Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

The story of their flight to Dover on foot, clad in the rags of peasants--a disguise to which the little girl had such an objection that she angrily announced to all they met, "that she was not a peasant boy, but the Princess Henrietta of England"--when related at the French Court no doubt excited a suitable thrill. But Parliament was not ridiculous enough to pursue such fugitives, and they crossed to Calais in the ordinary French packet. Such was Madame's _début_ on the theatre of life. She was two years old at the time. Fifteen years later she again appeared before the public as a star, so to speak,--a _rôle_ in which she scored a brilliant popular success. Like most such intervals, these intervening years were obscure, hard, discouraging.

For Queen Henrietta Maria, widowed, exiled, and impoverished to the condition of shabby gentility, was not a cheerful mother to live with. She was always weeping, praying, and plotting, and her _enfant de bénédiction_ had a cheerless childhood. Rooms had been assigned to the Queen of England at the Louvre, and the sum of forty thousand livres had been voted her by the Parliament of Paris. But it was soon _mangé_ by her son and his beggared followers, and there was often real misery in that little Court at the Louvre.

The famous Cardinal de Retz, who during the Fronde was a sort of king in Paris, describes with his mocking pity the state in which he discovered the English royalties when one day in mid-winter affairs obliged him to call on Henrietta Maria.

"You see," said the _Reine Malheureuse_, whom he found at the bedside of her daughter, who as a child was thought to be consumptive, "I am keeping Henrietta company; I dare not let the poor child rise to-day as we have no fire."

"The truth was," adds de Retz ironically, "that no tradespeople would trust her for anything. Posterity will hardly believe that a princess of England, granddaughter of Henry the Great, had wanted a faggot in the month of January to get out of bed in the Louvre, and in the eyes of the French Court! We read in history with horror of baseness less monstrous than this, and the little concern I have met with about it in most people's minds has obliged me to make a thousand times this reflection: _That examples of times past move men beyond comparison more than those of their own times_. _We accustom ourselves to what we see, and I doubt whether Caligula's horse being made a consul would have surprised us so much as we imagine._"

Owing to the cynical de Retz, it no doubt consoled Henrietta Maria to be assured that "a princess of England would not keep her bed the next day for want of a faggot."

But his generosity seems to us to have been prompted from a far less noble impulse than that of the chivalrous Duke of Ormond. For this Bayard of the British peerage sold his order of the Garter for the benefit of his Queen, and was "compelled to put himself in prison, with other gentlemen, at a pistole a week for his diet."

These days of adversity, however, came to an end, and after the Fronde was subdued Henrietta Maria enjoyed all the privileges of her royal birth. Not that she availed herself of them; on the contrary, grief had taken most of the joy out of life for her, and though she lived in the closest intimacy with her sister-in-law, Anne of Austria, the Regent, and in the midst of a brilliant Court, she was scarcely ever seen out of her own apartments. But grief did not kill Henrietta Maria's ambition. She longed to see a crown on her daughter's head. So the young princess, who shared her mother's rigid seclusion, was carefully educated with the secret object of making a suitable consort for her cousin, the young King.

In looking back on these dreary years of girlhood Henrietta could remember but a single joy they had contained. It was a joy, however, so great that its memory coloured this entire period. This was the real affection that her brother Charles, alone of mortals, during an all too fleeting visit to Paris, evinced for her. The emotional child, whose affections were being choked by the austerity of her mother's life, paid back her brother's kindness to her with compound interest. He began by treating her as a plaything with which he liked to toy in an idle moment and ended by making her his friend and confidante. To her he was like a hero of romance. No one in that graceless, dashing crowd of exiled Cavaliers, whom necessity had turned into adventurers, followed his fortunes with such an eager sympathy. No one in those long years of baffled hopes and fruitless efforts was more firmly convinced that he would come to his own again. When his star had completely vanished in the dazzling sunlight of Cromwell, when even the astute Mazarin believed that the throne of England was for ever lost to the Stuarts, the insignificant Henrietta in her dreary room at the Louvre never despaired. It is perhaps only a girl who could, under such circumstances, have maintained such an unshaken faith. Charles never forgot it. Cynical and insincere with all, he remained to the last ever frank and true to his sister. She wished no greater reward.

Owing to the simplicity of her life no one in the brilliant French Court remarked the almost imperceptible development of those spiritual charms that were to turn an obscure princess into a fascinating queen of hearts. As a child she was not at all pretty, and all her physical defects were heightened by perpetual colds, and toothaches, and sore eyes. The complete lack of taste with which her mother dressed her, and a certain blue-stocking air that her intellectual cramming gave her were, moreover, little calculated to excite admiration. It was, on the face of it, absurd to imagine that Louis, palpitating with youth and health and pride and the joy of life, would dream of choosing such a princess for his queen. Pride alone would have prevented him from placing on the throne beside him one whom he considered as a poor relation living on his charity. Besides, his boy's head at the time was full of Mazarin's nieces; he was kissing Hortense, flirting with Olympe, and plighting undying troth with Marie.

Henrietta Maria, however, had learnt nothing from her prolonged lessons in defeat; she was one of those women who resist, not from obstinacy, but from habit. Having set her heart on seeing her daughter Queen of France she intrigued accordingly. The most important accomplice in the making of the match was Anne of Austria, the King's mother. The relations between the sisters-in-law were of the most cordial description, and Anne, like an anxious mother terrified lest her favourite son should make a _mésalliance_--an event that in Louis' case seemed quite likely--decided that the sooner he was married the better. Of course she had a list of marriageable princesses to choose from, but as in her anxiety there was no time to be lost her choice was confined to one of two on the spot. These were "La Grande Mademoiselle" and the Princess Henrietta, both of whom were her nieces; but as no love was lost between Anne and the former, the princess of England who had lacked a faggot to warm herself by suddenly found herself arrived within measurable distance of the throne of France.

To facilitate matters Anne gave a dance in honour of Henrietta, who was then eleven and very precocious, if equally unattractive, for her age. The young King, who by all the rules of etiquette, which he observed so faithfully in after life, should have offered his hand to his cousin, accorded this honour, to his mother's dismay, to the Duchesse de Mercoeur, the eldest of the beautiful nieces of Mazarin. Anne, who though now no longer Regent, nevertheless deluded herself with the thought that her influence over her son was still paramount, was covered with mortification and lost her head. She went up to her son and ordered him to dance with his cousin. But the expression on Louis' face warned the observant Henrietta Maria that another humiliation was imminent for her, and she tried to avert it with a tact that was hardly to be expected of her by at once intervening between the mother and son, declaring that her daughter had hurt her foot and could not dance.

"Well, then," cried the exasperated Anne, "if Henrietta does not dance neither shall Louis."

The boy, intensely mortified at the scene his mother was making before the whole Court, was quick to guess her motive. Having led the Duchesse de Mercoeur back to her seat, he went up sulkily to his cousin and asked her to dance. But the next day when Anne, who had had time to cool, coaxingly explained to him her plans for his marriage, he replied firmly, with all the pride of a boy of seventeen, "that he did not like little girls."

Anne of Austria did not patiently brook attempts to thwart her, but in this instance by wisely discerning her master in her son she managed to marry him--in his own good time--to another niece, the daughter of her brother, the King of Spain. As for the Queen of England, her disappointment was very bitter, and she wept and prayed and plotted against Cromwell more than ever. While Henrietta returned to her former obscurity, and though she did not cherish resentment against Louis, for whom she cared quite as little as he cared for her, she did not forget the slight she had received from him.

At last the day of triumph she had anticipated for her brother arrived.

When the news reached Paris of the _gaudeamus_ with which Charles II. was received in England, Henrietta Maria and her daughter were transported with joy. The sister of the King of England became at once a _partie_ eagerly sought after. Among those who wished to marry her was the Emperor. She, however, willingly consented to the proposal for her hand made by France on behalf of Monsieur, Louis XIV.'s brother, not because she loved him, but because such an alliance was to the interest of her own brother. This marriage was no sooner arranged, to the great satisfaction of Henrietta Maria, to whom the thought of her daughter on the steps of the French throne was almost as pleasing as the sight of her on the throne itself would have been, than the Queen and the Princess went to England to share in the triumph of King Charles.

Without detailing the events of this visit, on which Henrietta's right to be classed among the beauties of the Court of Whitehall rests, quite as much as on the fact of her birth, it will be sufficient to say that it was a success. With the restoration of Charles to the throne of his ancestors, Stuarts of every degree of consanguinity had flocked to London. They came from all over Europe, rich and poor, blood relations and collaterals; there never had been in the history of the family such a reunion. As most of them wanted something, a young king in the hour of victory could not but be generous; offices and honours rained on Stuarts of Blantyre and Stuarts of Richmond; places and pensions on aunt-Queens of Bohemia, on princely cousin Ruperts, and dowager sisters of Orange. Retrenchment was a word that had not been invented to frighten nations with in that day. But of all her family the one who got the lion's share of this prodigal profusion was the Princess Henrietta. The others took the wealth of the people, she won its heart.

In the bacchanal joy of the Restoration sentiment was conspicuous. The interest in the dramatic romance of the dynasty was heightened by the well-known sympathy between the King and his youngest sister. Though she had grown up unobserved in the French Court, England had been following her career. Cavaliers had noisily drunk her health on the Rhine, in the army of Condé, in the Highlands, and in whispers all over Cromwell-ridden England. Even the Puritans had heard with sentimental contempt--for there was sentiment in them too--of Charles Stuart's letters to the little girl in the Louvre, which bore the simple, pathetic address, "For my dear, dear sister." To this member of the family at least the nation was prepared to give no grudging welcome. The sudden and overwhelming gladness that had come into her life had transformed her into a fascinating girl of seventeen. Beautiful in the vulgar, plastic sense she was not, yet she created the impression of beauty. Like Madame de Pompadour, she possessed the _beauté sans traits_. The lights in her expressive eyes, the swift changes of her mobile face, spoke to all of the sympathy and gaiety of her temperament. The praises of Whitehall echoed in the coffee-houses, everybody talked of her, everybody wished to see her. Her public appearances were ovations. It was impossible to resist her smile. It was the smile of one who seems to desire nothing so much as to please. In a princess this is even more winning than tact in a king. "On dirait qu'elle demande le coeur," says M. Anatole France, "voilà le secret de Madame."

Money was as necessary to her as to any of the others of her family; _she_ had never had a farthing of her own. But to none of the Stuarts did the nation give so gracefully and so quickly. The House of Commons not only voted her a gift of ten thousand pounds, but sent her the money on the same day. But in the midst of all this popularity and joy a great gloom fell over Whitehall. Henrietta's youngest brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had died of small-pox just before she arrived in England; and now her only sister, the Princess of Orange, fell ill of the same disease and succumbed after a short illness. This tragedy occurring at such a time "wholly altered," says Evelyn, "the face and gallantry of the whole Court." Henrietta Maria, terrified lest she should lose her only surviving daughter, on whose future she built such high hopes, eagerly hastened to leave a country which seemed to bring nothing but disaster to her family. Their departure was facilitated by the impatience of the French Government to conclude the projected alliance with England--an impatience manifested through the anxiety of Monsieur in regard to the health of his _fiancée_. Within less than three months of leaving Paris for London the Princess was back in the city of her adoption, and shortly afterwards her marriage with the French king's only brother took place, by which she became, as regards rank, the second woman in the kingdom.

Those who remembered what an insignificant girl she had been were amazed at the change in her. It was not, however, she who had changed, but merely the light in which she had stood. Heretofore, because it had not considered her, the world took it for granted that she was not worth considering. But now as the wife of the first prince of the blood all eyes were turned upon her, while she, like an understudy who suddenly finds herself in the _rôle_ for which she has been trained, acted her part to the best of her ability. That she electrified the French Court as she had done Whitehall did not in the least surprise the few who had known her intimately; on the contrary, they confidently expected her success. Madame de Motteville, a shrewd observer who knew her well, had predicted that "when she appeared on the great theatre of the Court of France she would play one of the leading parts there."

To her the _ancien régime_ owed its two chief characteristics--its gaiety and its grace. She possessed "une vivacité d'esprit et une élégance de manières" that in casting their spell over women as well as men created a model which made France down to the Revolution the supreme arbiter of taste in Europe. Her own natural ability--a quality that very few of the Stuarts lacked--sharpened and refined by the careful education her mother had given her, made her readily discern true genius from its sham. The artistic and intellectual appealed to her strongly. In the searchlight that the people fix upon royalty she was never seen to better advantage than when in the company of the elect of the nation. If Louis XIV. may be compared to Augustus, Madame was his Mecænas. She more than he made his fame splendid. It was she who mined and refined the ore which Louis stamped with his name. La Rochefoucauld and Bussy-Rabutin, Bossuet and Boileau, Condé and Turenne, Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette, all alike found in her an eager, sympathetic, and even a critically discriminating admirer.

In her day the peasants did not count as human beings; they were considered either as food for cannon or the mine that produced the gold of the upper classes. When the "people" were spoken of it was the _bourgeoisie_, the Third Estate, that was meant. The distance between this class and the throne was so bridgeless that only a revolution, one hundred and fifty years in the building, could span it. But across even this vast space the fascination of Madame penetrated. In the sublime _oraison funèbre_ that the great Bossuet pronounced over her dead body, he merely stated the simple truth when he declared that the people of Paris shuddered when, like a clap of thunder, there resounded over the city the appalling news, "_Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!_"

That smile, "which seemed to ask for one's heart," had captured that of Paris as it had that of London.

Stories of her enthusiastic appreciation of genius were related everywhere, but none touched the people like those which showed her in the act of levelling the barriers between the idols of the masses and the heroes of the Court. Everybody knew that she wept over Racine. Everybody had heard how Boileau had been drawn from his obscurity by a quotation from his unknown poem with which she had greeted him, when passing by chance through an ante-room in which the poor poet was waiting to solicit the patronage of some great lord. Everybody remembered that she had stood sponsor to the child of Molière, and had "Tartuffe" acted in her own house before the King while the Church was condemning the play and demanding that the author should be burnt alive. In a country like France such things strike the imagination. With the "people" Madame could not but be popular.

At the same time she became "toute la joie, tout le plaisir de la cour." If the long reign of Louis XIV. had a gorgeous summer in Athenaïs de Montespan, and a bleak winter in Madame de Maintenon, brightened for a brief moment by the sunshine of the lovely Duchess of Burgundy, it had a joyous spring in Henrietta of England. This Golden Age of France, as it has been termed, was never so happy as when Madame infected Fontainebleau and Versailles with her gaiety.

But the Court was not sincere like the people. Courts never are. Those who owed their places and pensions to the Queen Mother and the Queen naturally studied to please them, and nothing would have pleased Anne of Austria and Marie Thérèse, of Spain so much as the ruin of this radiant, _spirituelle_ Madame who cast them into the shade. To the people of Paris, who shuddered when the couriers came from St. Cloud with the news of her tragic death, the Court of France appeared as dazzling as did the palace of Armida to Renaud before he crossed its threshold. It was only those within who had breathed its poisoned air, tasted its treacherous pleasures, and languished in its labyrinth of intrigue who knew how fatal it was. The roses that strewed the Court of France concealed death-traps. All who lived there walked gingerly, the first princess of the blood--aye, the Queen herself, no less than the courtiers. To some the sense of danger gives an added zest to the joy of living. Madame was one of these. All her ingenuity was requisitioned to outwit her enemies, of whom the chief were her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and her husband.

The young King, who had been trained by his mother to play a great _rôle_ on the throne of France, took his position even now very seriously. He was, however, naturally fond of amusement, and it was certainly not his Queen who could provide it for him. His Spanish cousin, whom he had married for reasons of high policy, bored him utterly. Marie Thérèse was very plain, very stupid, and very virtuous. She fenced herself round with etiquette, and lived on a sort of unscalable Olympian height in all the gloomy splendour of the Spanish Court in which she had been bred. Her only recreations appeared to be cards and eating. All the Bourbons were famous gluttons, but Marie Thérèse in this matter suffered none to take precedence of her. Louis was not long in drawing the inevitable comparison between his wife and his sister-in-law; and when he wished amusement, conformable to his dignity and agreeable to his temperament, it was to Madame he went. The more he saw of her the more he liked her. A word, a phrase, an opinion, would suddenly arrest his attention, and from going to Madame for amusement he began to go for something else as well.

He seemed to have quite forgotten that he had ever looked upon her with disdain. But while she bore him no grudge for the slight he had put on her when there had been a question of her marrying him, she took a certain malicious, coquettish pleasure in encouraging his growing tenderness. What a sweet, innocent revenge it would be to make him fall in love with her! In a private station such a flirtation might have escaped attention, but in an Argus-eyed Court the first sigh will be suspected, the first understanding detected. The Queen, who possessed among the numerous qualities with which she bored her husband that of jealousy, complained to Anne of Austria that Madame was robbing her of her husband's affections. The Queen Mother, who liked to exercise over her family the influence which she no longer possessed in the Government, lent a ready ear to these confidences, and as she herself had a grievance against Madame for outshining her, she soon found the means of venting it. When Anne of Austria had a score to pay off she stopped at nothing. In this instance the means she employed were despicable. She set her younger son, Monsieur, against his wife.

(PHILIPPE D'ORLÉANS.)

_After Wallerant Vaillant._]

The character of Philippe d'Orléans belongs to a type with which readers of latter-day fiction are very familiar. This prince of the seventeenth century was the beau-ideal decadent that many modern novelists have delighted to depict. His mother and Mazarin, warned by the troubles the previous King's brother, Gaston d'Orléans, had caused the throne, were determined that Philippe should be trained to play the most paltry part in affairs. Consequently, while Louis XIV. was given the education which fitted him to become an able king, Monsieur was encouraged in every tendency that could enfeeble him. "The prettiest child in France" had grown up a young man of striking beauty with not a redeeming virtue. The last Valois king was the most degenerate monarch that ever sat on the throne of France, but he was at least picturesque. Monsieur did not possess even this quality. To find his equal one would have to go back to the decline of the Roman Empire. In the third century he might have won the purple and worn it like Heliogabalus, and the Prætorians would have poisoned or strangled or slain him. But he had the luck to be born in a Christian and more indulgent era, and died peacefully in his bed after a life of incredible uselessness and scandal. Brought up entirely among women, he had acquired an effeminacy that, when clad in women's dress, a costume he frequently affected, made it difficult to believe he belonged to the other sex. The study of clothes was his chief consideration, he spent hours rouging and perfuming himself. Court functions, to which he looked forward like a child to a party, provided him with the opportunity to wear his gorgeous costumes. A State funeral afforded him as much pleasure as a State wedding.

La Grande Mademoiselle declares that when her father, Gaston d'Orléans, died, the King on paying her his visit of condolence, said--

"To-morrow you will see Monsieur in a trailing violet mantle. He is enchanted to hear of your father's death so as to have the pleasure of wearing it."

And as Louis predicted, Monsieur went to the funeral wearing a mantle of a "furieuse longueur."

Added to his taste for dress and pageants, he delighted in collecting precious furniture, pictures, and jewels. He also wrote neurotic verses and swore love-till-death friendships--most of which he betrayed. Of his literary accomplishments the Bibliothèque Nationale contains the voluminous and ridiculous correspondence with which he honoured the witty Madame de Sablé. As to the scandals into which his pleasures led him, perhaps the least said about them the better. Those who are interested in such things may learn all about them in the memoirs of his period. Shame was an emotion he never knew. When his favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, the most profligate man of his century, was banished, Monsieur sulked. He possessed, however, two traits that in a decadent of his type are rather surprising. He liked the society of women quite as much as that of his own sex. By his two marriages he had seven children, of whom no one ever doubted that he was the father. He was, also, with all his vanity and effeminacy, personally brave. When he served in the army it was said "that he was more afraid of spoiling his complexion than of bullets." Strange to say, the division he commanded covered itself with glory. At a certain siege he so distinguished himself that Louis, who was extremely jealous of the tributes paid to others, sarcastically shouted--

"Take care, brother; I advise you to lie as flat on the ground as possible!"

Perhaps his degeneracy was not so much inherent as due to that remorseless tyranny known as "politics," which can find a host of plausible excuses to gain an end. Had Monsieur been given a fair chance he might have shown as much ability as Louis himself. After his first campaign, brilliant though it was, he was never given another command. He had been trained to fear his brother, but now and then he resented the dwarfing to which he was continually subjected. One cannot help feeling a certain satisfaction on reading that once in boyhood in a "fit of ungovernable passion he dashed a bowl of soup into his brother's face."

When Madame married him the process of degeneration was complete. "He was a woman," says Saint-Simon, "with all her faults and none of her virtues; childish, feeble, idle, gossiping, curious, vain, suspicious, incapable of holding his tongue, taking pleasure in spreading slander and making mischief." The union of this wretched creature and the fascinating Madame could not but be unhappy. It was a foregone conclusion that the _mignons_ of Monsieur should be jealous of her influence. They had already roused all the paltry jealousy of his nature against her when Anne of Austria reinforced them with her malice. Not that Monsieur loved his wife and resented her coquetry with his brother. "I never loved her after the first fortnight," he confessed in later life. Monsieur's jealousy was purely personal. He was jealous of her popularity, of her wit, of her brains--in a word, of her superiority to himself.

He was also jealous of the attention the King paid her.

The family bickerings to which his attachment to his sister-in-law subjected Louis were irritating to his pride. To silence them Madame, who had no desire to forego a friendship that amused and flattered her as much as it pleased the King, devised a ruse by which everybody was thrown off the scent. In order to enable Louis to continue his visits and to divert in another direction the hostility to which they exposed her, it was agreed that the King should feign a passion for one of Madame's maids of honour. The one selected for this questionable purpose was a sweet, unsophisticated young girl fresh from Touraine--the celebrated Mademoiselle de la Vallière.

The ruse succeeded only too well. Madame's enemies were completely hoodwinked, but Louis fell head over ears in love with the maid of honour. Madame, who ought to have foreseen this _dénouement_, was at first astonished and mortified. She was, however, too amiable to cherish resentment, and, to show Louis how little she cared, she plunged more gaily than ever into a life of pleasure, whereby she became involved in another and more dangerous flirtation, famous in French history as: L'affaire Guiche-Madame.

* * * * *

This "affaire" may be described as the historical parent of a numerous family of the purest French breed, of which some of the more familiar descendants are the Diamond Necklace, the Panama, the Dreyfus. Complexity of intrigue was to each what the "Austrian lip" is to the Hapsburgs--a family characteristic. Those who wish a graphic account of the story should read Dumas' "Vicomte de Bragelonne." We can do no more here than give a rough sketch of it.

_From a painting in the possession of the Duc de Gramont._]

Like all of the Gramonts, Armand de Guiche was an original character. His family, with the exception of the famous Chevalier, who, afterwards returned to favour, stood high at Court. His father, the Maréchal--Maréchal _Lampon_ they called him in Paris, from the number of lampoons his doings had inspired--was held in great esteem by Louis, who forgave him his private life for the sake of his public worth. His sister, the flighty Princess of Monaco, of whom there are many curious stories in the memoirs of the period, was loved by Monsieur as much as he could ever love any one, and an intimate friend of Madame as well; as was also his aunt, the Marquise de Saint-Chaumont, who was afterwards governess to her children. He himself had passed all his life at Court, where till the infamous Chevalier de Lorraine came on the scene he was the bosom-friend of Monsieur.

Fortune had been particularly kind to him. He possessed everything necessary to make him a general favourite: birth, wealth, good looks, winning manners. The consciousness, however, of these great advantages, says Madame de La Fayette, "gave him a certain scornful air that tarnished his merit not a little, yet one must own no one at Court had so much of it as he." The temperament of this hero was no less romantic than his appearance. His brain teemed with the most chivalrous and erotic ideas; he longed for a _grande passion_, but it must not be one of your commonplace, vulgar sort. He wanted a Guinevere to play Launcelot to, a Francesca to whom he might be the Paolo. And they married him when little more than a boy, much against his will, to an honest, prosaic girl. The marriage was, of course, unhappy--for the Comtesse de Guiche. She would have given half of her life to have been loved by him, but marriage had only served to make him long more than ever for the realisation of his extravagant, impossible ideal. Now and then he fancied for a moment he had found what he sought; one of these brief illusions was a girl who afterwards became the famous Princesse des Ursins.

He was still seeking the unattainable when Madame returned from London and fascinated the Court. The high-flown imagination of the Comte de Guiche was at once inflamed. It pleased him to think that the danger of lifting his eyes to one so far removed from him added to the glory of such a passion. But Guiche's head was not yet so cracked that all sense had left it. Having learnt from the example of his uncle, the Chevalier de Gramont, how unwise it was to excite the jealousy of Louis in an affair of the heart, he prudently waited till the King had left the field before he entered it. But when his chance arrived he behaved in the most singular manner. Although they were thrown constantly together both at Fontainebleau and the Tuileries, Madame was as unaware of his infatuation as Dulcinea del Toboso of Don Quixote's. The Comte de Guiche, however, had no intention of concealing his passion from the rest of the world. The jealousy of Monsieur was aroused--the jealousy of a slighted husband and a slighted friend. He and Guiche quarrelled, and the latter "broke with the prince of the blood as if he were his equal."

The "_bruit_," as it was called, that this quarrel occasioned was the first intimation that Madame received of the devotion of her quixotic admirer. As she was not interested in the Comte de Guiche, who had now withdrawn from Court, the affair would have ended here but for Mademoiselle de Montalais, one of her maids of honour.

This girl was an _intrigante_ of a type that abounded at the French Court throughout the _ancien régime_. Her object was to insinuate herself, so to speak, into fortune, by making herself useful to some great person. She sought an interview with the Comte de Guiche, and gained his confidence by assuring him that she would win him the favour of Madame. The means she employed did not at first meet with the slightest success. Madame refused to read the letters Guiche sent her through the maid of honour, or to hold any communication with him. But Montalais was not disheartened. By dint of continually harping to her mistress on the subject of the Count she succeeded in creating a certain impression on her mind; and one day, just as Madame was leaving Fontainebleau for Paris, Montalais with a mischievous air flung into her coach all Guiche's unopened letters. As the journey was tedious and Madame had nothing better to do she read the billets. The originality of their style, which was so obscure as to suggest that the writer had no idea what he meant, amused her. The whim seized her to reply--and the flirtation began.

As her heart was not involved in the flirtation, her interest in her curious lover would no doubt speedily have waned. But love of excitement, the natural gaiety of her disposition, and the life she led with Monsieur, whose jealousy might more accurately be described as a malicious espionage, inclined Madame to coquetry. Moreover, the unexpected end to her flirtation with the King had created a sort of blank in her life; she was easily _ennuyée_, and when in this mood, like the Duchesse de Longueville, the pleasures she sighed for were not innocent. Her jaded gaiety required a fresh stimulant, and this the flirtation with Guiche gave her. The sense of the danger they both ran from detection pleased her as a child is pleased in playing with fire. Letters passed between them every day, four of Guiche's to Madame's one. One day Guiche disguised himself as an old woman and, aided by Montalais, visited his mistress. The skill with which he evaded recognition by Madame's ladies while he told them their fortunes would have done credit to a Rochester. But success may sometimes invite disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in turning Madame's indifference to Guiche into prejudice, Vardes made the mistake of keeping his memory alive. Deceived by Vardes' amiable and insinuating manners, and believing him to be her friend, Madame distinguished him with certain confidences that he interpreted as signs of a growing affection. Vardes was, however, rudely disillusioned at the very moment he fancied victory within grasp. One night, at some Court function, the conversation in the _entourage_ of Madame chanced to turn on the Comte de Guiche, who from Lorraine had gone to Poland, where he was covering himself with glory and wounds. Among the stories told of him, it was related that in a battle, in which some of the fingers of his right hand had been shot off, a bullet had struck him on the breast, and that death was only averted by a "portrait he wore next his heart." Madame, remembering all that had passed between herself and Guiche, had no doubt the charmed portrait was her own, and, in spite of the prejudice against him that had been subtly instilled into her mind, she was sufficiently touched by what she heard to exclaim to Vardes that "she believed she liked the Comte de Guiche more than she thought."

Realising that he had failed, Vardes now resolved to be revenged on both Madame and Guiche.

At the time of her arrest Mademoiselle de Montalais had managed to save Guiche's letters to Madame, of which she had the care, from falling into the hands of Monsieur. These she carried with her to her convent prison, whence she had sent them for safer keeping, as she thought, to her lover, Malicorne. This man showed them to a certain Manicamp, a supposed friend of the Comte de Guiche, from whom Vardes artfully got possession of them. And from this rape of the letters sprung a numerous progeny of little intrigues, by means of which, in the usual French fashion, a crowd of minor persons set to work to weave the threads of their own fortunes into the general pattern of Vardes-Guiche-Madame.

To enumerate all the adventures of this precious crew would require a book almost as long as the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." Perhaps only a Dumas could unravel all the threads of this curious tangle. And what a tangle it was! Think of the incriminating correspondence passing from a Montalais' hand to those of a Malicorne and a Manicamp, who wrote a libel on Madame and Guiche, printed in Holland, and bought up, all save one copy, by Madame's father-confessor, who travelled secretly to Holland for the purpose and had adventures not a few. Think of Vardes' forged letters from the Queen of Spain to ruin Madame--letters lost by the forgers. Think of the Comte de Guiche returning from Poland and discovering his friend's treachery; think of Guiche's attempts to clear himself in Madame's eyes--attempts in which the whole Gramont family lent a hand with daily consultations at the house of the famous Philibert and his La Belle Hamilton--attempts in which masked balls and lackey's liveries play a prominent part. If one thinks of the possibilities of such incidents, one will get some idea of the adventures the Affaire Guiche-Madame had to encounter. To stop it, once started, not even Vardes himself, had he wished, had the power. Like a Juggernaut, it continued to advance, crushing all who got in its way, the innocent and the evil alike.

So cleverly had Vardes schemed, it seemed impossible that Madame, still unaware of his villainy, could escape destruction. She carried on an intimate correspondence with her brother, Charles II., in which neither concealed their thoughts of the people around them. One of these letters, not very flattering to Louis, Vardes got possession of and showed the King, to whom as gentleman of the bedchamber he had easy access. But this fatal shot missed fire owing to the treachery of his chief ally--his mistress, Olympe Mancini, Comtesse de Soissons. This woman, believing that Vardes' hatred of Madame was but a mask to conceal a passion as wild as Guiche's for the Princess, had a quarrel with her lover, on whom in a fit of jealousy she revenged herself by having an _éclaircissement_ with Madame. Horrified at the plot of which she was to be the victim, Madame went straight to the King and explained to him what she had learnt. Louis accepted her interpretation of the letter to her brother, and Vardes was sent to the Bastille.

But now the Comtesse de Soissons, realising that her jealousy had not only utterly lost her her lover but freed her rival, resolved to be revenged on the Comte de Guiche. She had one of his letters, in which, in his romantic way, he had offered to make his regiment swear allegiance to Madame. But the day was long past when Olympe Mancini could make Louis XIV. eager to fulfil her requests. To the mortification and terror of the Comtesse, he went to consult Madame. By this time Madame's gaiety was sobered by experience; she had come to see the incredible folly of a woman of her position flirting with Guiche and making friends with a Vardes. Whatever affection she may have had for the Comte de Guiche was at an end, and she wished him out of the way. But she was shrewd enough to detect an enemy in the Comtesse de Soissons, and she resolved to save Guiche at her expense as the lesser of two evils. Louis was induced to pardon him if it could be proved that his faults were small in comparison to those of his enemies. As Madame now held all the court-cards in the game, this was easy to do. She gave the King a full and frank account of her flirtation with Guiche from its beginning, as well as the complications to which it had led, and wrote to Guiche to do the same, "assuring him that she had found plain dealing the best security against Court machinations." The indignation of Louis was aroused, and he lost no time in venting his anger. Vardes was taken from the Bastille--the _ancien régime's_ prison for such persons as we nowadays call "first-class misdemeanants"--and immured in a dungeon at Montpelier. It was nearly thirty years before he saw the Court of France again.

A much milder punishment was meted out to the Comtesse de Soissons. She was forced to retire into the country for a time; but, far from having a wholesome effect on her lawless spirit, this temporary exile seemed to have assisted its degeneration. When she returned to Court she took to poisoning, or was at least suspected of being implicated in the "Poison Affair," whereupon Louis had to banish her altogether from the country. She died in great misery, after a sensational vagabond life, just as the star of her son, Prince Eugene of Savoy, began to rise over Europe.

As for the Comte de Guiche, he and his Dulcinea never met again, in spite of all his attempts, in the last of which, disguised as a footman, he fainted in the very presence of Madame. Louis once more obliged him to carry his high-flown, imaginary passion off to the war then raging, in which, after a short but brilliant career, he perished. Of all those who had been entangled in this intrigue Madame alone succeeded in escaping with colours flying. But though the King's confidence in his brilliant sister-in-law was fully restored, and she was admitted to the secret councils of the Cabinet--a distinction that no other woman, save Madame de Maintenon, enjoyed in this reign--she could not win happiness. Monsieur was a constant thorn in her flesh. Perhaps it would have been impossible to overcome the resentment of his petty, contemptible nature; but Madame's attempt merely served to whet his dislike into hatred. Rightly guessing that his favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, fomented the discord between them, she determined that this man should be banished. The necessary excuse for effecting an object so thoroughly justifiable was provided for her by Louis, who disliked the Chevalier de Lorraine quite as much as she did herself. Instead of remonstrating with his brother on his behaviour, the King gave the Chevalier a lecture on the subject, who, by declaring that henceforth he would be answerable for Monsieur's good conduct, fell into the trap set for him.

"What!" said Louis haughtily, "you answerable to me for _my_ brother? Do you think that I choose to have such a guarantee? But, be it so, I shall hold you to your word."

As opportunities of objecting to Monsieur's conduct were innumerable, the Chevalier's impertinent boast was soon put to the test. One day, accordingly, without any warning, Louis sent to arrest him. He was seized in a room in which he was closeted with Monsieur, who fell into such a paroxysm of grief and rage as to give the widest publicity to a disagreeable scandal.

But the Chevalier de Lorraine in a dungeon at the Château d'If, or in exile in Italy, was even more dangerous to Madame's domestic happiness than when at the Palais Royal. From the day of his favourite's disgrace to his wife's strange death a few months later, Monsieur was an impossible husband for any woman to live with. He seemed now to have but two objects in life, to be possessed of two burning desires which dwelt in him evilly like demons. One was the return of his Chevalier, the other the death of Madame.

The vindictive animosity that Monsieur displayed towards his wife was still further whetted by a singular mark of favour which Louis bestowed on his sister-in-law. Wishing to detach Charles II. from the alliances he had formed, the King of France thought that he could not find a more suitable instrument to accomplish his design than the insinuating Madame, whose relations with her brother were, as Vardes had proved to him, of the most cordial description. The Princess, when the subject was explained to her, willingly undertook to go to England and negotiate with Charles in person, having, according to one authority, the ulterior object of persuading her brother to afford her his protection in the not unlikely event of her separating from her husband, whose conduct was becoming more and more insupportable. Whether this was so or not, considering the character of Monsieur, it was extremely undesirable that he should be acquainted with the secret of her mission. Hereupon he availed himself of his conjugal rights with characteristic pettiness and forbade her to leave France. But Louis was not to be thwarted in a matter of such importance to him by his brother's paltry rancour, and he sternly told Monsieur "that she _should_ go and that he would have no more obstacles thrown in his way."