Love affairs of the Courts of Europe by Thornton Hall

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Such marked favours as these not unnaturally set jealous tongues
wagging. Even Montespan began to grow uneasy, and to wonder what was
coming next. When she ventured to refer sarcastically to the use
"Scarron's widow" had made of his present, Louis silenced her by
answering, "In my opinion, _Madame de Maintenon_ has acted very wisely";
thus by a word conferring noble rank on the woman his favourite was
already beginning to fear as a rival.

And indeed there were soon to be sufficient grounds for Montespan's
jealously and alarm. Every day saw Louis more and more under the spell
of his children's governess--the middle-aged woman whose musical voice,
gentle eyes, and wise words of counsel were opening a new and better
world to him. She knew, as well as himself, how sated and weary he was
of the cup of pleasure he had now drained to its last dregs of
disillusionment; and he listened with eager ears to the words which
pointed to him a surer path of happiness. Even reproof from her lips
became more grateful to him than the sweetest flatteries from those of
the most beautiful woman who counted but half of her years.

The growing influence of the widow Scarron over the "Sun-King" had
already become the chief gossip of the Court. From the allurements of
Montespan, of Mademoiselle de Fontanges, and of de Ludre he loved to
escape to the apartments of the soft-voiced woman who cared so much more
for his soul than for his smiles. "His Majesty's interviews with Madame
de Maintenon," Madame de Sevigne writes, "become more and more frequent,
and they last from six in the morning to ten at night, she sitting in
one arm-chair, he in another."

In vain Montespan stormed and wept in her fits of jealous rage; in vain
did the beautiful de Fontanges seek to lure him to her arms, until death
claimed her so tragically before she had well passed her twentieth
birthday. The King had had more than enough of such Delilahs. Pleasure
had palled; peace was what he craved now--salve for his seared
conscience.

When Madame de Maintenon was appointed principal lady-in-waiting to the
Dauphine and when, a little later, Louis' unhappy Queen drew her last
breath in her arms, Montespan at last realised that her day of power was
over. She wrote letters to the King begging him not to withdraw his
affection from her, but to these appeals Louis was silent; he handed
the letters to Madame de Maintenon to answer as she willed.

The Court was quick to realise that a new star had risen; ministers and
ambassadors now flocked to the new divinity to consult her and to win
her favour. The governess was hailed as the new Queen of Louis and of
France. The climax came when the King was thrown one day from his horse
while hunting, and broke his arm. It was Madame de Maintenon alone who
was allowed to nurse him, and who was by his side night and day. Before
the arm was well again she was standing, thickly veiled, before an
improvised altar in the King's study, with Louis by her side, while the
words that made them man and wife were pronounced by Archbishop de
Harlay.

The prison-child had now reached the loftiest pinnacle in the land of
her birth. Though she wore no crown, she was Queen of France, wielding a
power which few throned ladies have ever known. Princes and Princesses
rose to greet her entry with bows and curtsies; the mother of the coming
King called her "aunt"; her rooms, splendid as the King's, adjoined his;
she had the place of honour in the King's Council Room; the State's
secrets were in her keeping; she guided and controlled the destinies of
the nation. And all this greatness came to her when she had passed her
fiftieth year, and when all the grace and bloom of youth were but a
distant memory.

The King himself, two years her junior, and still in the prime of his
manhood, was her shadow, paying to the plain, middle-aged woman such
deference and courtesy as he had never shown to the youth and beauty of
her predecessors in his affection. And she--thus translated to dizzy
heights--kept a head as cool and a demeanour as modest as when she was
"Scarron's widow," the convent protegee. For power and splendour she
cared no whit. Her ambition now, as always, was to be loved for herself,
to "play a beautiful part in the world," and to deserve the respect of
all good men.

Her chief pleasure was found away from the pomp and glitter of the
Court, among "her children" of the Saint Cyr Convent, which she had
founded for the education of the daughters of poor noblemen, over whom
she watched with loving and unflagging care. And yet she was not
happy--not nearly as happy as in the days of her obscure widowhood. "I
am dying of sorrow in the midst of luxury," she wrote. And again. "I
cannot bear it. I wish I were dead." Why she was so unhappy, with her
Queendom and her environment of love and esteem, and her life of good
works, it is impossible to say. The fact remains, inscrutable, but still
fact.

Twenty-five years of such life of splendid sadness, and Louis, his last
days clouded by loss and suffering, died with her prayers in his ears,
his coverlet moistened by her tears. Two years later--years spent in
prayers and masses and charitable work--the "Queen Dowager" drew the
last breath of her long life at St Cyr, shortly after hearing that her
beloved Due de Maine, her pet nursling of other days, had been arrested
and flung into prison.

CHAPTER XXIII

A THRONED BARBARIAN

The dawn of the eighteenth century saw the thrones of France and Russia
occupied by two of the most remarkable sovereigns who ever wore a
crown--Louis XIV., the "Sun-King," whose splendours dazzled Europe, and
whose power held it in awe; and Peter I. of Russia, whose destructive
sword swept Europe from Sweden to the Dardenelles, and whose clever
brain laid sure the foundation of his country's greatness. Each of these
Royal rivals dwarfed all other fellow-monarchs as the sun pales the
stars; and yet it would scarcely have been possible to find two men more
widely different in all save their passion for power and their love of
woman, which alone they had in common.

Of the two, Peter is unquestionably to-day the more arresting,
dominating figure. Although nearly two centuries have gone since he made
his exit from the world, we can still picture him in his pride, towering
a head higher than the tallest of his courtiers, swart of face, "as if
he had been born in Africa," with his black, close-curling hair, his
bold, imperious eyes, his powerful, well-knit frame--"the muscles and
stature of a Goliath"--a kingly figure, with majesty in every movement.

We see him, too, wilfully discarding the kingliness with which nature
had so liberally dowered him--now receiving ambassadors "in a short
dressing-gown, below which his bare legs were exposed, a thick nightcap,
lined with linen, on his head, his stockings dropped down over his
slippers"--now walking through the Copenhagen streets grotesque in a
green cap, a brown overcoat with horn buttons, worsted stockings full of
darns, and dirty, cobbled shoes; and again carousing, red of face and
loud of voice, with his meanest subjects in some low tavern.

As the mood seizes him he plays the role of fireman for hours together;
goes carol-singing in his sledge, and reaps his harvest of coppers from
the houses of his subjects; rides a hobby-horse at a village fair, and
shrieks with laughter until he falls off; or plies saw and plane in a
shipbuilding yard, sharing the meals and drinking bouts of his
fellow-workmen.

The French Ambassador, Campredon, wrote of him in 1725:--"It is utterly
impossible at the present moment to approach the Tsar on serious
subjects; he is altogether given up to his amusements, which consist in
going every day to the principal houses in the town with a suite of 200
persons, musicians and so forth, who sing songs on every sort of
subject, and amuse themselves by eating and drinking at the expense of
the persons they visit." "He never passed a single day without being
the worse for drink," Baron Poellnitz tells us; and his drinking
companions were usually chosen from the most degraded of his subjects,
of both sexes, with whom he consorted on the most familiar terms.

When his muddled brain occasionally awoke to the knowledge that he was a
King, he would bully and hector his boon-comrades like any drunken
trooper. On one occasion, when a young Jewess refused to drain a goblet
of neat brandy which he thrust into her hand, he promptly administered
two resounding boxes on her ears, shouting, "Vile Hebrew spawn! I'll
teach thee to obey."

There was in him, too, a vein of savage cruelty which took remarkable
forms. A favourite pastime was to visit the torture-chamber and gloat
over the sufferings of the victims of the knout and the strappado; or to
attend (and frequently to officiate at) public executions. Once, we are
told, at a banquet, he "amused himself by decapitating twenty Streltsy,
emptying as many glasses of brandy between successive strokes, and
challenging the Prussian envoy to repeat the feat."

Mad? There can be little doubt that Peter had madness in his veins. He
was a degenerate and an epileptic, subject to brain storms which
terrified all who witnessed them. "A sort of convulsion seized him,
which often for hours threw him into a most distressing condition. His
body was violently contorted; his face distorted into horrible grimaces;
and he was further subject to paroxysms of rage, during which it was
almost certain death to approach him." Even in his saner moods, as
Waliszewski tells us, he "joined to the roughness of a Russian _barin_
all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor." Such in brief suggestion was
Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of
contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple--"a huge mastodon,
whose moral perceptions were all colossal and monstrous."

It was, perhaps, inevitable that a man so primitive, so little removed
from the animal, should find his chief pleasures in low pursuits and
companionships. During his historic visit to London, after a hard day's
work with adze and saw in the shipbuilding yard, the Tsar would adjourn
with his fellow-workmen to a public-house in Great Tower Street, and
"smoke and drink ale and brandy, almost enough to float the vessel he
had been helping to construct."

And in his own kingdom the favourite companions of his debauches were
common soldiers and servants.

"He chose his friends among the common herd; looked after his household
like any shopkeeper; thrashed his wife like a peasant; and sought his
pleasure where the lower populace generally finds it." His female
companions were chosen rather for their coarseness than their charms,
and pleased him most when they were drunk. It was thus fitting that he
should make an Empress of a scullery-maid, who, as we have seen in an
earlier chapter, had no vestige of beauty to commend her to his favour,
and whose chief attractions in his eyes were that she had a coarse
tongue and was a "first-rate toper."

It was thus a strange and unhappy caprice of fate that united Peter,
while still a youth, to his first Empress, the refined and sensitive
Eudoxia, a woman as remote from her husband as the stars. Never was
there a more incongruous bride than this delicately nurtured girl
provided by the Empress Nathalie for her coarse-grained son. From the
hour at which they stood together at the altar the union was doomed to
tragic failure; before the honeymoon waned Peter had terrified his bride
by his brutality and disgusted her by the open attentions he paid to his
favourites of the hour, the daughters of Botticher, the goldsmith, and
Mons, the wine-merchant.

For five years husband and wife saw little of each other; and when, in
1694, Nathalie's death removed the one influence which gave the union at
least the outward form of substance, Peter lost no time in exhibiting
his true colours. He dismissed all Eudoxia's relatives from the Court,
and sent her father into exile. One brother he caused to be whipped in
public; another was put to the torture, which had its horrible climax
when Peter himself saturated his victim's clothes with spirits of wine,
and then set them on fire. For Eudoxia a different fate was reserved.
Not only had he long grown weary of her insipid beauty and of her
refinement and gentleness, which were a constant mute reproach to his
own low tastes and hectoring manners--he had grown to hate the very
sight of her, and determined that she should no longer stand between him
and the unbridled indulgence of his pleasure.

During his visit to England he never once wrote to her, and on his
return to Moscow his first words were a brutal announcement of his
intention to be rid of her. In vain she pleaded and wept. To her tearful
inquiries, "What have I done to offend you? What fault have you to find
with me?" he turned a deaf ear. "I never want to see you again," were
his last inexorable words. A few days later a hackney coach drove up to
the palace doors; the unhappy Tsarina was bundled unceremoniously into
it, and she was carried away to the nunnery of the "Intercession of the
Blessed Virgin," whose doors were closed on her for a score of years.

Pitiful years they were for the young Empress, consigned by her husband
to a life that was worse than death--robbed of her rank, her splendours,
and luxuries, her very name--she was now only Helen, the nun, faring
worse than the meanest of her sister-nuns; for while they at least had
plenty to eat, the Tsarina seems many a time to have known the pangs of
hunger. The letters she wrote to one of her brothers are pathetic
evidence of the straits to which she was reduced. "For pity's sake," she
wrote, "give me food and drink. Give clothes to the beggar. There is
nothing here. I do not need a great deal; still I must eat."

It is not to be wondered at, that, in her misery, she should turn
anywhere for succour and sympathy; and both came to her at last in the
guise of Major Glebof, an officer in the district, whose heart was
touched by the sadness of her fate. He sent her food and wine to restore
her strength, and warm furs to protect her from the iciness of her cell.
In response to her letters of thanks, he visited her again and again,
bringing sunshine into her darkened life with his presence, and soothing
her with words of sympathy and encouragement, until gratitude to the
"good Samaritan" grew into love for the man.

When she learned that the man who had so befriended her was himself
poor, actually in money difficulties, she insisted on giving him every
rouble she could wring, by any abject appeal, out of her friends and
relatives. She became his very slave, grovelling at his feet. "Where thy
heart is, dearest one," she wrote to him, "there is mine also; where thy
tongue is, there is my head; thy will is also mine." She loved him with
a passion which broke down all barriers of modesty and prudence,
reckless of the fact that he had a wife, as she had a husband.

When Major Glebof's visits and letters grew more and more infrequent,
she suffered tortures of anxiety and despair. "My light, my soul, my
joy," she wrote in one distracted letter, "has the cruel hour of
separation come already? O, my light! how can I live apart from thee?
How can I endure existence? Rather would I see my soul parted from my
body. God alone knows how dear thou art to me. Why do I love thee so
much, my adored one, that without thee life is so worthless? Why art
thou angry with me? Why, my _batioushka_, dost thou not come to see me?
Have pity on me, O my lord, and come to see me to-morrow. O, my world,
my dearest and best, answer me; do not let me die of grief."

Thus one distracted, incoherent letter followed another, heart-breaking
in their grief, pitiful in their appeal. "Come to me," she cried;
"without thee I shall die. Why dost thou cause me such anguish? Have I
been guilty without knowing it? Better far to have struck me, to have
punished me in any way, for this fault I have innocently committed." And
again: "Why am I not dead? Oh, that thou hadst buried me with thy own
hands! Forgive me, O my soul! Do not let me die.... Send me but a crust
of bread thou hast bitten with thy teeth, or the waistcoat thou hast
often worn, that I may have something to bring thee near to me."

What answers, if any, the Major vouchsafed to these pathetic letters we
know not. The probability is that they received no answer--that the
"good Samaritan" had either wearied of or grown alarmed at a passion
which he could not return, and which was fraught with danger. It was
accident only that revealed to the world the story of this strange and
tragic infatuation.

When the Tsarevitch, Alexis, was brought to trial in 1718 on a charge of
conspiracy against his father, Peter, suspecting that Eudoxia had had a
hand in the rebellion, ordered a descent on the nunnery and an inquiry.
Nothing was found to connect her with her son's ill-fated venture; but
the inquiry revealed the whole story of her relations with the too
friendly officer. The evidence of the nuns and servants alone--evidence
of frequent and long meetings by day and night, of embraces
exchanged--was sufficiently conclusive, without the incriminating
letters which were discovered in the Major's bureau, labelled "Letters
from the Tsarina," or Eudoxia's confession which was extorted from her.

This was an opportunity of vengeance such as exceeded all the Tsar's
hopes. Glebof was arrested and put on his trial. Evidence was forced
from the nuns by the lashing of the knout, so severe that some of them
died under it. Glebof, subjected to such frightful tortures that in his
agony he confessed much more than the truth, was sentenced to death by
impalement. In order to prolong his suffering to the last possible
moment, he was warmly wrapped in furs, to protect him from the bitter
cold, and for twenty-eight hours he suffered indescribable agony, until
at last death came to his release.

As for Eudoxia, her punishment was a public flogging and consignment to
a nunnery still more isolated and miserable than that in which she had
dragged out twenty years of her broken life. Here she remained for seven
years, until, on the Tsar's death, an even worse fate befell her. She
was then, by Catherine's orders, taken from the convent, and flung into
the most loathsome, rat-infested dungeon of the fortress of
Schlussenberg, where she remained for two years of unspeakable horror.

Then at last, after nearly thirty years of life that was worse than
death, the sun shone again for her. One day her dungeon door flew open,
and to the bowing of obsequious courtiers, the prisoner was conducted to
a sumptuous apartment. "The walls were hung with splendid stuffs; the
table was covered with gold-plate; ten thousand roubles awaited her in
a casket. Courtiers stood in her ante-chamber; carriages and horses
were at her orders."

Catherine, the "scullery-Empress," was dead; Eudoxia's grandson, Peter
II., now wore the crown of Russia; and Eudoxia found herself
transported, as by the touch of a magic wand, from her loathsome
prison-cell to the old-time splendours of palaces--the greatest lady in
all Russia, to whom Princesses, ambassadors, and courtiers were all
proud to pay respectful homage. But the transformation had come too
late; her life was crushed beyond restoration; and after a few months of
her new glory she was glad to find an asylum once more within convent
walls, until Death, the great healer of broken hearts, took her to
where, "beyond these voices, there is peace."

* * * * *

While Eudoxia was eating her heart out in her convent cell, her husband
was finding ample compensation for her absence in Bacchanalian orgies
and the company of his galaxies of favourites, from tradesmen's
daughters to servant-maids of buxom charms, such as the Livonian
peasant-girl, in whom he found his second Empress.

Of the almost countless women who thus fell under his baneful influence
one stands out from the rest by reason of the tragedy which surrounds
her memory. Mary Hamilton was no low-born maid, such as Peter especially
chose to honour with his attentions. She had in her veins the blood of
the ducal Hamiltons of Scotland, and of many a noble family of Russia,
from which her more immediate ancestors had taken their wives; and it
was an ill fate that took her, when little more than a child, to the
most debased Court of Europe to play the part of maid-of-honour, and
thus to cross the path of the most unprincipled lover in Europe.

Peter's infatuation for the pretty young "Scotswoman," however, was but
short-lived. She had none of the vulgar attractions that could win him
to any kind of constancy; and he quickly abandoned her for the more
agreeable company of his _dienshtchiks_, leaving her to find consolation
in the affection of more courtly, if less exalted, lovers--notably the
young Count Orloff, who proved as faithless as his master.

Such was Mary's infatuation for the worthless Count that, under his
influence, she stooped to various kinds of crime, from stealing the
Tsarina's jewels to fill her lover's purse, to infanticide. The climax
came when an important document was missing from the Tsar's cabinet.
Suspicion pointed to Orloff as the thief; he was arrested, and, when
brought into Peter's presence, not only confessed to the thefts and to
his share in making away with the undesirable infants, but betrayed the
partner of his guilt.

There was short shrift for poor Mary Hamilton when she was put on her
trial on these grave charges. She made full confession of her crimes;
but no torture could wring from her the name of the man for love of whom
she had committed them, and of whose treachery to her she was ignorant.
She was sentenced to death; and one March day, in the year 1719, she
was led to the scaffold "in a white silk gown trimmed with black
ribbons."

Then followed one of the grimmest scenes recorded in history. Peter, the
man who had been the first to betray her, and who had refused her pardon
even when her cause was pleaded by his wife, was a keenly interested
spectator of her execution. At the foot of the scaffold he embraced her,
and exhorted her to pray, before stepping aside to give place to the
headsman. When the axe had done its deadly work, he again stepped
forward, picked up the lifeless and still beautiful head which had
rolled into the mud, and calmly proceeded to give a lecture on anatomy
to the assembled crowd, "drawing attention to the number and nature of
the organs severed by the axe." His lecture concluded, he kissed the
pale, dead lips, crossed himself, and walked away with a smile of
satisfaction on his face.

CHAPTER XXIV

A FRIEND OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

There is scarcely a spectacle in the whole drama of history more
pathetic than that of Marie Antoinette, dancing her light-hearted way
through life to the guillotine, seemingly unconscious of the eyes of
jealousy and hate that watched her every step; or, if she noticed at
all, returning a gay smile for a frown.

Wedded when but a child, full of the joy of youth, with laughter
bubbling on her pretty lips and gaiety dancing in her eyes, to a
dull-witted clown to whom her fresh young beauty made no appeal;
surrounded by Court ladies jealous of her charms; feared for her foreign
sympathies, and hated by a sullen, starving populace for her
extravagance and her pursuit of pleasure, the Austrian Princess with all
her young loveliness and the sweetness of her nature could please no one
in the land of her exile. Her very amiability was an offence; her
unaffected simplicity a subject of scorn; and her love of pleasure a
crime.

Had she realised the danger of her position, and adapted herself to its
demands, her story might have been written very differently; but her
tragedy was that she saw or heeded none of the danger-signals that
marked her path until it was too late to retrace a step; and that her
most innocent pleasures were made to pave the way to her doom.

Nothing, for instance, could have been more harmless to the seeming than
Marie Antoinette's friendship for Yolande de Polignac; but this
friendship had, beyond doubt, a greater part in her undoing than any
other incident in her life, from the affair of the "diamond necklace" to
her innocent infatuation for Count Fersen; and it would have been well
for the Queen of France if Madame de Polignac had been content to remain
in her rustic obscurity, and had never crossed her path.

When Yolande Gabrielle de Polastron was led to the altar, one day in the
year 1767, by Comte Jules de Polignac, she never dreamt, we may be sure,
of the dazzling role she was destined to play at the Court of France.
Like her husband, she was a member of the smaller _noblesse_, as proud
as they were poor. Her husband, it is true, boasted a long pedigree,
with its roots in the Dark Ages; but his family had given to France only
one man of note, that Cardinal de Polignac, accomplished scholar,
courtier, and man of affairs, who was able to twist Louis XIV. round his
dexterous thumb; and Comte Jules was the Cardinal's great-nephew, and,
through his mother, had Mazarin blood in his veins.

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