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, "Iam 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 Lavallière) 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; andLouise, 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 Françoise d'Aubigné 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'Aubigné, 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 Françoise 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'Aubigné found his prisondoors 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 Françoise 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 Françoise'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 ofFrench 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, Françoise 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 Françoise 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 Françoise d'Aubigné 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 wishfor 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.
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 Maintenonhas 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 toits 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 Sevigné 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; hehanded 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, payingto 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 protégée. 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.
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—"themuscles 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 rôle 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 withoutbeing the worse for drink," Baron Pöllnitz 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 toapproach him." Even in his saner moods, as Waliszewski tells us, he "joined to the roughness of a Russianbarinall 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 wroteto 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 herletters 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, mybatioushka, 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 werediscovered 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 ina 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 ancestorshad 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 hisdienshtchiks, 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 year1719, 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.
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-signalsthat 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 rôle she was destined to play at the Court of France. Like her husband, she was a member of the smallernoblesse, 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.
But the young couple had a purse as short as their descent was long; and the early years of their wedded life were spent in Comte Jules' dilapidated château, on an income less than the equivalent of a pound a day—in a rustic retirement which was varied by anoccasional jaunt to Paris to "see the sights," and enjoy a little cheap gaiety.
Comte Jules, however, had a sister, Diane, a clever-tongued, ambitious young woman, who had found a footing at Court as lady-in-waiting to the Comtesse d'Artois, and whom her brother and his wife were proud to visit on their rare journeys to the capital. And it was during one of these visits that Marie Antoinette, who had struck up an informal friendship with the sprightly, laughter-loving Diane, first met the woman who was to play such an important and dangerous part in her life.
It was, perhaps, little wonder that the French Queen, craving for friendship and sympathy, fell under the charm of Yolande de Polignac—a girl still, but a few years older than herself, with a singular sweetness and winsomeness, and "beautiful as a dream." The beauty of the young Comtesse was, indeed, a revelation even in a Court of fair women. In the extravagant words of chroniclers of the time, "she had the most heavenly face that was ever seen. Her glance, her smile, every feature was angelic." No picture could, it was said, do any justice to this lovely creature of the glorious brown hair and blue eyes, who seemed so utterly unconscious of her beauty.
Such was the woman who came into the life of Marie Antoinette, and at once took possession of her heart. At last the Queen of France, in her isolation, had found the ideal friend she had sought so long in vain; a woman young and beautiful like herself, with kindred tastes, eager as she was to enjoy life, andwith all the qualities to make a charming and sympathetic companion. It was a case of love at first sight, on Marie Antoinette's part at least; and each subsequent meeting only served to strengthen the link that bound these two women so strangely brought together.
The Comtesse must come oftener to Court, the Queen pleaded, so that they might have more opportunities of meeting and of learning to know each other; and when the Comtesse pleaded poverty, Marie Antoinette brushed the difficulty aside. That could easily be arranged; the Queen had a vacancy in the ranks of her equerries. M. le Comte would accept the post, and then Madame would have her apartments at the Court itself.
Thus it was that Comte Jules' wife was transported from her poor country château to the splendours of Versailles, installed aschère amieof the Queen in place of the Princesse de Lamballe, and with the ball of fortune at her pretty feet. And never did woman adapt herself more easily to such a change of environment. It was, indeed, a great part of the charm of this remarkable woman that, amid success which would have turned the head of almost any other of her sex, she remained to her last day as simple and unaffected as when she won the Queen's heart in Diane de Polignac's apartment.
So absolutely indifferent did she seem to her new splendours, that, when jealousy sought to undermine the Queen's friendship, she implored Marie Antoinette to allow her to go back to her old, obscure life; and it was only when the Queen begged her to stay,with arms around her neck and with streaming tears, that she consented to remain by her side.
If the Queen ever had any doubt that she had at last found a friend who loved her for herself, the doubt was now finally dissipated. Such an unselfish love as this was a treasure to be prized; and from this moment Queen and waiting-woman were inseparable. When they were not strolling arm-in-arm in the corridors or gardens of Versailles, Her Majesty was spending her days in Madame's apartments, where, as she said, "We are no longer Queen and subject, but just dear friends."
So unhappy was Marie Antoinette apart from her new friend that, when Madame de Polignac gave birth to a child at Passy, the Court itself was moved to La Muette, so that the Queen could play the part of nurse by her friend's bedside.
Such, now, was the Queen's devotion that there was no favour she would not have gladly showered on the Comtesse; but to all such offers Madame turned a deaf ear. She wanted nothing but Marie Antoinette's love and friendship for herself; but if the Queen, in her goodness, chose to extend her favour to Madame's relatives—well, that was another matter.
Thus it was that Comte Jules soon blossomed into a Duke, and Madame perforce became a Duchess, with a coveted tabouret at Court. But they were still poor, in spite of an equerry's pay, and heavily in debt, a matter which must be seen to. The Queen's purse satisfied every creditor, to the tune of four hundred thousand livres, and Duc Jules found himself lord of an estate which added seventy thousandlivres yearly to his exchequer, with another annual eighty thousand livres as revenue for his office of Director-General of Posts.
Of course, if the Queenwouldbe so foolishly generous, it was not the Duchesse's fault, and when Marie Antoinette next proposed to give a dowry of eight hundred thousand livres to the Duchesse's daughter on her marriage to the Comte de Guiche, and to raise the bridegroom to a dukedom—well, it was "very sweet of Her Majesty," and it was not for her to oppose such a lavish autocrat.
Thus the shower of Royal favours grew; and it is perhaps little wonder that each new evidence of the Queen's prodigality was greeted with curses by the mob clamouring for bread outside the palace gates; while even her father's minister, Kaunitz, in far Vienna, brutally dubbed the Duchesse and her family, "a gang of thieves."
Diane de Polignac, the Duchesse's sister-in-law, had long been made a Countess and placed in charge of a Royal household; and the grateful shower fell on all who had any connection with the favourite. Her father-in-law, Cardinal de Polignac's nephew, was rescued from his rustic poverty to play the exalted rôle of ambassador; an uncle was raisedper saltumfromcuréto bishop. The Duchesse's widowed aunt was made happy by a pension of six thousand livres a year; and her son-in-law, de Guiche, in addition to his dukedom, was rewarded further for his fortunate nuptials by valuable sinecure offices at Court.
So the tide of benefactions flowed until it wascalculated that the Polignac family were drawing half a million livres every year as the fruits of the Queen's partiality for her favourite. Little wonder that, at a time when France was groaning under dire poverty, the volume of curses should swell against the "Austrian panther," who could thus squander gold while her subjects were starving; or that the Court should be inflamed by jealousy at such favours shown to a family so obscure as the Polignacs.
To the warnings of her own family Marie Antoinette was deaf. What cared she for such exhibitions of spite and jealousy? She was Queen; and if she wished to be generous to her favourite's family, none should say her nay. And thus, with a smile half-careless, half-defiant, she went to meet the doom which, though she little dreamt it, awaited her.
The Duchesse was now promoted to the office of governess of the Queen's children, a position which was the prerogative of Royalty itself, or, at least, of the very highest nobility. With her usual modesty, she had fought long against the promotion; but the Queen's will was law, and she had to submit to the inevitable as gracefully as she could. And now we see her installed in the most splendid apartments at Versailles, holding asalonalmost as regal as that of Marie Antoinette herself.
She was surrounded by sycophants and place-seekers, eager to capture the Queen's favour through her. And such was her influence that a word from her was powerful enough to make or mar a minister. She held, in fact, the reins of power and was now more potent than the weak-kneed King himself.
It was at this stage in her brilliant career that the Duchesse came under the spell of the Comte de Vaudreuil—handsome, courtly, an intriguer to his finger-tips, a man of many accomplishments, of a supple tongue, and with great wealth to lend a glamour to his gifts. A man of rare fascination, and as dangerous as he was fascinating.
The woman who had carried a level head through so much unaccustomed splendour and power became the veriest slave of this handsome, honey-tongued Comte, who ruled her, as she in turn ruled the Queen. At his bidding she made and unmade ministers; she obtained for him pensions and high offices, and robbed the treasury of nearly two million livres to fill his pockets. When Marie Antoinette at last ventured to thwart the Comte in his ambition to become the Dauphin's Governor, he retaliated by poisoning the Duchesse's mind against her, and bringing about the first estrangement between the friends.
Torn between her infatuation for Vaudreuil and her love of the Queen, the Duchesse was in an awkward dilemma. It became necessary to choose between the two rivals; and that Vaudreuil's spell proved the stronger, her increasing coldness to Marie Antoinette soon proved. It was the "rift within the lute" which was to make the music of their friendship mute. The Queen gradually withdrew herself from the Duchesse'ssalon, where she was sure to meet the insolent Vaudreuil; and thus the gulf gradually widened until the severance was complete.
Evil days were now coming for Marie Antoinette. The affair of the diamond necklace had made powerful enemies; the Polignac family, taking the side of Vaudreuil and their protectress, were arrayed against her; France was rising on the tide of hate to sweep the Austrian and her husband from the throne. The horrors of the Revolution were being loosed, and all who could were flying for safety to other lands.
At this terrible crisis the Queen's thoughts were less for herself than for her friend of happier days. She sought the Duchesse and begged her to fly while there was still time. Then it was that, touched by such unselfish love, the Duchesse's pride broke down, and all her old love for her sovereign lady returned in full flood. Bursting into tears, she flung herself at Marie Antoinette's feet, and begged forgiveness from the woman whose friendship she had spurned, and whose life she had, however innocently, done so much to ruin.
A few hours later the Duchesse, disguised as a chambermaid and sitting by the coachman's side, was making her escape from France in company with her husband and other members of her family, while the Queen who had loved her so well was left to take the last tragic steps that had the guillotine for goal.
Just before the carriage started on its long and perilous journey, a note was thrust into the "chambermaid's" hand—"Adieu, most tender of friends. How terrible is this word! But it is necessary. Adieu! I have only strength left to embrace you. Your heart-broken Marie."
Then ensued for the Duchesse a time of perilousjourneying to safety. At Sens her carriage was surrounded by a fierce mob, clamouring for the blood of the "aristos." "Are the Polignacs still with the Queen?" demanded one man, thrusting his head into the carriage. "The Polignacs?" answered the Abbé de Baliviere, with marvellous presence of mind. "Oh! they have left Versailles long ago. Those vile persons have been got rid of." And with a howl of baffled rage the mob allowed the carriage to continue its journey, taking with it the most hated of all the Polignacs, the chambermaid, whose heart, we may be sure, was in her mouth!
Thus the Duchesse made her way through Switzerland, to Turin, and to Rome, and to Venice, where news came to her of the fall ot the monarchy and Louis' execution. By the time she reached Vienna on her restless wanderings, her health, shattered by hardships and by her anxiety for her friend, broke down completely. She was a dying woman; and when, a few months later, she learned that Marie Antoinette was also dead—"a natural death," they mercifully told her—"Thank God!" she exclaimed; "now, at last, she is free from those bloodthirsty monsters! Now I can die in peace."
Seven weeks later the Duchesse drew her last breath, with the name she still loved best in all the world on her lips. In death she and her beloved Queen were not divided.