The crime of Madame Tiquet—A charming little Hand—Aqua Toffana—The Casket—A devout Criminal—The Sinner and the Saint—Monsieur de Lauzun’s Boots—“Sister Louise”—La Fontanges—“Madame de Maintenant.”—The Blanks in the Circle—The Vatican Fishes and their Good Example—Piety at Versailles—The Periwigs and the Paniers—Père la Chaise—A dull Court—Monsieur de St Evrémond’s Decision.
The eighteenth century in France is stained with the record of three criminal cases which glare forth in the annals of human wickedness. The last occurred in the latest years, and culminated in the trial and execution of the chief criminal, Madame Tiquet. Though she had accomplices—one of whom also suffered the extreme penalty—and although the murderous aim fell short, and the intended victim escaped, the attempton the life ofMonsieur Tiquet—an esteemed magistrate—charged against his wife, made on two separate occasions, was held to be sufficient warranty for the capital sentence upon her. Still, since Monsieur Tiquet was living and well, the decision was much criticised. The Parliament was accused of exacting too great a penalty for the crime committed against itself, in the person of one of its members, and Monsieur Tiquet himself is said to have pleaded with the king personally for his wife’s reprieve, but to no effect. Madame Tiquet was a beautiful woman, moving inthe best society, and extenuation was accordingly made by many, some even going the length of declaring belief in her entire innocence. But Madame Tiquet was decapitated on the Place de Grêve, while her chief accomplice, Jacques Moura, was hanged.
The enormity of this crime rivalled that of the recorded murder already narrated, of the Duchesse de Ganges, some score years earlier, these both being rivalled by the series of murders, perpetrated by poison, of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers. It is recorded in her connection, that
“In the plaster-cast shop is a small, delicate, plump little hand, dimpled and beautiful, which is sold to artists as a model. You take it in yours, handle it, admire it, almost fancy you are shaking hands with the good-humoured and festive little personage to whom it must have belonged. You ask whose it was, and are told that it was that of Madame de Brinvilliers, the notorious poisoner. You recoil as if you had been handling an asp.”
“In the plaster-cast shop is a small, delicate, plump little hand, dimpled and beautiful, which is sold to artists as a model. You take it in yours, handle it, admire it, almost fancy you are shaking hands with the good-humoured and festive little personage to whom it must have belonged. You ask whose it was, and are told that it was that of Madame de Brinvilliers, the notorious poisoner. You recoil as if you had been handling an asp.”
Marguérite d’Aubrai was the daughter of one Monsieur d’Aubrai, lieutenant-civil of Paris, and she was married at an early age to the Marquis de Brinvilliers, to whom for a while she was devotedly attached. In time her affection waned in favour of a Gascon officer named St Croix, a worthless adventurer. Monsieur d’Aubrai, discovering his daughter’s infatuation, obtained an order for the imprisonment of St Croix in the Bastille. During the year he was confined there, he contrived to make acquaintance with an Italian named Exili, who was an adept in the art of toxicology, and possessed the secret of the concoction of the terribleAqua Toffana—to callit by its best-known name, and as it was in its later form called by “la Toffana,” the Neapolitan woman who got possession of the recipe from the reputed witch, la Sphara, the hag of a hundred years earlier, who was in the pay of the Borgias. In course of time the secret of the hideous brew—originally styled by la Sphara, “The Manna of St Nicolas of Bari”—had leaked out through the confessional, the father-confessors, appalled probably by the many penitential revelations made, had in course of generations given vent almost unwittingly to the disclosures of so many crimes at so many different hands; for it is said the “Manna,” had poisoned over six hundred persons, and Exili had learnt the secret of the ingredients of the subtle mortal poison, which was a tasteless colourless drug. On the release of St Croix, the marchioness’s mad love for him had only waxed greater, and when she had extracted from him this recipe for death, they planned together to poison her father, her sister, and two brothers successively, all in the same year of 1670, the marchioness, meanwhile, being apparently a most charitable and pious visitor of the sick in the Hôtel Dieu, and other hospitals of Paris, but suspected later of trying the effects of her potions on the various patients.
One day brought the discovery of the crimes of these two. The poisons that St Croix delighted in, were many of them, so deadly of breath, that he wore a glass mask to protect his face and lips from the vapours, and on one occasion, while he was at work, the mask fell off. He died instantly. Noone coming forward to claim the adventurer’s effects, they fell into the hands of Government. Among the articles was a certain casket, which the marchioness claimed, and so insistently and vehemently, that the authorities became suspicious, and first had the casket opened. Its contents were composed of packets of many kinds of poisons, each ticketed with a description of the effects they produced. When she learned of the opening of the casket, the murderess made her escape to England; but still in terror of pursuit, she fled back to the Continent, where she was tracked down at Liège, and taken under arrest back to Paris. The crimes, one by one, were brought home to her, and she was condemned to be beheaded and burned. Refusing however, to plead, she was put to the question by the torture of swallowing water—“Surely,” she cried, when she saw the three bucketfuls of water standing ready, “it is not intended to drown me, for it is absurd to suppose that a person of my dimensions can swallow all that!”
Not content with her own criminal work, she was proved to have supplied the means for it to many suspected of similar crimes. Implicated among those was the Duc de Luxembourg, and some of his friends, who, it will be remembered, were suspected of causing the death of the amiable and lamented Duchesse d’Orléans.
One person escaped who might well be supposed would have been one of the marchioness’s first victims—her husband. It is believed that his indifference to her induced her to pass him over.Madame de Sévigné, however, mentions theon ditthat she did more than once attempt to poison Brinvilliers; but that St Croix, for his own reason, administered him an antidote, and the marquis survived to intercede for his wife’s life, but, of course, ineffectually.
When she was arrested at Liège, a kind of general written formula framed in vague allusion to her criminal doings was found upon her, clearly for using in confession, to which she went with great regularity. This was sufficiently explicit to confirm the other evidences of her guilt.
“She communicated her poisons frequently in pigeon-pies—by which a great many were killed,” writes Madame de Sévigné, “not from any particular reason for despatching them, but out of mere curiosity to try the effects of her drugs. The chevalier de Guet, who had been a guest at her delightful entertainments about three years ago, has been languishing ever since. She inquired the other day if he was dead; upon being answered ‘No,’ she said, turning her head on one side, ‘He must have a very strong constitution then.’ This Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld swears to be true.”
“She communicated her poisons frequently in pigeon-pies—by which a great many were killed,” writes Madame de Sévigné, “not from any particular reason for despatching them, but out of mere curiosity to try the effects of her drugs. The chevalier de Guet, who had been a guest at her delightful entertainments about three years ago, has been languishing ever since. She inquired the other day if he was dead; upon being answered ‘No,’ she said, turning her head on one side, ‘He must have a very strong constitution then.’ This Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld swears to be true.”
During the next ensuing days, Madame de Sévigné’s letters brim with details of the wretched woman’s latest hours.
“At six o’clock on the morning of her execution,” she writes, “la Brinvilliers was carried in a cart, stripped to her shift, with a cord about her neck, to the church of Notre Dame, to perform theamende honorable. She was then replaced in the cart, where I saw her lying at her length on a truss of straw, only her shift and a suit of plain head-clothes, with a confessor on one side and ahangman on the other. Indeed, my dear, the sight made me shudder. Those who saw the execution say she mounted the scaffold with great courage.”
“At six o’clock on the morning of her execution,” she writes, “la Brinvilliers was carried in a cart, stripped to her shift, with a cord about her neck, to the church of Notre Dame, to perform theamende honorable. She was then replaced in the cart, where I saw her lying at her length on a truss of straw, only her shift and a suit of plain head-clothes, with a confessor on one side and ahangman on the other. Indeed, my dear, the sight made me shudder. Those who saw the execution say she mounted the scaffold with great courage.”
Threatened with the question, it was not applied; since she said at last that she would confess everything, and an appalling confession it was. Repeatedly she had tried to poison her father, brother and several others, before she succeeded; and all under the appearance of the greatest love and confidence. Finally, Madame de Sévigné writes—
“At length all is over—la Brinvilliers is in the air; after her execution, her poor little body was thrown into a great fire, and her ashes dispersed by the wind. And so we have seen the end of a sinner. Her confessor says she is a saint!!”
“At length all is over—la Brinvilliers is in the air; after her execution, her poor little body was thrown into a great fire, and her ashes dispersed by the wind. And so we have seen the end of a sinner. Her confessor says she is a saint!!”
After the death of Queen Maria Théresa, which occurred some little time before the fall of Madame de Montespan, the ascendency of the royal governess increased rapidly.
Madame Arnoul was now no longer the indispensable friend of Madame Scarron. She had come, in fact, to be so nearly an encumbrance, that Françoise had handed her over in marriage to a gentleman of Marseilles, with a portion of twenty thousand crowns, after having profited so excellently by the example of the intriguing skill of that past-mistress in the art, that she was quite capable henceforth of acting for herself.
Madame Scarron was not slow to mark the preponderating affection of Louis for his illegitimate children over the children of the queen, and that tosecure His Majesty’s favour and goodwill, was to work to advance their interests by every possible means. She therefore took at its turn the tide of the ill-starred fortunes of Mademoiselle Montpensier’s connection with de Lauzun, to win from her the duchy of Aumâle, the earldom of Eu, and the principality of Dombes, wherewith to endow the children, as the price paid for obtaining from Louis the pardon and release of de Lauzun, from Pignerol. Then came the turn of Lauzun to extract from Mademoiselle, for himself, the duchy of Saint Fargeau, the barony of Thiers in Auvergne, also a huge income from the salt-tax in Languedoc. That done, de Lauzun showed himself for the base ungrateful creature he was. That before his incarceration at Pignerol a secret marriage had been made between them, had always been the supposition; since otherwise she would not, it was thought, have tolerated his treatment of her now, nor all the insults his fertile imagination devised for heaping on her. One day, in the presence of others, he had the cruelty to find fault with her style of dress as entirely out of keeping with her age. Another time he accused her of being the cause of all his sufferings at Pignerol. No money, he declared, would ever make up for it. He was for ever extorting from her money or jewels, which he lost at cards. Then he strove to obtain from her the sole command and control of all she still possessed; but the worm will turn, and Mademoiselle refused. This enraged him to a pitch that spared her no insults, and his finishing touch was to stretch outhis foot one day when he visited her at Choisy, and desire her to pull off his boots. Mademoiselle turned scornfully away, and in a little while sought consolation and refuge from these indignities in religious exercises of the most rigid kind.
Mademoiselle de la Vallière, another broken-hearted woman, also about this time entered into the convent of the Carmelites. She took the veil, and passed the rest of her days a veritable saint under the name of “Sister Louise de la Miséricorde.”
Madame de Montespan, finding all attempts to regain the old empire over Louis in vain, subsequently made some endeavour to live a more creditable life.
And meanwhile the star of Françoise rose higher and higher in the royal firmament. The flickering meteor known as Mademoiselle de Fontanges hardly ruffled her placidity. To Ninon, Françoise merely referred to her as a proof that the intimacy in which she herself lived with the king, was no more than one of pure warm friendship, and had never exceeded those limitations.
As for la Fontanges, she is best known to posterity by the extraordinary head-dress she adopted. Ugly as it was, it remained in fashion for half a score of years. It was a structural arrangement of eight divisions, in wire, covered with pieces of muslin, bows of ribbon, interlaced with curls. These divisions were severally called: la Duchesse, le Solitaire, le Chou, le Mousquetaire, le Croissant, le Firmament, le Septième Ciel, and la Souris. (The Duchess, the Solitary, the Cabbage, the Musketeer,the Crescent, the Firmament, the Seventh Heaven and the Mouse.)
The king now bought for Madame Scarron the château and estate of Maintenon, in Brittany, on the banks of the Gave near Chartres, and by his desire she was henceforth called “Madame de Maintenon.” Perhaps hardly so much at his desire, there were some about who made a slight change in the orthography of the last syllable, and called her “Madame deMaintenant.”
Her marriage with Louis is believed to have been celebrated in the chapel of the château[7]in 1683—she being fifty and the king forty-seven years old—in the presence of Harlay and Louvois, the nuptial knot being tied by the confessor of the marquise, Père la Chaise. She further obtained his appointment to the office of the king’s confessor.
Père la Chaise was a priest of the Company of Jesus, a man, if “neither fanatical nor fawning,” intolerant of all religious creeds outside his own; and now, holding the conscience of Louis XIV. and of Madame Louis XIV., Père la Chaise soon became a power in the land.
One by one death was bearing away the friends of Ninon’s earlier years. The death of Madame de Chevreuse, at Port Royal, was followed close by that of Madame de Longueville. Madame de Maintenon’s prediction that de la Rochefoucauld would quickly follow her to whom his heart had been unchangingly given, was verified. A few months, and Marsillac,the friend of Ninon’s merry days at Loches, was no more.
A deep melancholy darkened in upon Ninon as she thought of all those gone hence, and the many missing now from the circle in the rue des Tournelles, although new faces were not wanting there, and she maintained the old hospitalities. She was not sorry, however, to put an end to these for a while, in order to fall in with the proposition of Monsieur le Nôtre, that she, with Madame de la Fayette, should accompany him to Rome, whither he was bound with his friend, the poet Santeuil, a canon of St Victor, who was making the journey in order to try and obtain the sanction of the pope to the use of a certain collection of Latin hymns he had composed—in all the churches of Christendom; while the pope was anxious to consult the royal gardener upon the laying out of the parterres of the Vatican.
They went by way of Geneva, Turin, Parma, and Florence, and arrived in Rome. His Holiness received the travellers with the most gracious and fatherly of welcomes, surrounded by all the members of the Sacred College. After a while he conducted the visitors to the gardens, where he paused on the brink of a great pond, containing fish of all kinds, some of them carp two hundred years old. Presently one of the cardinals rang a bell hanging to a post near the water’s edge, and all the fishes came swimming with lightning rapidity, their heads lifting high above the surface of the water, and a page approached with two baskets, one filled with bread-crumbs, the other with grain. These dainties thepope threw into the pond to his favourites, who snapped up every morsel in a trice. Then the bell rang again, the fish twisted and turned joyously for a little while, as if to display their gratitude and satisfaction, and then disappeared. De Santeuil remarked that the fish set a fine example to the religious Orders, observing so excellently as they did, the rule of silence, and drinking nothing but water. The observation was not very cordially received by either the pope or his cardinals, and in any case, de Santeuil, who did not then obtain the permission to use his hymns, was inclined to blame the fishes. Some grace was accorded the hymns later; but the Consistory was of opinion that they bore a flavour of paganism.
Ninon, on returning from the Holy City to Paris, found Corneille at the point of death. Memories now were her best consolation, and though she had not been eight months away from Paris, she found as many changes on her return, as if she had been absent a century. The king, to begin with, had become converted, and the Court had followed suit. Everyone was occupied with the concerns of his future salvation. The king had cut off his moustache, and the courtiers had all shaved their upper lips. As His Majesty had decided that a grey wig would add to his air of respectability, everybody had powdered their hair. Hitherto, hair-powder had been used by women only. Hair had become so enormously expensive, that moderately-supplied purses had to be content with a thin kind of crape puffed into curls.Thejustaucorps, after having developed into a cassock kind of garment, was now a coat, and the nether clothes Ninon considered to have grown disgracefully ugly in shape.
The women had borrowed from Spain the hideous deformity ofvertugadins, cage-like objects composed of wire, horsehair, or both, which they bound upon their hips, to extend the hang of their petticoats. On the top of this monstrosity came the panier, a whalebone contrivance covered with cloth stuff, put to similar ends, and so greatly obstructing the thoroughfares, that the women were frequently obliged to stand on one side to allow of others passing. Pairing off with the older fashions, went the old French natural gaiety, graceful manners and conversation, and pompous deportment and stilted formalities of speech were the vogue. Ninon almost found consolation for growing old in face of these dreary surroundings, fostered and assiduously tended by Madame Louis Quatorze and her Jesuit director, Père la Chaise. Of what consequence was France and her well-being, provided these two carried their own ends to fruition?
Possibly this altered state of things had something to do with Monsieur de St Evrémond’s decision to remain in England, where the natural atmosphere might be brumous, but the social conditions far less lugubrious. He wrote, at all events, to Ninon that, everything considered, he preferred to remain where he had now been for fifteen years, and would content himself with correspondence with her, and “I shall read with vast satisfactionabout things which you will tell me that I know,” he writes, “but above all, tell me of the things about which I do not know.”
And Ninon did write bright letters to her old friend, full of chat and the social events of the day, as of the days that were past—a sort of long confession, in which she did not specially spare anyone; certainly not herself.