A Disastrous Wooing—Fénelon—“Mademoiselle de L’Enclos”—The Pride that had a Fall—The Death of the Duchesse d’Orléans—Intrigue—The Sun-King and the Shadows—The Clermont Scholar’s Crime—Monsieur de Montespan—Tardy Indignation—The Encounter—TheFilles Répenties—What the Cards Foretold.
The episode of Clotilde could but forcibly remind Ninon of the son whom his father, Monsieur de Gersay, had taken away so shortly after his birth, to rear as his own exclusively, but of whom, unlike Clotilde, she had not entirely lost traces. On the contrary, she knew that the Marquis de Gersay lived the most of his time on his own estates in Brittany, and that therefore Charles, as the child had been named, was likely to be with him; and Ninon wrote to the marquis, begging for some intelligence of the young man—for he was now two-and-twenty. De Gersay informed her that he had taken the necessary steps for legitimatising him, and that he was called the Chevalier de Villiers. He added that the secret of his birth was entirely unknown to the young man, who was a fine, handsome fellow, and very amiable and intelligent, only needing to rub off the little corners of his provincial rearing to be perfection. The marquis added that it would please him very well to bring him to Paris and introduce him into the circle of Ninon’s friends, so famous for its refinement and elegance; but itwas on the condition that the origin of his birth should be religiously concealed.
And when young de Villiers arrived in Paris, Ninon received him in her salon, as she received other young people who sought entry there, or for whom it was sought, that they might acquire the tone of good society andle bon goût. Ninon was then over sixty years of age. Whether, as it is said, she absolutely retained all the beauty and freshness of her youth, may perhaps be takencum grano salis; but that much of it clung about her with all the charm of her manner, seems indisputable, since she fascinated the young man of twenty-two.
He fell passionately in love with her; but for a long time he maintained silence, until he could conceal his love no longer, and Ninon could no longer remain blind to the true state of the case. She was deeply distressed and perplexed. She assumed a sort of maternal tenderness towards him, which had simply the effect of heating the young man’s ardour to frenzy, and she was forced to forbid him her house. Fear of never seeing her again, drove him to say that he would cease to love her. Love forced him to do this, and to this promise love made him false. The excess of his passion would not permit him to exist longer in a state of doubt. He sought a last interview of her. Ninon had gone to her country-house, and thither he followed. He found her alone, and spoke like a man driven, as indeed he was, to desperation. Ninon, overcome with pity, overwhelmed with grief at being the cause of her son’s misery, could no longer maintain herfirmness, and young de Villiers, believing that the moment of his happiness had arrived, approached her with passionate gestures. Seized with horror, she shrank from him and told him the truth. “I am your mother!” she cried in her distress. One instant de Villiers stood as if thunderstruck; then he turned and rushed into the garden, hurrying blindly on till he reached the little thicket at the end of it. There, in his despair, he drew his sword and stabbed himself to the death.
Ninon waited, and when he did not return, she went in search of him, to find him weltering in his own blood. He was still breathing, and strove to speak; but his words were undistinguishable. The passionate love he felt for her still burned in his eyes; but the agitation her tenderness and despair occasioned him, only hastened the end, and he died in her arms.
The horror of this tragedy nearly drove Ninon to take away her own life. Her pitying friends strove to bring some assuagement to her sufferings, and Madame Scarron nursed her in the long illness which ensued, and her gentle, tender ways and words, and her manner of winning Ninon to speak of the unhappy lost one, at last brought tears to her eyes, parched with her mental agony, and so relief came, and Françoise Scarron, weeping with her, was then her best friend. It was she who ordered a mausoleum tomb for the dead. It was placed where Charles de Villiers had been interred, a monument of black marble. Night and day the tapers burned around it, andmany an hour in prayer Ninon knelt beside the last resting-place of Charles de Villiers.
At this time, Madame Scarron, hitherto very far from a devotee, introduced to her a young priest of St Sulpice. His name was de la Mothe Fénelon. His touching words and sincere, gentle sympathy brought healing as time passed; but the shadow of sorrow and suffering never fully lifted—the gay, frivolous Ninon was known no more. Henceforth, till death, she was Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, bearing herself with dignity, self-restrained, and esteemed by most.
The consent of the king to the marriage of Lauzun and the Grande Mademoiselle having been at last wrung from him, Lauzun grew insufferable. His pride was boundless. Except to the king, he would not even doff his hat. He occupied himself exclusively in arranging the details of the festivities and ceremonial of the marriage.
But his enemies were at work. His folly and vanity had created a host of them, and among them were the powerful Louvois, and the vindictive and ambitious favourite, Madame de Montespan, whom he had frequently grossly insulted; while Louvois found himself constantly thwarted and provoked by him. Madame de Montespan, thinking over the matter of Mademoiselle’s marriage, decided that her vast property would be much better disposed among the eight children she had brought the king, than in the pockets of Lauzun, and finding a supporter in Louvois, she represented the case to His Majesty, the result being that hewithdrew his consent to the marriage, and de Lauzun was lodged in the Bastille, his character blackened—no such difficult matter—by the two. The friends of the lovers had warned them of the imminent possibility of this; and it was believed that they accepted the advice, and contrived to be privately married. De Lauzun vented his wrath for the promise—this time so undisputedly broken—by denouncing Madame de Montespan for her wifely unfaithfulness to her husband; but it did not hinder his imprisonment, which he spent for five years in the fortress of Pignerol, that dreary stronghold of deportation for offending, blue-blooded courtiers. He was conducted thither by Monsieur d’Artagnan, lieutenant of the Guards. Five years’ further incarceration after this in Pignerol was allotted him; though on conditions slightly ameliorated. The treatment had first been hard in the extreme, and had rigidly condemned him to one cell.
Sympathy extended only to the disconsolate Mademoiselle, the victim of an ambitious coxcomb, and of a venal, faithless woman.
Attention was, however, soon turned entirely from this affair, by the terrible and sudden death of Henrietta, the Duchesse d’Orléans of England—daughter of King Charles I.—the amiable and universally beloved wife of the king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans.
She was one evening enjoying the cool air on the great balcony of the palace of St Cloud, in company with her ladies, and requested one of them to fetch her a glass of chicory water from herapothecary. The apothecary arrived in a few moments with an enamelled goblet containing the drink, which he presented to her. Scarcely had she drunk it, than she was seized with violent convulsive agony, and cried out that she was poisoned.
They carried her to the nearest bedchamber, and laying her down, loosened her clothes, and administered all the usual restoratives; but in vain. Already her face and limbs were livid and distorted. “I am poisoned—I have drunk poison!” was all she was able to utter.
The king came hurrying to the bedside, followed by his physicians, whom he had hastily summoned. They examined the agonised woman, grew themselves pale with dismay, and remained silent.
“Where are your senses?” demanded the king, in an access of distressful alarm. “It is frightful to let a woman die like this, and not be able to afford any help.”
The doctors only looked at each other, and still did not utter a word.
Madame herself entreated for an emetic, but Monsieur Valet, physician-in-chief, declared that it would be dangerous. She had been seized, he said, with themiserere—the term generally then used for cholera morbus.
Against these silent impotent healers of the body, the physician of the soul was sent for. He came. It was Monsieur l’Abbé Bossuet, and amid his pious, gentle consolations Madame passed away. It was also Bossuet who pronounced the funeral oration a day or two later.
“Madame is dead!—Madame is dead!” So the terrible words rang forth in the presence of the king and the assembled half-stunned courtiers.
That Madame was universally beloved had an exception to its ruling. He who should have best loved her, the duke himself, was indifferent to her. Scandal, busy with his name, said worse—said so much that was shameful, that it is not to be repeated here. It said so much, that the king, who was aware of it, had already ordered the immediate departure of the chevalier de Lorraine from Paris, a dismissal that was to be final. This minion of the duke had been furious at the command, and accused Madame as the cause of it, and she had simply laughed at the accusation. The day following her death, the chevalier de Lorraine, it was asserted, was seen, wrapped in a long riding-cloak, and his face concealed by a hat whose broad brims were drawn down low over his brows, riding hastily by the path of the gate of St Cloud, and so by the roads to the frontier. He was known to be a great friend of Monsieur de Luxembourg, and at a later day more than suspicion implicated Monsieur de Luxembourg in the most notorious poisoncause celébreof its century.
The Court of Louis XIV. was now one vast spider’s-web of intrigue, woven from the lust and greed of so many of those surrounding him. It was the Nemesis of his policy of drawing all the nobility and provincial seigneurs from far and near to Versailles. If these were not lured into the brilliance of the Sun-King’s presence, and desiredto live on their estates, it was next to an impossibility to do so, under fear of being suspected of plotting against the throne. They were required to group themselves all round the great orb, gathering from it the lustre beyond which all was obscurity, and this rarely enough to be done, even in Paris, but only at Versailles. Louis did not love the Louvre. He had never forgotten that in the days of the Fronde he had been driven thence to find refuge where it could be had.
And so the castles and lands of fair France were left untenanted and falling to ruin, and to lie untilled and neglected, for all the good at least the people reaped; and this at a time when rougher warfare had ceased, and religious strife had calmed down, and under other ruling, the promise of prosperity dawned. Such profits and incomings as did arise from these tenures and estates, by the toil of the peasant dwellers on them, brought them only starvation wage; for the money earned by the sweat of the brows of the peasantry was needed for its overlords’ silks and velvets, and laces and jewelled snuff-boxes, and solitaires, to add greater bedazzlement to the salons and galleries where Louis le Grand lived his span of years. And even when this was ended—the time was still yet afar off for the breaking of the storm—but on, ever faster and heavier, the clouds were lowering in. Neither Richelieu or Mazarin tolerated the spirit which inspires to a man ruling, or striving to rule, with prudence and protecting care in his own house. They feared it, and taxation and gabelle, and rentsand quit-rents, as they waxed on to their hideous proportions, set minds working on the problem of why such things should be, and how came about such “inequality among men.” “Where is the wonder, is it not my college?” said the king, one day when he had bestowed his magnificent presence on the representation, by the pupils of the Jesuit College at Clermont, of a tragedy very finely performed. “Collegium Cleromonterum Societate Jesus” was originally graven upon the college gate, and the sycophant principal had now caused this to be effaced, and “Collegium Ludovici Magni” inscribed in gold letters in its place.
The next morning was to be seen, fastened on the gate beneath, a Latin distich, whose meaning may be thus interpreted—
“Christ’s name expunged, the king’s now fills the stone;Oh, impious race! by that is plainly shownThat Louis is the only god you own!”
“Christ’s name expunged, the king’s now fills the stone;Oh, impious race! by that is plainly shownThat Louis is the only god you own!”
“Christ’s name expunged, the king’s now fills the stone;
Oh, impious race! by that is plainly shown
That Louis is the only god you own!”
The author of these lines was run to earth. He was found to be a pupil of the college, and thirty-one years of the Bastille and of St Marguérite were awarded his crime. The term might have ended only with his years, had he not suddenly become sole heir to the estates of his family, and it was then suggested by the governor of the Bastille, a Jesuit, that setting him free might bring golden rewards. Being released, probably the reward followed.
And ever the intricate machinery of corruption and intrigue in high places worked on. Among other schemes of Madame de Montespan, was one ofmarrying Louise de la Vallière to the Duc de Lauzun. It would be, at all events, removing the two incommoding ones from her path; but it was an arrangement not very likely to appeal to the Duchesse de la Vallière, and moreover, the imprisoned Duc de Lauzun had not been consulted. The great idea of the favourite was simply, by fair means or foul, to get all she could of Mademoiselle’s possessions, and knowing Mademoiselle’s infatuation for Lauzun, she set the strings to the best of her power to tempt her to part with an immense portion of her fortune by the promise of trying to win the king’s consent to freeing the captive of Pignerol. To this end she flattered and cajoled Mademoiselle’s ladies, among whom was Madame de Fiesque, Ninon’s bitter enemy, none the less envenomed against her on account of the triumphant carrying through of the marriage of Clotilde. And as it happened one evening, Ninon, departing from her usual custom of remaining indoors when she visited Madame Montausier at St Cloud, went for a stroll in the gardens, and at a turn of the clipped hedges she came face to face with la Montespan, leaning on the arm of Madame de Fiesque.
Then came the bursting of the thunderclap. Madame de Fiesque, pallid with rage, whispered a word in the ear of la Montespan, who turned, and in a tone of disdain indescribable, said—
“La Ninon! Who dares to permit this woman to walk here?”
“This woman!” The words stunned Ninon for the moment; while indignation raged up intoher heart, and angry tears blinded her. Ninon was—no matter what she was, she had elected to follow her own ways. These, at all events, were not soiled with the iniquities of the woman before her. She had not been false to marriage-vows. She had never betrayed trusts reposed in her and in friendship. She had not craftily stolen the love of the king from the woman he professed to be attached to. Blazing with indignation at the Montespan’s insulting words and insolent stare, she made some excuse to Madame Montausier for returning home, and sent a message to Monsieur de Montespan to call on her in the morning. On his arrival, she taxed him with the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity, and when he strove to disavow it, she drove the nail home, until he had no choice but to fall in with her suggestions—that he should find his way straight to St Cloud and punish the royal favourite in the presence of the king and all the Court. And this he did, bestowing a sounding box on the lovely ear of his wife. And when Ninon asked what the king said, the reply was, “Never a word.” But many a word, or rather epithet, de Montespan bestowed then on his Athénais.
Ninon recounted this affair with great gusto to Madame Scarron. Françoise still kept up great intimacy with her friend, Madame Arnoul, a person for whom Mademoiselle de L’Enclos had an instinctive dislike. She was a great fortune-teller with the cards, and an arch-crafty intriguer, and by a series of manœuvres she wormed herself into the notice of Madame de Montespan, whose husband subsequentlyplayed a sorry part in the scandal occurring at St Cloud; since he permitted himself to be bribed to continue to countenance his wife’s connexion with the king.
Madame Arnoul however, was laying her scheme, and played her cards so well for the amusement of Madame de Montespan, that she managed to acquaint herself with many secrets of the royal favourite; and in return, in order to do evil to gain what she considered good, she whispered to Madame de Montespan the truth about de Montespan’s box on the ear. The result was an order for Ninon’s conveyance to the convent-home for theFilles Répenties; and the guard who arrested her allowed her just twenty minutes for her preparations for leaving the rue des Tournelles.
It was a terrible and humiliating blow for Ninon. All the consolations and representations of Madame Arnoul, who was permitted an interview with her, could not reconcile her. Yet they brought some comfort; for Ninon could see that the woman’s machinations promised to bring about the fall of the favourite, and in her place to set no less, no greater, a person than Françoise, the Widow Scarron.
Rome was not, of course, built in a day; and Madame Arnoul, not forgetful of her own interests, hastened slowly. Indications were not wanting that the influence of Madame de Montespan was waning.
The favourite’s temper was not a mild one, and sometimes she gave vent to it in rather startling fashion. Madame Arnoul’s first care was to lead Madame Scarron into more devout ways than hitherto she had followed, and the habitual calm,composed bearing of Françoise was not out of the picture of this newrôle. Madame Arnoul, in her card-telling visits to Madame de Montespan, was favoured by her with many confidences, and among them theMaîtresse en Titrementioned that she was seeking a governess for her children, a lady who was to be pious and amiable, and of course accomplished, and intellectually gifted, and rich in patience. Except for the piety, Madame Scarron possessed all these qualifications, and for the piety, it would come in time; and meanwhile it could be put on easily enough—it was a virtue not difficult to assume. And Madame Arnoul, consulting her cards, gravely informed Madame de Montespan that if she repaired to the church of St Sulpice, on a certain day, at a certain hour, she would see among the communicants of the early Mass, the very person she was seeking for her children’s education. Then followed a description of the comely, if no longer very youthful, Françoise d’Aubigné, who was instructed to put in the necessary appearance at St Sulpice. So the arrangement was brought about and concluded very satisfactorily, and Madame Scarron found herself in charge of the little Duc du Maine, and Louis XIV.’s other children, of whom Athénais de Montespan was the mother, and more and more as time passed, winning the admiration and liking of the king, who found great charm in her conversation, which certainly went to show that his faulty education and rearing had not totally stunted him mentally, for the wife of Scarron, by nature and long association, was a woman of no common attainments.