Love affairs of the Courts of Europe by Thornton Hall

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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.

Thus Henriette returned to the turbulent life of the palace--the daily
routine of quarrels and peacemaking with the King, and undisguised
hostility from the Queen, through all of which Henri's heart still
remained hers. "How I long to have you in my arms again," he writes,
when on a hunting excursion, which had led him to the scene of their
early romance. "As my letter brings back the memory of the past, I know
you will feel that nothing in the present is worth anything in
comparison. This, at least, was my feeling as I walked along the roads I
so often traversed in the old days on my journey to your side. When I
sleep I dream of you; when I wake my thoughts are all of you." He sends
her a million kisses, and vows that all he asks of life is that she
shall always love him entirely and him alone.

One would have thought that such a conquest of a King and such triumph
over a Queen would have gratified the ambition of the most exacting of
women. But the Marquise de Verneuil seems to have found small
satisfaction in her victories. When she was not provoking quarrels with
Henri, which roused him to such a pitch of anger that at times he
threatened to strike her, she received his advances with a coldness or a
sullen acquiescence calculated to chill the most ardent lover. In other
moods she would drive him to despair by declaring that she had long
ceased to love him, and that all she wanted from him was a dowry to
carry in marriage to one or other of several suitors who were dying for
her hand.

But Madame's day of triumph was drawing much nearer to an end than she
imagined. The end, in fact, came with dramatic suddenness when Henri
first set eyes on the radiantly lovely Charlotte de Montmorency. Weary
at heart of the tempers and exactions of Henriette, it needed but such a
lure as this to draw him finally from her side; and from the first
flash of Charlotte's beautiful eyes this most susceptible of Kings was
undone. Madame de Verneuil's reign was ended; the next quarrel was made
the occasion for a complete rupture, and the Court saw her no more.

Already she had lost the bloom of her beauty; she had grown stout and
coarse through her excessive fondness for the pleasures of the table,
and the rest of her days, which were passed in friendless isolation, she
spent in indulging appetites, which added to her mountain of flesh while
robbing her of the last trace of good-looks. When the knife of Ravaillac
brought Henri's life and his new romance to a tragic end, the Marquise
was among those who were suspected of inspiring the assassin's blow; and
although her guilt was never proved, the taint of suspicion clung to her
to her last day.

After fruitless angling for a husband--the Duc de Guise, the Prince de
Joinville, and many another who, with one consent, fled from her
advances, she resigned herself to a life of obscurity and gluttony,
until death came, one day in the year 1633, to release her from a world
of vanity and disillusionment.

CHAPTER XXII

THE "SUN-KING" AND THE WIDOW

Search where you will in the record of Kings, you will find nowhere a
figure more splendid and more impressive than that of the fourteenth
Louis, who for more then seventy years ruled over France, and for more
than fifty eclipsed in glory his fellow-sovereigns as the sun pales the
stars. Nearly two centuries have gone since he closed his weary and
disillusioned eyes on the world he had so long dominated; but to-day he
shines in history in the galaxy of monarchs with a lustre almost as
great as when he was hailed throughout the world as the "Sun-King," and
in his pride exclaimed, "_I_ am the State."

Placed, like his successor, on the greatest throne in Europe, a child of
five, fortune exhausted itself in lavishing gifts on him. The world was
at his feet almost before he had learned to walk. He grew to manhood
amid the adulation and flatteries of the greatest men and the fairest of
women. And that he might lack no great gift, he was dowered with every
physical perfection that should go to the making of a King.

There was no more goodly youth in France than Louis when he first
practised the arts of love-making, in which he later became such an
adept, on Mazarin's lovely niece, Marie Mancini. Tall, with a well-knit,
supple figure, with dark, beautiful eyes illuminating a singularly
handsome face, with a bearing of rare grace and distinction, this son of
Anne of Austria was a lover whom few women could resist.

Such conquests came to him with fatal ease, and for thirty years at
least, until satiety killed passion, there was no lack of beautiful
women to minister to his pleasure and to console him for the lack of
charms in the Spanish wife whom Mazarin thrust into his reluctant arms
when he was little more than a boy, and when his heart was in Marie
Mancini's keeping.

Among all the fair and frail women who succeeded one another in his
affection three stand out from the rest with a prominence which his
special favour assigned to each in turn. For ten early years it was
Louise de la Baume-Leblanc (better known to fame as the Duchesse de
Lavalliere) who reigned as his uncrowned Queen, and who gave her life to
his pleasure and to the care of the children she bore to him. But such
constancy could not last for ever in a man so constitutionally
inconstant as Louis. When the Marquise de Montespan, in all her radiant
and sensuous loveliness, came on the scene, she drew the King to her
arms as a flame lures the moth. Her voluptuous charms, her abounding
vitality and witty tongue, made the more refined beauty and the
gentleness of the Duchesse flavourless in comparison; and Louise,
realising that her sun had set, retired to spend the rest of her life in
the prayers and piety of a convent, leaving her brilliant rival in
undisputed possession of the field.

For many years Madame de Montespan, the most consummate courtesan who
ever enslaved a King, queened it over Louis in her magnificent
apartments at Versailles and in the Tuileries. He was never weary of
showering rich gifts and favours on her; and, in return, she became the
mother of his children and ministered to his every whim, little dreaming
of the day when she in turn was to be dethroned by an insignificant
widow whom she regarded as the creature of her bounty, and who so often
awaited her pleasure in her ante-room.

* * * * *

When Francoise d'Aubigne was cradled, one November day in the year 1635,
within the walls of a fortress-prison in Poitou, the prospect of a
Queendom seemed as remote as a palace in the moon. She had good blood in
her veins, it is true. Her ancestors had been noblemen of Normandy
before the Conqueror ever thought of crossing the English Channel, and
her grandfather, General Theodore d'Aubigne, had won distinction as a
soldier on many a battlefield. It was to her father, profligate and
spendthrift, who, after squandering his patrimony, had found himself
lodged in jail, that Francoise owed the ignominy of her birthplace, for
her mother had insisted on sharing the captivity of her ne'er-do-well
husband.

When at last Constant d'Aubigne found his prison doors opened, he shook
the dust of France off his feet and took his wife and young children
away to Martinique, where at least, he hoped, his record would not be
known. On the voyage, we are told, the child was brought so near to
death's door by an illness that her body was actually on the point of
being flung overboard when her mother detected signs of life, and
rescued her from a watery grave. A little later, in Martinique, she had
an equally narrow escape from death as the result of a snakebite. A
child thus twice miraculously preserved was evidently destined for
better things than an early tomb, more than one declared; and so indeed
it proved.

When the father ended his mis-spent days in the West Indian island, the
widow took her poverty and her fledgelings back to France, where
Francoise was placed under the charge of a Madame de Villette, to pick
up such education as she could in exchange for such menial work as
looking after Madame's poultry and scrubbing her floors. When her mother
in turn died, the child (she was only fifteen at the time) was taken to
Paris by an aunt, whose miserliness or poverty often sent her hungry to
bed.

Such was Francoise's condition when she was taken one day to the house
of Paul Scarron, the crippled poet, whose satires and burlesques kept
Paris in a ripple of merriment, and to whom the child's poverty and
friendless position made as powerful an appeal as her budding beauty and
her modesty. It was a very tender heart that beat in the pain-racked,
paralysed body of the "father of French burlesque"; and within a few
days of first setting eyes on his "little Indian girl," as he called
her, he asked her to marry him. "It is a sorry offer to make you, my
dear child," he said, "but it is either this or a convent." And, to
escape the convent, Francoise consented to become the wife of the
"bundle of pains and deformities" old enough to be her father.

In the marriage-contract Scarron, with characteristic buffoonery,
recognises her as bringing a dower of "four louis, two large and very
expressive eyes, a fine bosom, a pair of lovely hands, and a good
intellect"; while to the attorney, when asked what his contribution was,
he answered, "I give her my name, and that means immortality." For eight
years Francoise was the dutiful wife of her crippled husband, nursing
him tenderly, managing his home and his purse, redeeming his writing
from its coarseness, and generally proving her gratitude by a ceaseless
devotion. Then came the day when Scarron bade her farewell on his
death-bed, begging her with his last breath to remember him sometimes,
and bidding her to be "always virtuous."

Thus Francoise d'Aubigne was thrown once more on a cold world, with
nothing between her and starvation but Scarron's small pension, which
the Queen-mother continued to his widow, and compelled to seek a cheap
refuge within convent walls. She had however good-looks which might
stand her in good stead. She was tall, with an imposing figure and a
natural dignity of carriage. She had a wealth of light-brown hair, eyes
dark and brilliant, full of fire and intelligence, a well-shaped nose,
and an exquisitely modelled mouth.

Beautiful she was beyond doubt, in these days of her prime; but there
were thousands of more beautiful women in France. And for ten years
Madame Scarron was left to languish within the convent walls with never
a lover to offer her release. When the Queen-mother died, and with her
the pitiful pension, her plight was indeed pitiful. Her petitions to the
King fell on deaf ears, until Montespan, moved by her tears and
entreaties, pleaded for her; and Louis at last gave a reluctant consent
to continue the allowance.

It was a happy inspiration that led Scarron's widow to the King's
favourite, for Madame de Montespan's heart, ever better than her life,
went out to the gentle woman whom fate was treating so scurvily. Not
content with procuring the pension, she placed her in charge of her
nursery, an office of great trust and delicacy; and thus Madame Scarron
found herself comfortably installed in the King's palace with a salary
of two thousand crowns a year. Her day of poverty and independence was
at last ended. She had, in fact, though she little knew it, placed her
foot on the ladder, at the summit of which was the dazzling prize of the
King's hand.

Those were happy years which followed. High in the favour of the King's
mistress, loving the little ones given into her charge as if they were
her own children, especially the eldest born, the delicate and
warm-hearted Duc de Maine, who was also his father's darling, Madame had
nothing left to wish for in life. Her days were full of duty, of peace,
and contentment. Even Louis, as he watched the loving care she lavished
on his children, began to thaw and to smile on her, and to find pleasure
in his visits to the nursery, which grew more and more frequent. There
was a charm in this sweet-eyed, gentle-voiced widow, whose tongue was so
skilful in wise and pleasant words. Her patient devotion deserved
recognition. He gave orders that more fitting apartments should be
assigned to Madame--a suite little less sumptuous than that of Montespan
herself; and that money should not be lacking, he made her a gift of two
hundred thousand francs, which the provident widow promptly invested in
the purchase of the castle and estate of Maintenon.

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