rout, at the Teatro San Carlo, so lightly attired “that many who saw her at her first entrance looked her up and down, and, not recognising her, or pretending not to recognise her, began to mutter disapprobation to such an extent that she was compelled to withdraw…. The English residents soon let her understand, by ceasing to frequent her palace, that even at Naples there were certain laws of dress which could not be trampled underfoot in this hoydenish manner.”
While Caroline was thus defying convention and even decency, watchful eyes were following her everywhere. A body of secret police, whose headquarters were at Milan, was noting every indiscretion; and every week brought fresh and damaging reports to England, where they were eagerly welcomed by the Regent and his satellites. And while the Princess was thus playing unconsciously, or recklessly, into the hands of the enemy, Pergami was daily making his footing in her favour more secure. Before Caroline left Naples he had been promoted from courier to equerry, and in this more exalted and privileged role was always at her side. So marked, in fact, was the intimacy even at this early stage, that the Princess’s retinue, one after another, and on one flimsy pretext or another, deserted her in disgust, each vacancy, as it occurred, being filled by one of Pergami’s relatives–his brother, his daughter, his sister-in-law (the Countess Oidi), and others, until Caroline was soon surrounded by members of the ex-courier’s family.
From Naples she wandered to Genoa, and from Genoa to Milan and Venice, received regally everywhere by the Italians and shunned by the English residents. From Venice she drifted to Lake Como, with whose beauties she was so charmed that she decided to make her home there, purchasing the Villa del Garrovo for one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and setting the builders to work to make it a still more splendid home for a future Queen of England. But even to the lonely isolation of the Italian lakes the eyes of her husband’s secret agents pursued her, spying on her every movement–“uncertain shadows gliding in the twilight along the paths and between the hedges, and even in the cellars and attics of the villa”–until the shadowy presences filled her with such terror and unrest that she sought to escape them by a long tour in the East.
Thus it was that in November, 1815, the Princess and her Pergami household set forth on their journey to Sicily, Tunis, Athens, the cities of the East and Jerusalem, the strange story of which was to be unfolded to the world five years later. How intimate the Princess and her handsome, stalwart courier had by this time become was illustrated by the Attorney-General in his opening speech at her memorable trial. “One day, after dinner, when the Princess’s servants had withdrawn, a waiter at the hotel, Gran Brettagna, saw the Princess put a golden necklace round Pergami’s neck. Pergami took it off again and put it jestingly on the neck of the Princess, who in her turn once more removed it and put it again round Pergami’s neck.”
As early as August in this year Pergami had his appointed place at the Princess’s table, and his room communicating with hers, and on the various voyages of the Eastern tour there was abundant evidence to prove “the habit which the Princess had of sleeping under one and the same awning with Pergami.”
But it is as impossible in the limits of space to follow Caroline and her handsome cavalier through every stage of these Eastern wanderings, as it is unnecessary to describe in detail the evidence of intimacy so lavishly provided by the witnesses for the prosecution at the trial–evidence much of which was doubtless as false as it was venal. That the Princess, however, was infatuated by her cavalier, and that she was in the highest degree indiscreet in her relations with him, seems abundantly clear, whatever the precise degree of actual guilt may have been.
Pergami had now been promoted from equerry to Grand Chamberlain to Her Royal Highness, and as further evidence of her favour, she bought for him in Sicily an estate which conferred on its owner the title of Baron della Francina. At Malta she procured for him a knighthood of that island’s famous order; at Jerusalem she secured his nomination as Knight of the Holy Sepulchre; and, to crown her favours, she herself instituted the Order of St Caroline, with Pergami for Grand Master. Behold now our ex-courier and adventurer in all his new glory as Grand Chamberlain and lover of a future Queen of England, as Baron della Francina, Knight of two Orders and Grand Master of a third, while every post of profit in that vagrant Court was held by some member of his family!
The Eastern tour ended, which had ranged from Algiers and Egypt to Constantinople and Jerusalem, and throughout which she had progressed and been received as a Queen, Caroline settled down for a time in her now restored villa on Lake Como, celebrating her return by lavish charities to her poor neighbours, and by popular fetes and balls, in one of which “she danced as Columbine, wearing her lover’s ear-rings, whilst Pergami, dressed as harlequin and wearing her ear-rings, supported her.”
But even here she was to find no peace from her husband’s spies, whose evidence, confirmed on oath by a score of witnesses, was being accumulated in London against the longed-for day of reckoning. And it was not long before Caroline and her Grand Chamberlain were on their wanderings again–this time to the Tyrol, to Austria, and through Northern Italy, always inseparable and everywhere setting the tongue of scandal wagging by their indiscreet intimacy. Even the tragic death in childbirth of her only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, which put all England in mourning, seemed powerless to check her career of folly. It is true that, on hearing of it, she fell into a faint and afterwards into a kind of protracted lethargy, but within a few weeks she had flung herself again into her life of pleasure-chasing and reckless disregard of convention.
But matters were now hurrying fast to their tragic climax. For some time the life of George III. had been flickering to its close. Any day might bring news that the end had come, and that the Princess was a Queen. And for some time Caroline had been bracing herself to face this crisis in her life and to pit herself against her enemies in a grim struggle for a crown, the title to which her years of folly (for such at the best they had been) had so gravely endangered. Over the remainder of her vagrant life, with its restless flittings, and its indiscretions, marked by spying eyes, we must pass to that February morning in 1820 when, to quote a historian, “the Princess had scarcely reached her hotel (at Florence) when her faithful major-domo, John Jacob Sicard, appeared before her, accompanied by two noblemen, and in a voice full of emotion announced, ‘You are Queen.'”
The fateful hour had at last arrived when Caroline must either renounce her new Queendom or present a bold front to her enemies and claim the crown that was hers. After a few indecisive days, spent in Rome, where news reached her that the King had given orders that her name should be excluded from the Prayer Book, her wavering resolution took a definite and determined shape. She would go to London and face the storm which she knew her coming would bring on her head.
At Paris she was met by Lord Hutchinson with a promise of an increase of her yearly allowance to fifty thousand pounds, on condition that she renounced her claim to the title of Queen, and consented never to put foot again in England–an offer to which she gave a prompt and scornful refusal; and on the afternoon of 5th June she reached Dover, greeted by enthusiastic cheers and shouts of “God save Queen Caroline!” by the fluttering of flags, and the jubilant clanging of church-bells. The wanderer had come back to the land of her sorrow, to find herself welcomed with open arms by the subjects of the King whose brutality had driven her to exile and to shame.
The story of the trial which so soon followed her arrival has too enduring a place in our history to call for a detailed description–the trial in which all the weight of the Crown and the testimony of a small army of suborned witnesses–“a troupe of comedians in the pay of malevolence,” to quote Brougham–were arrayed against her; and in which she had so doughty a champion in Brougham, and such solace and support in the sympathy of all England. We know the fate of that Bill of Pains and Penalties, which charged her with having permitted a shameful intimacy with one Bartolomeo Pergami, and provided as penalty that she should be deprived of the title and privilege of Queen, and that her marriage to King George IV. should be for ever dissolved and annulled–how it was forced through the House of Lords with a diminishing majority, and finally withdrawn. And we know, too, the outburst of almost delirious delight that swept from end to end of England at the virtual acquittal of the persecuted Caroline. “The generous exultation of the people was,” to quote a contemporary, “beyond all description. It was a conflagration of hearts.”
We also recall that pathetic scene when Caroline presented herself at the door of Westminster Abbey to demand admission, on the day of her husband’s coronation, to be received by the frigid words, “We have no instructions to allow you to pass”; and we can see her as, “humiliated, confounded, and with tears in her eyes,” she returned sadly to her carriage, the heart crushed within her. Less than three weeks later, seized by a grave and mysterious illness, she laid down for ever the burden of her sorrows, leaving instructions that her tomb should bear the words:
CAROLINE
THE INJURED QUEEN OF ENGLAND.
As for Pergami, the idol with the feet of clay, who had clouded her last years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a Prince and called Caroline “mother,” ended his days, while still a young man, in a madhouse.
CHAPTER XX
THE LOVE-AFFAIRS OF A REGENT
When Louis XIV. laid down, one September day in the year 1715, the crown which he had worn with such splendour for more than seventy years, his sceptre fell into the hands of his nephew Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, who for eight years ruled France as Regent, and as guardian of the child-King, the fifteenth Louis.
Seldom in the world’s history has a reign, so splendid as that of the Sun-King, closed in such darkness and tragedy. The disastrous war of the Spanish Succession had drained France of her strength and her gold. She lay crushed under a mountain of debt–ten thousand million francs; she was reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness, ruin, and disorder, and it was at this crisis in her life as a nation that fate placed a child of four on her throne, and gave the reins of power into the hands of the most dissolute man in Europe.
Not that Philippe of Orleans lacked many of the qualities that go to the making of a ruler and a man. He had proved himself, in Italy and in Spain, one of the bravest of his country’s soldiers, and an able, far-seeing leader of armies; and he had, as his Regency proved, no mean gifts of statesmanship. But his kingly qualities were marred by the taint of birth and early environment.
Such good qualities as he had he no doubt drew from his mother, the capable, austere, high-minded Elizabeth of Bavaria, who to her last day was the one good influence in his life. To his father, Louis XIV.’s younger brother, who is said to have been son of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria’s lover, and who was the most debased man of his time in all France, he just as surely owed the bias of sensuality to which he chiefly owes his place in memory.
And not only was he thus handicapped by his birth; he had for tutor that arch-scoundrel Dubois–the “grovelling insect” who rarely opened his mouth without uttering a blasphemy or indecency, and who initiated his charge, while still a boy, into every base form of so-called pleasure.
Such was the man who, amid the ruins of his country, inaugurated in France an era of licentiousness such as she had never known–an incomprehensible mass of contradictions–a kingly presence with the soul of a Caliban, statesman and sinner, high-minded and low-living, spending his days as a sovereign, a role which he played to perfection, and his nights as a sot and a sensualist.
It was doubtless Dubois who was mostly responsible for the baseness in the Regent’s character–Dubois who had taught him a contempt for religion and morality, the cynical view of life which makes the pleasure of the moment the only thing worth pursuing, at whatever cost; and who had impressed indelibly on his mind that no woman is virtuous and that men are knaves. And there was never any lack of men to continue Dubois’ teaching. He gathered round him the most dissolute gallants in France, in whose company he gave the rein to his most vicious appetites. His “roues” he dubbed them, a title which aptly described them; although they affected to give it a very different interpretation. They were the Regent’s roues, they said, no doubt with the tongue in the cheek, because they were so devoted to him that they were ready, in his defence, to be broken on the wheel (_la roue_)!
Each of these boon-comrades was a past-master in the arts of dissipation, and each was also among the most brilliant men of his day. The Chevalier de Simiane was famous alike for his drinking powers and his gift of graceful verse; De Fargy was a polished wit, and the handsomest man in France, with an unrivalled reputation for gallantry; the Comte de Noce was the Regent’s most intimate friend from boyhood–brother-in-law he called him, since they had not only tastes but even mistresses in common. Then there were the Marquis de la Fare, Captain of Guards and _bon enfant_; the Marquis de Broglio, the biggest debauchee in France, the Marquis de Canillac, the Duc de Brancas, and many another–all famous (or infamous) for some pet vice, and all the best of boon-companions for the pleasure-loving Regent.
Strange tales are told of the orgies of this select band which the Regent gathered around him–orgies which shocked even the France of the eighteenth century, when she was the acknowledged leader in licence. At six o’clock every evening Philippe’s kingship ended for the day. He had had enough–more than enough–of State and ceremonial, of interviewing ambassadors, and of the flatteries of Princes and the obsequious homage of courtiers. Pleasure called him away from the boredom of empire; and at the stroke of six we find him retiring to the company of his mistresses and his roues to feast and drink and gamble until dawn broke on the revelry–his laugh the loudest, his wit the most dazzling, his stories the most piquant, keeping the table in a roar with his infectious gaiety. He was Regent no longer; he was simply a _bon camarade_, as ready to exchange familiarities with a “lady of the ballet” as to lead the laughter at a joke at his own expense.
At nine o’clock, when the fun had waxed furious and wine had set the slowest tongue wagging and every eye a-sparkle, other guests streamed in to join the orgy–the most beautiful ladies of the Court, from the Duchesse de Gesores and Madame de Mouchy to the Regent’s own daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, who, young as she was, had little to learn of the arts of dissipation. And in the wake of these high-born women would follow laughing, bright-eyed troupes of dancing and chorus-girls from the theatres with an escort of the cleverest actors of Paris, to join the Regent’s merry throng.
The champagne now flowed in rivers; the servants were sent away; the doors were locked and the fun grew riotous; ceremony had no place there; rank and social distinctions were forgotten. Countesses flirted with comedians; Princes made love to ballet-girls and duchesses alike. The leader of the moment was the man or woman who could sing the most daring song, tell the most piquant story, or play the most audacious practical joke, even on the Regent himself. Sometimes, we are told, the lights would be extinguished, and the orgy continued under the cover of darkness, until the Regent suddenly opened a cupboard, in which lights were concealed–to an outburst of shrieks of laughter at the scenes revealed.
Thus the mad night hours passed until dawn came to bring the revels to a close; or until the Regent would sally forth with a few chosen comrades on a midnight ramble to other haunts of pleasure in the capital–the lower the better. Such was the way in which Philippe of Orleans, Regent of France, spent his nights. A few hours after the carouse had ended he would resume his sceptre, as austere and dignified a ruler as you would find in Europe.
It must not be imagined that Philippe was the only Royal personage who thus set a scandalous example to France. There was, in fact, scarcely a Prince or Princess of the Blood Royal whose love affairs were not conducted flagrantly in the eyes of the world, from the Dowager Duchesse de Bourbon, who lavished her favours on the Scotch financier, John Law, of Lauriston, to the Princesse de Conte, who mingled her piety with a marked partiality for her nephew, Le Kalliere.
As for the Regent’s own daughters, from the Duchesse de Berry, to Louise, Queen of Spain, each has left behind her a record almost as scandalous as that of her father. It was, in fact, an era of corruption in high places, when, in the reaction that followed the dismal and decorous last years of Louis XIV.’s reign, Pleasure rose phoenix-like from the ashes of ruin and flaunted herself unashamed in every guise with which vice could deck her.
It must be said for the Regent, corrupt as he was, that he never abused his position and his power in the pursuit of beauty. His mistresses flocked to him from every rank of life, from the stage to the highest Court circles, but remained no longer than inclination dictated. And the fascination is not far to seek, for Philippe d’Orleans was of the men who find easy conquests in the field of love. He was one of the handsomest men in all France; and to his good-looks and his reputation for bravery he added a manner of rare grace and courtliness, a supple tongue, and that strange magnetic power which few women could resist.
No King ever boasted a greater or more varied list of favourites, in which actresses and duchesses vied with each other for his smiles, in a rivalry which seems to have been singularly free from petty jealousy. Among the beauties of the Court we find the Duchesse de Fedari, the Duchesse de Gesores, the Comtesse de Sabran at one extreme; and actresses like Emilie, Desmarre, and La Souris at the other, pretty butterflies of the footlights who appealed to the Regent no more than Madame d’Averne, the gifted pet of France’s wits and literary men, the most charming “blue-stocking” of her day. And all, without exception–duchesses, countesses, and actresses–were as ready to give their love to Philippe, the man, as to the Duc d’Orleans, Regent of France.
Even in his relations with these ministers of pleasure, the Regent’s better qualities often exhibit themselves agreeably. To the pretty actress, Emilie, whose heart was so completely his, he always acted with a characteristic generosity and forbearance; and her conduct is by no means less pleasing than his. Once, we are told, when he expressed a wish to give her a pair of diamond ear-rings at a cost of fifteen thousand francs, she demurred at accepting so valuable a present. “If you must be so generous,” she pleaded, “please don’t give me the ear-rings, which are much too grand for such as me. Give me, instead, ten thousand francs, so that I may buy a small house to which I can retire when you no longer love me as you now do.”
Emilie had scarcely returned home, however, when a Court official appeared with a package containing, not ten thousand, but twenty-five thousand francs, which her lover insisted on her keeping; and when she returned fifteen thousand francs, he promptly sent them back again, declaring that he would be very angry if she refused again to accept them.
His love, indeed, for Emilie seems to have been as pure and deep as any of which he was capable. It was no fleeting passion, but an affection based on a sincere respect for her character and mental gifts. So highly, indeed, did he think of her judgment that she became his most trusted counsellor. She sat by his side when he received ambassadors; he consulted her on difficult problems of State; and it was her advice that he often followed in preference to the wisdom of all his ministers; for, as he said to Dubois, “Emilie has an excellent brain; she always gives me the best counsel.”
When at last he had to part from the modest and accomplished actress it was under circumstances which speak well for his generosity. A former lover, the Marquis de Fimarcon, on his return from fighting in Spain, sought Emilie out, and, blazing with jealousy, insisted that she should leave the Regent and return to his protection. He vowed that, if she refused, he would murder her; and when, in her alarm, she sought refuge in a convent at Charenton, he threatened to burn the nuns alive in their cells unless they restored her to him. Thus it was that, rather than allow Emilie to run any risks from her revengeful and brutal lover, the Regent relinquished his claim to her; and only when Fimarcon’s continued brutality at last made intervention necessary, did he order the bully to be arrested and consigned to the prison of Fort l’Eveque.
It is, however, in the story of Mademoiselle Aisse, the Circassian slave, that we find the best illustration of the chivalry which underlay the Regent’s passion for women, and which he never forgot in his wildest excesses. This story, one of the most touching in French history, opens in the year 1698, when a band of Turkish soldiers returned to Constantinople from a raid in the Caucasus, bringing with them, among many other captives, a beautiful child of four years, said to be the daughter of a King. So lovely was the little Circassian fairy that when the Comte de Feriol, France’s Ambassador to Turkey, set eyes on her, he decided to purchase her; and she became his property in exchange for fifteen hundred livres.
That she might have every advantage of training to fit her for his seraglio in later years, the child was sent to Paris, to the home of the Ambassador’s brother, President de Feriol, where she grew to beautiful girlhood as a member of the family, as fair a flower as ever was transplanted to French soil. Thus she passed the next thirteen years of her young life, charming all by her sweetness of disposition, as she won the homage of all by her remarkable beauty and grace.
Such was Ayesha, or Aisse, the Circassian maid, when at last her “owner” returned to Paris to fall under the spell of her radiant beauty and to claim her as his chattel, bought with good gold and trained at his cost to adorn his harem. In vain did Aisse weep and plead to be spared a fate from which every fibre of her being shrank in horror. Her “master” was inexorable. “When I bought you,” he said, “it was my intention to make you my daughter or my mistress. I now intend that you shall become both the one and the other.” Friendless and helpless, she was obliged to yield; and for six years she had to submit to the endearments of her protector, a man more than old enough to be her father, until his death brought her release.
At twenty-four, more lovely than ever, combining the beauty of the Circassian with the graces of France, Aisse had now every right to look forward at least to such happiness as was possible to a stranger in a strange land. But no sooner was one danger to her peace removed than another sprang up to take its place. The rumour of her beauty and her sweetness had come to the ears of the Regent, and strong forces were at work to bring her to his arms. Madame de Tencin was the leader in this base conspiracy, with the power of the Romish Church at her back; for with the fair Circassian high in the Regent’s favour and a pliant tool in their hands, the Jesuits’ influence at Court would be greatly strengthened. Dubois was won over to the unholy alliance; and the Due’s _maitresse en titre_ was bribed, not only to withdraw all opposition to her proposed rival, but to arrange a meeting between the Regent and the victim.
Success seemed to be assured. Mademoiselle Aisse was to exchange slavery to her late owner for an equally odious place in the harem of the ruler of France. Her tears and entreaties were all in vain; when she begged on her knees to be allowed to retire to a convent Madame de Feriol turned her back on her. Her only hope of rescue now lay in the Regent himself; and to him she pleaded her cause with such pathetic eloquence that he not only allowed her to depart in peace, but with words of sympathy and promises of his protection in the pure and noble sense of the word.
Thus by the chivalry of the most dissolute man of his age the Circassian slave-girl was rescued from a life which to her would have been worse than death–to spend her remaining years, happy in the love of an honest man, the Chevalier d’Aydie, until death claimed her while she still possessed the beauty which had been at once her glory and her inevitable shame.
* * * * *
The close of the Regent’s mis-spent life came with tragic suddenness. Worn out with excesses, while still young in years, his doctors had warned him that death might come to him any day; but with the light-heartedness that was his to the last, he laughed at their gloomy forebodings and refused to take the least precautions to safeguard his health. Two days before the end came he declined point-blank to be bled in order to avert a threatened attack of apoplexy. “Let it come if it will,” he said, with a laugh. “I do not fear death; and if it comes quickly, so much the better!”
On the evening of 2nd December, 1720, he was chatting gaily to the young Duchesse de Falari, when he suddenly turned to her and asked: “Do you think there is any hell–or Paradise?” “Of course I do,” answered the Duchesse. “Then are you not afraid to lead the life you do?” “Well,” replied Madame, “I think God will have pity on me.”
Scarcely had the words left her lips when the Regent’s head fell heavily on her shoulder, and he began to slip to the floor. A glance showed her that he was unconscious; and, rushing out of the room, the terrified Duchesse raced through the dark, deserted corridors of the palace shrieking for help. When at last help arrived, it came too late. The Regent had gone to find for himself an answer to the question his lips had framed a few minutes earlier–“is there any hell–or Paradise?”
CHAPTER XXI
A DELILAH OF THE COURT OF FRANCE
It was a cruel fate that snatched Gabrielle d’Estrees from the arms of Henri IV., King of France and Navarre, at the moment when her long devotion to her hero-lover was on the eve of being crowned by the bridal veil; and for many a week there was no more stricken man in Europe than the disconsolate King as he wailed in his black-draped chamber, “The root of my love is dead, and will never blossom again.”
No doubt Henri’s grief was as sincere as it was deep, for he had loved his golden-haired Gabrielle of the blue eyes and dimpled baby-cheeks as he had never loved woman before. It was the passion of a lifetime, the passion of a strong man in his prime, that fate had thus nipped in the fullness of its bloom; and its loss plunged him into an abyss of sorrow and despair such as few men have known.
But with the hero of Ivry no emotion of grief or pleasure ever endured long. He was a man of erratic, widely contrasted moods–now on the peaks of happiness, now in the gulf of dejection; one mood succeeding another as inevitably and widely as the pendulum swings. Thus when he had spent three seemingly endless months of gloom and solitude, reaction seized him, and he flung aside his grief with his black raiment. He was still in the prime of his strength, with many years before him. He would drink the cup of life, even to its dregs. He had long been weary of the matrimonial chains that fettered him to Marguerite of Valois. He would strike them off, and in another wife and other loves find a new lease of pleasure.
Thus it was with no heavy heart that he turned his back on Fontainebleau and his darkened room, and fared to Paris to find a new vista of pleasure opening to him at his palace doors, and his ears full of the praises of a new divinity who had come, during his absence, to grace his Court–a girl of such beauty, sprightliness, and wit as his capital had not seen for many a year.
Henriette d’Entragues–for this was the divinity’s name–was equipped by fate as few women were ever equipped, for the conquest of a King. Her mother, Marie Touchet, had been “light-o’-love” to Charles IX.; her father was the Seigneur d’Entragues, member of one of the most blue-blooded families of France, a soldier and statesman of fame; and their daughter had inherited, with her mother’s beauty and grace, the clever brain and diplomatic skill of her father. A strange mixture of the bewitching and bewildering, this daughter of a King’s mistress seems to have been. Tall and dark, voluptuous of figure, with ripe red lips, and bold and dazzling black eyes, she was, in her full-blooded, sensuous charms, the very “antipodes” to the childish, fairy-like Gabrielle who had so long been enshrined in the King’s heart. And to this physical appeal–irresistible to a man of such strong passion as Henri, she added gifts of mind which “baby Gabrielle” could never claim.
She had a wit as brilliant as the tongue which was its vehicle; her well-stored brain was more than a match for the most learned men at Court, and she would leave an archbishop discomfited in a theological argument, to cross swords with Sully himself on some abstruse problem of statesmanship. When Sully had been brought to his knees, she would rush away, with mischief in her eyes, to take the lead in some merry escapade or practical joke, her silvery laughter echoing in some remote palace corridor. A bewildering, alluring bundle of inconsistencies–beauty, savant, wit, and madcap–such was Henriette d’Entragues when Henri, fresh from his woes, came under the spell of her magnetism.
Here, indeed, was an escape from his grief such as the King had never dared to hope for. Before he had been many hours in his palace, Henri was caught hopelessly in the toils of the new siren, and was intoxicated by her smiles and witcheries. Never was conquest so speedy, so dramatic. Before a week had flown he was at Henrietta’s feet, as lovesick a swain as ever sighed for a lady, pouring love into her ears and writing her passionate letters between the frequent meetings, in which he would send her a “good night, my dearest heart,” with “a million kisses.”
In the days of his lusty youth the idol and hero of France had never known passion such as this which consumed him within sight of his fiftieth birthday, and which was inspired by a woman of much less than half his years; for at the time Henri was forty-six, and Henriette was barely twenty.
He quickly found, however, that his wooing was not to be all “plain sailing.” When Henriette’s parents heard of it, they affected to be horrified at the danger in which their beloved daughter was placed. They summoned her home from the perils of Court and a King’s passion; and when Henri sent an envoy to bring them to reason they sent him back with a rebuff. Their daughter was to be no man’s–not even a King’s–plaything. If Henri’s passion was sincere, he must prove it by a definite promise of marriage; and only on this condition would their opposition be removed.
Even to such a stipulation Henri, such was his infatuation, made no demur. With his own hand he wrote an agreement pledging himself to make Demoiselle Henriette his lawful wife in case, within a certain period, she became the mother of a son; and undertaking to dissolve his marriage with his wife, Marguerite of France, for this purpose. And this agreement, signed with his own hand, he sent to the Seigneur d’Entragues and his wife, accompanied by a _douceur_ of a hundred thousand crowns.
But before it was dispatched a more formidable obstacle than even the lady’s natural guardians remained to be faced–none other than the Duc de Sully, the man who had shared all the perils of a hundred fights with Henri and was at once his chief counsellor and his _fidus Achates_. When at last he summoned up courage to place the document in Sully’s hands, he awaited the verdict as nervously as any schoolboy in the presence of a dreaded master. Sully read through the paper, was silent for a few moments, and then spoke. “Sire,” he said, “am I to give you my candid opinion on this document, without fear of anger or giving offence?” “Certainly,” answered the King. “Well then, this is what I think of it,” was Sully’s reply, as he tore the document in two pieces and flung them on the floor. “Sully, you are mad!” exclaimed Henri, flaring into anger at such an outrage. “You are right, Sire, I am a weak fool, and would gladly know myself still more a fool–if I might be the only one in France!”
It was in vain, however, that Sully pointed out the follies and dangers of such a step as was proposed. Henri’s mind was made up, and leaving his friend, in high dudgeon, he went to his study and re-wrote his promise of marriage. The way was at last clear to the gratification of his passion. Henriette was more than willing, her parents’ scruples and greed were appeased, and as for Sully–well, he must be left to get over his tantrums. Even to please such an old and trusted friend he could not sacrifice such an opportunity for pleasure and a new lease of life as now presented itself!
Halcyon months followed for Henri–months in which even Gabrielle was forgotten in the intoxication of a new passion, compared with which the memory of her gentle charms was but as water to rich, red wine. That Henriette proved wilful, capricious, and extravagant–that her vanity drained his exchequer of hundreds of thousands of crowns for costly jewellery and dresses, was a mere bagatelle, compared with his delight in her manifold allurements.
But Sully had by no means said his last word. The decree for annulling Henri’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois was pronounced; and it was of the highest importance that she should have a worthy successor as Queen of France–a successor whom he found in Marie de Medicis.
The marriage-contract was actually sealed before the King had any suspicion that his hand was being disposed of, and it was only when Sully one day entered his study with the startling words, “Sire, we have been marrying you,” that the awakening came. For a few moments Henri sat as a man stunned, his head buried in his hands; then, with a deep sigh, he spoke: “If God orders it so, so let it be. There seems to be no escape; since you say that it is necessary for my kingdom and my subjects, why, marry I must.”
It was a strange predicament in which Henri now found himself. Still more infatuated than ever with Henriette, he was to be tied for life to a Princess whom he had never even seen. To add to the embarrassment of his position, the condition of his marriage promise to Henriette was already on the way to fulfilment; and he was thus pledged to wed her as strongly as any State compact could bind him to stand at the altar with Marie de Medicis. One thing was clear, he must at any cost recover that fatal document; and, while he was giving orders for the suitable reception of his new Queen, and arranging for her triumphal progress to Paris, he was writing to Henriette and her parents demanding the return of his promise of marriage agreement–to her, a pleading letter in which he prays her “to return the promise you have by you and not to compel me to have recourse to other means in order to obtain it”; to her father, a more imperious demand to which he expects instant obedience.
As some consolation to his mistress, whose alternate tears, rage, and reproaches drove him to distraction, he creates her Marquise de Verneuil and promises that, if he should be unable to marry her, he will at least give her a husband of Royal rank, the Due de Nevers, who was eager to make her his wife.
But pleadings and threats alike fail to secure the return of the fatal document, and Henri is reduced to despair, until Henriette gives birth to a dead child and his promise thus becomes of as little value as the paper it was written on. The condition has failed, and he is a free man to marry his Tuscan Princess, while Henriette, thus foiled in her great ambition, is in danger not only of losing her coveted crown, but her place in the King’s favour. The days of her wilful autocracy are ended; and, though her heart is full of anger and disappointment, she writes to him a pitiful letter imploring him still to love her and not to cast her “from the Heaven to which he has raised her, down to the earth where he found her.” “Do not let your wedding festivities be the funeral of my hopes,” she writes. “Do not banish me from your Royal presence and your heart. I speak in sighs to you, my King, my lover, my all–I, who have been loved by the earth’s greatest monarch, and am willing to be his mistress and his servant.”
To such humility was the proud, arrogant beauty now reduced. She was an abject suppliant where she had reigned a Queen. Nor did her pleadings fall on deaf ears. Her Royal lover’s hand was given, against his will, to his new Queen, but his heart, he vowed, was all Henriette’s–so much so that he soon installed her in sumptuous rooms in his palace adjoining those of the Queen herself.
Was ever man placed in a more delicate position than this King of France, between the rival claims of his wife and mistress, who were occupying adjacent apartments, and who, moreover, were both about to become mothers? It speaks well for Henri’s tactfulness that for a time at least this _menage a trois_ appears to have been quite amiably conducted. When Queen Marie gave birth to a son it was to Henriette that the infant’s father first confided the good news, seasoning it with “a million kisses” for herself. And when Henriette, in turn, became a mother for the second time, the double Royal event was celebrated by fetes and rejoicings in which each lady took an equally proud and conspicuous part.
It was inevitable, however, that a woman so favoured by the King, and of so imperious a nature, should have enemies at Court; and it was not long before she became the object of a conspiracy of which the Duchesse de Villars and the Queen were the arch-leaders. One day a bundle of letters was sent anonymously to Henri, letters full of tenderness and passion, addressed by his beloved Marquise, Henriette, to the Prince de Joinville. The King was furious at such evidence of his mistress’s disloyalty, and vowed he would never see her again. But all his storming and reproaches left the Marquise unmoved. She declared, with scorn in her voice, that the letters were forgeries; that she had never written to Joinville in her life, nor spoken a word to him that His Majesty might not have heard. She even pointed out the forger, the Duc de Guise’s secretary, and was at last able to convince the King of her innocence.
The Duchesse de Villars and Joinville were banished from the Court in disgrace; the Queen had a severe lecture from her husband; and Henriette was not only restored to full favour, but was consoled by a welcome present of six thousand pounds.
But the days of peace in the King’s household were now gone for ever. Queen Marie, thus humiliated by her rival, became her bitter enemy and also a thorn in the side of her unfaithful husband. Every day brought its fierce quarrels which only stopped on the verge of violence. More than once in fact Henri had to beat a retreat before his Queen’s clenched fist, while she lost no opportunity of insulting and humiliating the Marquise.
It is impossible altogether to withhold sympathy from a man thus distracted between two jealous women–a shrewish wife, who in her most amiable mood repelled his advances with coldness and cutting words, and a mistress who vented on him all the resentment which the Queen’s insults and snubs roused in her. Even all Sully’s diplomacy was powerless to pour oil on such vexed waters as these.
The Queen, however, had not long to wait for her revenge, which came with the disclosure of a conspiracy, at the head of which were Henriette’s father and her half-brother, the Comte d’Auvergne, and in which, it was proved, she herself had played no insignificant part. Punishment came, swift and terrible. Her father and brother were sentenced to death, herself to perpetual confinement in a monastery.
But even at this crisis in her life, Henriette’s stout heart did not fail her for a moment. “The King may take my life, if he pleases,” she said. “Everybody will say that he killed his wife; for I was Queen before the Tuscan woman came on the scene at all.” None knew better than she that she could afford thus to put on a bold front. Henri was still her slave, to whom her little finger was more than his crown; and she knew that in his hands both her liberty and her life were safe. And thus it proved; for before she had spent many weeks in the Monastery of Beaumont-les-Tours, its doors were flung open for her, and the first news she heard was that her father was a free man, while her brother’s death-sentence had been commuted to a few years in the Bastille.