FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[23]Letter to the Maréchale de Noailles, Dec. 1701. Recueil de M. Geffroy.[24]Combes, p. 109.[25]Collection of M. Geffroy, p. 457.

[23]Letter to the Maréchale de Noailles, Dec. 1701. Recueil de M. Geffroy.

[24]Combes, p. 109.

[25]Collection of M. Geffroy, p. 457.

THE PRINCESS MAKES A FALSE STEP IN HER STATECRAFT—A BLUNDER AND AN IMBROGLIO.

Torecall Madame des Ursins at the earliest possible moment and inflict upon her a well-merited disgrace was the earnest desire of Louis XIV.; but, omnipotent as that Prince was, he found his hand arrested by a very serious difficulty, thecamerara-mayor, in fact, screened herself behind the Queen, and the King of France was well aware that in recalling her he would deal a blow alike against the affection and self-love of his grand-daughter which she would never forgive—an extremity which was not less repugnant to his policy than to his good feeling. Moreover the departure of Madame des Ursins would not render the Cardinal d’Estrées’ position less insupportable in a court, all the approaches to which were barred to him, and in which his isolation was a constant insult to France. There was nothing left, therefore, but to grant the latter a recall which, smarting with a humiliation so unforeseen to his overweening arrogance, he demanded in accents of rage and despair. However, in order to salve hisamour-propre, the Abbé d’Estrées continued to discharge the functions of the embassy, as though his uncle’s absence were only temporary; but that state of things did not suit either of the two factions which for more than twelve months past divided the French household of the King ofSpain, surpassing each other in vituperation and calumny. Despite a sort of truce stipulated between the embassy and the palace, the Abbé d’Estrées soon found himself in the same position in which the Cardinal had been placed; for Madame des Ursins did not like the arrangement of the Abbé being left behind, but as Madame de Maintenon insisted upon it, she was obliged to accept it with as good a grace as possible.[26]The Abbé, vain of his family and his position, was not a man much to be feared as it seemed. Madame des Ursins accordingly laughed at and despised him. He was admitted to the council, but was quite without influence there, and when he attempted to make any representations to Madame des Ursins or Orry, they listened to him without attending in the least to what he said. The Princess reigned supreme, and thought of nothing but getting rid of all who attempted to divide her authority. At last she obtained such a command over the poor Abbé d’Estrées, so teased and hampered him, that he consented to the hitherto unheard-of arrangement, that the Ambassador of France should not write to the King without first concerting his letter with her, and afterwards show her its contents before he despatched it. But such restraint as this became, in a short time, so fettering, that the Abbé determined to break away from it. He wrote a letter to the King without showing it to Madame des Ursins. She soon had scent of what he had done; seized the letter as it passed through the post, opened it, and, as she expected, found its contents were not of a kind to give her much satisfaction. In fact, in her emotion of anger and indignation she made a false step in her state-craft of a nature one can hardly imagine a personso astute as the Princess making. This blunder led to a greatimbroglio.

The question has been raised—Did Madame des Ursins always use the intimate and uncontrolled influence she had obtained over the young Queen of fourteen in a purely devoted and disinterested way? It would be difficult, certainly, to answer in the affirmative. Louville, her rival and enemy, a man of talent and ardour, but passionate, represents her as the wickedest woman on earth, to be got rid of at the earliest possible moment and at any cost, “sordid and thievish to a marvellous degree.” He raises the same accusation against Orry, a clever man whom Louis XIV. had sent to Spain to put some order into her finances. These accusations seem to have been unjustifiable. The Marshal Duke of Berwick, who kept himself aloof from all these odious bickerings, does more justice to Orry, and everything leads the impartial student to think that Madame des Ursins on that score comes out of the scrutiny with still cleaner hands. “Je suis gueuse, il est vrai,” she writes to Madame de Noailles on first going to Spain, “mais je suis encore plus fière.” Detailing to Madame de Maintenon somewhat later the indignities they both had to put up with from accusations of a like nature, she speaks of them in a tone of lofty irony and sovereign contempt which appears to exclude anything like falsehood.

But what seems more certain—if the truth must be told—is, although a little singular at first sight, that at the age of sixty and upwards, Madame des Ursins still had lovers. “She is hair-brained in her conduct,”[27]wrote Louville to the Duke and Duchess de Beauvilliers. One Sieur d’Aubigny, a kind of household steward whom she hadpromoted to be her equerry, was lodged in theRetiropalace near the apartments of her women, where he was seen one day brushing his teeth very unconcernedly at the window.C’était un beau et grand drôle très-bien fait et très-découplé de corps et d’esprit,[28]and not abête brute, as Louville calls him. But he was bold and somewhat insolent, as one who conceived that he had a right to be so. On another occasion, Louville and the Duke de Medina-Cœli entering the apartments of Madame des Ursins, into which she ushered them in order that they might talk more unrestrainedly, D’Aubigny who was installed at the other end, seeing only the Princess and believing her to be alone, began to apostrophise her in terms of very rude and coarse familiarity, which threw all present into confusion. The feminine failing of Madame des Ursins, was, we are told, this; “gallantry andl’entêtement de sa personnewas in her the dominant and overweening weakness above all else, even to the latest period of her life.” So Saint Simon says, and he renders her full justice moreover for her spirited and elevated qualities.

But to return to the matter of the intercepted despatch. What piqued the Princess most was, to find details in it exaggerating the authority of D’Aubigny, and a statement to the effect that it was generally believed that she had married him. On reading this passage the pride of the great lady was more outraged even than her modesty. Beside herself with rage and vexation, she wrote with her own hand upon the margin of the letter, “Pour mariée, non” (“At any rate, not married”), showed it in this state to the King and Queen of Spain, to a number of other people, always with strange clamouring, and finally crowned herfolly by sending it to Louis XIV., with furious complaints against the Abbé for writing it without her knowledge, and for inflicting upon her such an atrocious injury as to mention such a thing as this pretended marriage. Her letter and its enclosure reached the King at a very inopportune moment. Just before he had received a letter, which, taken in connection with this of the Princess des Ursins, struck a blow at her power of the most decisive kind. At the same time that the original thus annotated was despatched to the Marquis de Torcy, a copy of it was addressed by the Princess to the Duke de Noirmoutier, her brother, and the latter caused it to be circulated throughout Paris, to the great scandal of a society which had still some little respect left for morals and royal power.

Louis XIV. owed it to himself not to allow such excessive audacity to go unpunished. At the same time the affairs of Spain were then in such a state of confusion, the danger of exasperating the young Queen appeared so great, that it was necessary to defer severe measures, however justifiable they might be. It was only some months afterwards, when Philip V. had quitted Madrid for the frontiers of Portugal, to take command of his army, reinforced by a French corps under the command of the Duke of Berwick, that Louis thought it possible to make himself obeyed and to strike what he himself called a decisive blow.

“The complaints against the Princess des Ursins,” wrote the King to the Abbé d’Estrées,[29]“have reached such a point that at length it is necessary to take notice of them. I should have used less delay if I had only consulted the welfare of the State; but I was compelled to wait until the King quitted Madrid. I had reason to foresee that he wouldbe only too much influenced by the Queen’s tears, that they might hinder him from deferring with sufficient promptitude to my advice.... If the King offers resistance, let him see how onerous is the war which I am waging for his interests. Do not tell him that I will abandon him, for he would not believe you; but let him understand that whatever may be my affection for him, I can, if he does not respond thereto, make peace at the expense of Spain, and grow tired of supporting a monarchy wherein I only see disorders and contradictions in matters the most reasonable that I may urge in his own interest. In fine, after such anéclat, nothing short of success will do; my honour, the interest of the King, my grandson, and that of the monarchy are concerned therein.... The directions that I give you are absolutely necessary for my service, but the consequences will be disagreeable for you. They have not ceased to make mischief between my grandson and yourself; matters have made such an impression that he has already on several occasions requested me to recall you.”

Louis XIV. gave the Abbé, therefore, an order to leave forthwith, adding to the expression of his lively regret the assurance that this disgrace, wholly involuntary as it was, should not damage his future fortunes. Such was the extremity to which a subject had brought the most absolute prince in Europe. It may thus be seen what extensive roots the woman had already thrown out in Spain who balanced so nicely the power of the French King in his grandson’s court. It will shortly afterwards be more clearly apparent; but if theéclatof such a part enhances the importance of Madame des Ursins, her character remains singularly compromised by it. However indulgently we may be disposed to look upon it, we cannot dissever from asystem of policy the unworthy hostility waged by a Frenchwoman against two ambassadors of her sovereign with so cruel a perseverance. The Cardinal d’Estréeswas desirous of carrying the same measures in Spain as Madame des Ursins; he there represented their common master with a loftier title and a more legitimate authority. His errors of conduct, which were numerous, had in some sort been forced upon him, and if he had the misfortune to fall into ambushes, to another person must be attributed the fault of preparing them. In that period of two years, the least honourable of her political life, the Princess had solely as a stimulant her egotistic and impatient ambition. In subordinating to her interests those of two monarchies, in alleging as an excuse for the violence of her attacks the right of her own superiority, she confirmed in the minds of her adversaries by her example the truth, that for ardent natures it is less perilous to exercise than to pursue power.

Philip, reduced by the Queen’s absence to his natural indolence, opposed no resistance to the injunctions of his grandfather. Assailed in her tenderest affections, wounded in her dignity as a sovereign, and resenting at fifteen years of age that twofold outrage in as lively a degree as in the maturity of life, Marie-Louise restricted herself at first to a disdainful silence which, nevertheless, revealed the hope either of a terrible vengeance or a speedy retaliation. Madame des Ursins submitted to the commands of her sovereign with the stately haughtiness, the expression of which is conveyed in one of her very best letters to Madame de Noailles. The consciousness of the great services rendered by her to both monarchies with an inviolable fidelity, the bitter astonishment at finding her relative, until then so devoted, “prefer to herself persons who were merelyher allies, and whose wickedness ought to have inspired her with horror,” her adroit flattery of Madame de Maintenon, “to whom Providence had reserved, as by an assured privilege for her virtue, the sacred mission of causing truth and justice in the end to triumph;” “Heaven wishing to avail itself of her services for that purpose in spite of herself;” such are the chief features of that clever defence, in which calculation tempers rage and resentment, and which ought to be read in its entirety in the interesting letters of the Princess.[30]

But the letters likewise of the great King which have come down to us, show that there was no need of the foolish insult conveyed by her own epistle, to make him angry with Madame des Ursins. The complaints raised against her were then universal, at least at Versailles, and at a distance it was difficult to separate those which were founded on false reports. With the well-known temper which characterised Louis XIV., it must have seemed a thing inconceivable that such importance should be conceded to a woman whom he had placed there to do his bidding. Finding that his grandson and the young queen were disposed to resist his recall of thecamerara-mayor, he addressed them as a father and as a king:—

“You ask for my advice,” he says to Philip V. (20th August, 1704), “and I write you what I think; but the best advice becomes useless when it is only asked for and followed after the mischief has happened.... You have hitherto given your confidence to incapable or interested persons.... (And speaking of the recall of Orry and of another agent) it seems, however, that the interest of those particular persons wholly engages your attention, and at a time when you ought only to haveelevated viewsyou dwarf them down to the cabals of the Princess des Ursins, with which I am unceasingly wearied.”

And to the Queen, Louis XIV. writes still more explicitly (20th September, 1704,):—

“You know how much I have desired that you should give your confidence to the Princess des Ursins, and that I forgot nothing that might induce you to do so. However, unmindful of our common interest, she has given herself up to an enmity which I do not comprehend, and has only thought of baffling those who have been charged with our affairs. If she had had a sincere attachment for you, she would have sacrificed all her resentments, well or ill-founded, against the Cardinal d’Estrées, instead of dragging you into them.Persons of your rank ought to keep themselves aloof from private quarrels and conduct themselves with regard to their own interests and those of their subjects, which are always identical.I must therefore recall my ambassador, abandon you to the Princess des Ursins, and leave her solely to govern your realms, or recall that lady herself. That is what I think I ought to do.”

In these truthful and kingly words, the true cause of Louis’ dissatisfaction may be seen, and the marginal note, true or false, in the despatch, appears nothing more than a secondary accident.[31]

The politic monarch, moreover, thought it well to take extreme precaution in timing his blow aright. The moment of the young King being with the army and separated from the Queen was expressly chosen, for fear lest the latter in her despair, might oppose some obstacle, to its execution.

FOOTNOTES:[26]Saint Simon.[27]“Elle a des mœursà l’escarpolette.”[28]Saint Simon.[29]19th March, 1704. Memoirs of Noailles, tom. ii., p. 297.[30]Letter of May, 23rd, 1704. Geffroy’s Recueil, p. 169.[31]The affirmation of Madame des Ursins was no doubt true, since in a letter of hers to Orry, dated in 1718, she begs him to present her friendly remembrances to M. d’Aubigny’swife.

[26]Saint Simon.

[27]“Elle a des mœursà l’escarpolette.”

[28]Saint Simon.

[29]19th March, 1704. Memoirs of Noailles, tom. ii., p. 297.

[30]Letter of May, 23rd, 1704. Geffroy’s Recueil, p. 169.

[31]The affirmation of Madame des Ursins was no doubt true, since in a letter of hers to Orry, dated in 1718, she begs him to present her friendly remembrances to M. d’Aubigny’swife.

THE PRINCESS QUITS MADRID BY COMMAND OF LOUIS XIV.—AFTER A SHORT EXILE SHE RECEIVES PERMISSION TO VISIT VERSAILLES.

Madame des Ursinshad received Louis XIV.’s command to withdraw into Italy. Quitting Madrid as a State criminal (en criminelle d’état), the Princess directed her steps towards the land indicated for her exile. We must refer, however, to “The Memoirs of Saint Simon” those of our readers who are desirous of admiring the presence of mind with which Madame des Ursins, recalled thus unexpectedly and struck by the Olympian bolt, suffered herself to be in nowise disconcerted, but skilfully managed to retreat slowly and in good order, yielding ground only step by step,[32]without appearing to disobey, she found time to arouse her friends at Versailles into action, “who representing the severity of such a fall for a dictatress of her quality, urged that the King, having been obeyed, and having glutted his vengeance, a feeling of commiseration ought to be shown thereafter, and that it was not advisable to push the Queen to extremity.” These reasons commented upon by the Duke d’Harcourt, a man of great weight in the affairs of the Peninsula, by Marshal de Villeroy and the Noailles, prevailed with Louis XIV., who granted the Princess his permission, ardently solicited, to stop at Toulouse and there take up her abode. That was but thefirst step to a rehabilitation towards which laboured with equal ardour, though by very different ways, the youthful spouse of Philip V. and the grave companion of Louis XIV. Madame de Maintenon, accepting willingly the part of missionary of Divine justice, held it as a point of honour not to deceive the hope of the illustrious accused, who had attributed those functions to her at a juncture soà propos. And whether that she felt a real affection for Madame des Ursins, whether that she wished to mitigate the Duchess of Burgundy’s regret for her sister’s vexation, whether, in short, she feared to see Louis XIV. lose by so abrupt a change all authority over the affairs of Spain, she was disposed in every event to serve the exile. The Princess, to give time for the storm to expend its fury, well knowing that acts hastily determined upon are ordinarily the least durable, did not seek to hurry matters herself with the French King, but wrote to Madame de Noailles, hoping that her letter might be shown: “You are not ignorant of my attachment and respect for Madame de Maintenon; the obligations that I owe her are ever present to me, and the reliance that I place in the generosity of her heart.”[33]All the correspondence from Toulouse is in that vein, and, still further, she adroitly represents herself as a victim, as a woman disabused of worldly grandeur, and afflicted solely at having displeased Louis XIV.

This conduct allayed the mutterings of the spent tempest. The court grew accustomed to behold in her an unfortunate noblewoman resigned to her exile with an antique patience.

At the end of four months passed in the capital of Languedoc, in the depth of a retreat enlivened by an assiduous correspondence with the two courts, Madame des Ursinsreceived permission to appear at Versailles and there to justify herself. The intervention of Madame de Maintenon had nothing more in it than was perfectly natural under the circumstances; not that she had the desire to govern Spain, as Saint Simon affirms, nor even France, however entirely she might govern Louis XIV. What she desired to establish on either side of the Pyrenees was a species of moral control of the house of Bourbon. And, by keeping her informed of the most minute particulars touching the King and Queen, by inspiring the Duchess of Burgundy’s sister with the duteous affection of the elder for heraunt, Madame des Ursins rendered the Marquise de Maintenon the only service the latter cared for, and the only one, to speak the truth, which could add anything to her importance.

The motives of Louis XIV. were of a very different kind, and his politic mind did not hesitate to sacrifice to them his grievances, however legitimate they might be. Far from pacifying the Court of Spain, the departure of the Princess des Ursins had been the signal for an outburst of the most complete anarchy. To the rule exercised by the Queen had succeeded an entire absence of direction, and matters were conducted with an incoherence so shocking, that M. de Torcy having exhausted both his advice and his patience, opened with perfect terror the despatches drawn from that Pandora’s box. The accord—at least apparent, which the preponderance of Madame des Ursins had maintained among the members of thedespachoby the intervention of the Duke de Montellano, her creature, was abruptly broken up, and the Austrian party gathered strength from the effect of that disorder and that universal dissolution. The Archduke, proclaimed King of Spain by the Emperor under the name of Charles III. and recognised in that quality by Englandand Holland, had just landed at Lisbon; the campaign opened against the Portuguese had ended, after some ephemeral successes, by a sort of disbanding of the Spanish army, through want of clothing, pay, and provisions, in the supply of which nothing was done after Orry’s departure, recalled to France from the same motives as the Princess. Gibraltar, the defence of which had been confided by an inexplicable negligence to fifty men, was torn away for ever by a handful of British seamen from the crown of the Catholic kings; Catalonia, Arragon, the kingdom of Valentia, made ripe for insurrection by the Prince of Darmstadt, were on the eve of escaping from their allegiance. At the beginning of 1705, the armies of Philip V. were composed of five or six thousand men in rags, their tottering fidelity daily tampered with, and the little band of French auxiliaries exhausted itself in fruitless efforts to retake Gibraltar, which, covered as it was by the English fleet, remained mistress of the Straits, after the first disaster inflicted on the French marine in that war which was destined to cost it its last vessel.

To the government of prime ministers, and still more that of women, Louis XIV. had an insuperableantipathy. Itmust therefore have cost him much to renounce the flattering hope of seeing his grandson make practical application of the lofty instructions in which his personal royalty reflected itself with so much splendour; but such a prince as he knew but too well that a political idea is valueless when it remains inapplicable. Impressed with the sorrowful conviction, he was compelled to recognise that Philip’s ailing temperament rendered all equilibrium between intelligence and will impossible, so far so that that unhappy Prince could not elude his fate save by escaping from himself. Inthe approaching perils which the disasters of the French armies foreboded, the hope of preserving Spain even under the dictation of Madame des Ursins was better, after all, than the certainty of losing that crown by estranging thecamarera-mayor. After the battle of Blenheim, the defection of the Duke of Savoy and the disastrous Italian campaign, the restoration of the Princess to her charge was, on the part of Louis XIV., a first concession to evil fortune, a determination for which his sagacity triumphed over his repugnance. And so Saint Simon ought to have seen, instead of representing the triumph obtained by Madame des Ursins at Versailles as the inexplicable effect of a species of sudden fascination.

That victory suddenly transformed her who was but a short time previously an accused person into “a court divinity.” The Spanish ambassador, followed by a swarm of courtiers, went forth to meet her outside the gates of Paris, and offered her his mansion during her stay in the capital. There she received “all France” we are told.[34]Her every look was interpreted, and the words she addressed to ladies of the highest consideration impressed them with a rapturous sense of her condescension. Nothing could exceed the King’s attentions in every way that could contribute to her honour and distinction, and from the majestic fashion with which it was all received, with such a rare admixture of grace and politeness it reminded the beholders of the early days of the Queen-Mother. Whether the particular determination of the King shone through this marked graciousness, or that the well-known dexterity of the Princess did not allow of any doubt of her success, she was welcomed on all hands, not with those timid precautions and that ambiguous reserve which characterise the incertitude of courts, but with that lively, prompt and decided enthusiasm which only greets unclouded favour and assured fortune. At the balls which were given at the royal residences, Louis XIV., the Duchess of Burgundy, and all the princes treated her with the most affable condescension. If Louis XIV. showed great tact in appearing to attribute to his conversations with Madame des Ursins a preconceived resolution which had really been the simple result of events, and if the easy grace of the gentleman covered in some sort the retreat of the politician, it will be readily imagined that the Princess did not suffer herself to be beaten in address. When the desire to see her return to the side of the young Queen of Spain was intimated to her, she spoke of the disgust with which the condition of that miserable country filled her, and which made it impossible to do any good there. To the King’s impatience she opposed the impaired state of her health, and placed herself under medical treatment, having at that identical moment a real interest in being pronounced out of health. She delayed from day to day a departure that was more and more pressed for, cautiously making it understood that in order to avoid the mishaps and the mistakes of the past, the safety of Spain must be sought in a complete unity of direction, and that the inevitable preponderance of the Queen would constrain the placing of that political direction, not in the embassy, but in the Palace. This was to demand nothing less than acarte blancheto govern the kingdom; but however audacious in itself such exigence might be, it offended no one, so glad were all concerned, after so many mistakes, to find one head which could courageously confront the responsibility of a situation that had become so perilous. She was the only Frenchwoman who couldgovern Spain, and the cabinet of Versailles, satisfied with having shown its strength, exhibited henceforth that majestic condescendence towards her which is the flattery made use of by monarchs in their relations with indispensable agents.

She was not in a hurry, therefore, to return to Madrid. Probably she was anxious to enjoy her triumph, and by it to crush for a long while the trembling jealousy of her enemies; perhaps, sure of setting out when she chose, it was her aim to make her presence in Spain felt. Be that as it may, we do not believe, as it has been supposed, that she herself was tired of her politicalrôlewhatever may have been the mask with which her prudence sought to cover her ambition during her disgrace, the existence of that ambition is clear enough as a matter of history. We admit nothing more, in answer to the insinuations of Saint Simon, that dazzled with the royal favour she had dreamed of supplanting Madame de Maintenon in the great King’s confidence. Of a judgment eminently sound and precise, she had too much of the practical in her character to cradle her imagination with such chimæras. Madame des Ursins’ quick-sightedness fathomed all the advantages she might derive from the general discouragement, and promised herself to let nothing be lost by it either for herself or her dependents, however equivocal their position might be towards her. She procured the admission of D’Aubigny into the cabinet of Louis XIV., and, a thing more difficult still, into that of Madame de Maintenon. She caused Orry to be reinstated in his former functions, at the same time that one of her most dangerous enemies, the father Daubenton, received an order to quit Madrid, where his restless nullity had lost itself in a maze of intrigues. Authorised ina manner to form her ministry, she nominated the President Amelot as Ambassador for Spain, a diplomatist although very high minded, yet of somewhat subaltern ability, one of the lights of that magistracy from which Louis XIV. loved to recruit the staff of his government, and whence Madame des Ursins herself sprung on her mother’s side. The Marshal de Tessé was appointed to the command of the army, and Orry, a pupil of Colbert and a distinguished financier, was one of those clever and hard-working citizens who were amongst the best of French ministers of that epoch. This selection, equally excellent for both monarchs, was better still for the Princess, to whom it guaranteed a valuable concurrence without leaving her to apprehend any resistance. Those three men, from the very moment of their arrival in Madrid, found themselves face to face with two grave difficulties. The first was the opposition of the grandees; the second, a foreign invasion. Aristocratic conspiracies were hatching in the capital. The Archduke Charles had landed in Catalonia, and several noblemen were endeavouring to clear the road for him as far as Madrid. The Marquis de Leganez was the soul of this plot. Ever since the accession of Philip V. he had eluded taking the oath of allegiance: and later, summoned to take up arms against the Archduke, he had refused. From that moment he became a suspected person. His sole refuge was a conspiracy: and that was his destruction. Arrested by order of the new administration, he was conducted to the fortress of Pampeluna, afterwards to Bordeaux, whence his vain and tardy protestations in favour of Philip V. failed to extricate him. This energetic blow struck terror into the hearts of the grandees and prepared the triumphal return of the Princess.

FOOTNOTES:[32]“A lents tours de roue.” St. Simon, tom. vii.[33]Recueil of M. Geffroy, Letter lvi.[34]Saint Simon.

[32]“A lents tours de roue.” St. Simon, tom. vii.

[33]Recueil of M. Geffroy, Letter lvi.

[34]Saint Simon.

THE PRINCESS TRIUMPHS AT VERSAILLES.

Inthe balls given at Marly, she appeared loftily self-possessed, easy and familiar by turns, ogling people one after another with her eye-glass; and at one of these balls she made her appearance with a tiny spaniel under her arm, as though she had been in her own house, and (which was more remarked than anything else) the King caressed the little dog on several different occasions, when he went up to converse with her, and he did so nearly throughout the evening. “She had never before been seen to take so grand a flight.”

Madame des Ursins, who, though a woman of imagination, was, as we have said, but little liable to be dazzled, might still have been pardoned giving way during these months of royal favour to an excess of intoxication; but above all, and at the same time that she displayed the treasures of her continual and inexhaustible conversation, she evinced a lively appreciation of the King’s mental qualities. She returns to the subject afterwards too frequently, and enters too minutely into detail of what she discovered in him, not to show on her part a truthfulness stronger than flattery. She never speaks of the King otherwise than asl’homme du monde le plus aimable, as themeilleur ami, andle plus honnête homme du monde.

“If I had further, Madam, as you observe to me (she writes to Madam de Maintenon) the happiness of his being more accustomed to me, I ingenuously confess to you that it only depends upon his Majesty to perceivethat I find himvery good company. Really, although I can boast of having, in my time, entertained in France, Italy, and Spain, all the wittiest and most agreeable persons therein, I have never been so much pleased with them as with his Majesty. You must own that this is a very frank avowal.”

There were not wanting those who even went so far as to suppose that the views of Madame des Ursins went much further—“the age and health of Madame de Maintenon tempting her.” The question must have occurred to the Princess, it was hinted, whether the prospect of replacing her in France was not more alluring than any she was likely to meet with in Spain. Such conjectures, however, touching the inmost secrets of a woman’s heart, are more easily formed than verified.

That which appears far more certain is, that independently even of politics there was a mental triumph achieved by her in this close contact with the great King. Madame de Maintenon, Madame des Ursins, and Louis XIV. were all three for some time under the same spell: “I often recall to mind your ideas and that amiable countenance which so charmed me at Marly,” Madame de Maintenon writes to her a year later; “do you still preserve that equanimity which allowed you to pass from the most important topics of conversation with the King to indulge inbadinagewith Madame d’Heudicourt in my cabinet?” Madame des Ursins, who was only at that moment a bird of passage, was of those in whom the delight of pleasing and the feeling of success doubly enhanced every innate grace. That slight fascination which she probably underwent, she repaid with a shower of sparkling phrases.

Louis XIV. himself was seduced both by her grace and her talent. He had expected, according to all accounts, to find in Madame des Ursins a woman of the Fronde, somewhat post-dated: instead of that he discovered a person whom it cost little to be naturally a person of authority, with a capacity for governing, and whose social powers never failed of their charm, so elevated were their characteristics. She, even as a third party, from her intercourse with Madame de Maintenon, felt herself grow quite young again. Of these three potential persons, the assertion may be hazarded that Madame des Ursins was still that one who best maintained her position, possessed the happy knack of turning all things to advantage through her lucid common sense: of the three she played her part the most unrestrictedly, and therefore so much the better, through an energetic will in carrying out what an acute judgment told her was best.

Her brow encircled with the halo of victory, Madame des Ursins, after a year’s absence, re-entered that Spain which she had quitted humiliated: she returned to it amid the acclamations of its populace, welcomed in all its cities as a sovereign. The citadels fired salutes as she passed; the Spanish Court went out to meet her as far as Burgos; the King and Queen received her at some two leagues from Madrid. She returned strengthened by disgrace, so much the stronger that her absence had proved injurious, treating henceforward as between Power and Power with the Court of Versailles, which, yielding to a political necessity, recognized and graciously accepted, had restored her with its own hand to the summit of power, and seemed, by that signal preference, to menace beforehand all those who should pretend to struggle against her sovereign mission.

Once re-established in Spain, Madame des Ursins, thus acting in harmony once more with Louis XIV., set herself to pursue a more measured course, more regular andthoroughly irreproachable with relation to those whose envoy she was. She took no step save in concert with the sagacious ambassador M. Amelot. If the letters she addressed to Madame de Maintenon, and which commence immediately after her departure from Paris, do not reveal her genius in all its vigour and brilliancy, they at any rate allow us to divine it in certain passages, and give us clearly the chief outlines of her character. The natural tone of her mind was serious, positive, somewhat dry at bottom, but frank, deliberate, and bold. Unlike Madame de Maintenon, she had political ideas which she dared not only avow, but put into execution. Before all else she decided upon the complete restoration of the King’s authority. With reference to a claim advanced by the grandees against the captain of the guards, she was anxious to break up effectually that cabal of the grandees who profited by the weakness of the new régime in order to create titles and prerogatives for themselves: otherwise it would be the means of throwing Spain again into the same embarrassments as those in which France found herself during the Fronde, “when Frenchmen only busied themselves with provoking one another.” She was of opinion that the chiefs of that party should feel the effects of the King’s displeasure before there was time to receive replies from France, in order that it might clearly appear that it was a determination taken by the King of Spain himself, and not a suggestion of others:

“Do not be frightened, Madame, I entreat you, at these resolutions. It is fortunate that the grandees have given us such a lucky opportunity of mortifying them. Lacking strength and courage, these haughty nobles are ceaseless in their attempts to overthrow the authority of their king, and against whom I am incensed beyond measure for all which they did so long as they had the uppermost in theDespacho(Privy Council).”

The virile tone of that paragraph carries us far beyond Madame de Maintenon. There was one thing, however, of more importance to Madame des Ursins than appeasing the grandees, and that was to procure troops and find the means of paying them. That done, she might laugh at every other difficulty. “Would to heaven,” she exclaimed, “that it were as easy to get the uppermost over the priests and monks, who are the cause of all the revolts you hear of!”

The first portion of the Princess’s labours was accomplished. Her most dangerous enemies had fallen: she reigned. But there yet remained a few hostile nobles, and she resolved to strike at them. One of them, formerly her ally, the Duke de Montellano, president of Castile, excited the suspicion of this mistrustful woman. She manifested towards him, from the moment of her return, a haughty coldness. She dreaded to see in a post of such eminence a man placed by his birth amongst her worst enemies. Montellano, offended at her attitude towards him, tendered his resignation. The King hesitated, but the Princess made him accept it, and the corregidor of Madrid, Ronquillo, a man of obscure origin, was nominated to the presidentship. Amelot was equally mistrustful of certain grandees in the Privy Council, as was the Princess; and, whether they tendered their resignation or that it was required of them, the Duke de Montalto and the Count de Monterei were replaced by devoted partisans of the Princess. The high aristocracy, indignant at this manœuvre, worked against her in an underhanded opposition, in which the double character of the Duke de Medina-Cœli was more and more developed. Their plans were foiled in the very outset, but we shall see them again make their appearance upon thepolitical arena at a moment when it required nothing less than all the power and skill of Madame des Ursins to triumph over them.

The Princess was, in fact, triumphing on the very brink of a volcano. Spain was in a blaze, and every day seemed to call in question the existence of that throne under the shadow of which she had come to reign. Lord Peterborough had torn Barcelona from Philip V., and the greater part of its garrison had recognised the Archduke, who, acting henceforward as King of Spain, had just made his entrance into that city amidst the acclamations of the Catalan people. The principal fortresses of the province had shared the fate of the chief city; and on one side the insurrection spread to Saragossa, whilst on the other, the important city of Valencia proclaimed Charles III. The situation was little better in the west of the kingdom, for an Anglo-Portuguese army had penetrated into Estramadura, commanded by a French refugee who had been made an English peer,[35]and whose hatred pursued Louis XIV. on every field of battle. Constrained to carry on the struggle simultaneously in Flanders, Italy, and beyond the Pyrenees, in order to defend the integrity of a monarchy which more and more hesitated in its obedience, the French King had just sent to Spain thirty battalions and twenty squadrons, which it became necessary to supplement by despatching a new army. Unhappily, the time was approaching when the French soldiery had more cause to dread their own generals than those of the enemy; and these forces, besides being insufficient, were placed under the command of Marshal de Tessé, a cunning courtier but mediocre general, incapable of anyinitiative strategy, and whose sole study was to carry out to the letter the personal instructions of Louis XIV. and Chamillard. However, either from want of sufficient resources or want of skill, Tessé failed this once in the execution of his master’s formal orders, which directed him to suspend all his operations in order to retake Barcelona at any cost. A siege languidly conducted in presence of a fleet mistress of the seas, on which the French flag dared no longer show itself, was followed by a disaster aggravated by the presence of the King of Spain and by bitter recriminations between the two nations together engaged in that fatal enterprise. Alike indifferent to misfortune and success, still it might be seen in Philip, since the presence of his rival in Spain, that there was an indomitable resolution to die sword in hand in defence of the sole right which touched his pride and his conscience. Before Barcelona he had displayed a useless courage, and when de Tessé rendered it necessary to raise the siege by his refusal to continue it, the insurrection had closed to the King every road which gave access to his capital. To rejoin the Queen Regent in the heart of the two Castiles, Philip was compelled to take, in mortal agony, the road to France, in order to direct his steps by way of Rousillon towards Navarre, thus giving his enemies a plausible pretext for turning his going out of the kingdom into a desertion of the crown.

Trials not less formidable awaited the young Queen at the hands of fortune. Excited by the greatness of the danger, but finding a succour in thesang-froidof Madame des Ursins, which her youth and ardour denied her, adored by the inhabitants of Madrid, to whom in the hour of crisis she confided herself with a touching helplessness, theSavoiana, by the spell of her gentle and steady virtues, alone maintainedthe royal authority in a country where “it was necessary to have almost an army in each province.”[36]

At length the day came when despair reigned everywhere save at theRetiroPalace. The square d’Alcantara, defended by ten battalions, the last remains of the Spanish army, had surrendered without fighting. Whether through folly or treason, Salamanca had also just fallen into the enemy’s hands, and the Anglo-Portuguese troops advanced by forced marches upon Madrid, in order there to proclaim Charles III. There was nothing left but flight—but to quit a city of proved devotion and confide in others of doubtful fidelity. The King had rejoined the French army; the Queen, accompanied by hercamerara mayorand a few female attendants, was compelled to repair to Burgos, in order there to keep up at least some shadow of legitimate government. The little party was without resources, money, almost without victuals. The silver plate belonging to the palace was hastily flung into the melting-pot; the sovereign of so many realms, after having borrowed by pawning so many thousand pistoles, packed up with her own hands those jewels which were a tribute to her from the new world, the pride and recreation of her sorrowful youth, previous to pledging them to the Jew brokers. Her court, lately so numerous, had been dispersed by the wind of adversity, not with the intent of influencing events, but, shameful to record, only to await them; and Marie Louiseenceintewith the first child of her marriage, shaped her course towards the land of the Cid, resolved to go thither and defend the monarchy even among those rugged mountains which had been its cradle. Destitution prevailed throughout the solitudes of Castile aswell as in those poorposadas, bare as an Asiatic caravanserai. If in the central provinces the populace showed itself faithful, it was not without extreme suffering and the most cruel perplexity that the journey could be accomplished by almost impracticable ways, through detachments of the enemy, launched in pursuit of the royal retinue. Nothing certainly is more honourable to the memory of the Princess des Ursins than the letters in which she relates with charming naturalness the daily accidents of that adventurous life, which she supported at the age of sixty-five with all the gaiety of a youthful tourist.[37]

In the midst of these disasters, therefore, Philip V. found a firm support in the devotion of the people and in the indefatigable zeal of Madame des Ursins. At Madrid and in all the provinces, except Catalonia, the allies were received with that repugnance which presages a disastrous future and belies the most brilliant promises of victory. Madame des Ursins multiplied herself: speeches, letters, overtures—she spared nothing to obtain from the people the money indispensable for carrying on the war. She thus arrested desertion, consolidated in Old Castile, and even in Andalusia the King’s authority; she propagated, in short (if we may so express it) the feeling of devotedness. She knew how to surround Philip V. with the austere majesty of royal misfortune endured with courage and consoled by the watchful love of the nation. At the same time her cheerful and confident spirit restored to its serenity the little court of Burgos. She locked within her own bosom her discouragements and inquietudes: she clung to hope, and that successfully. She sought and found in her own firm will consolationjustified by events. All her correspondence at this epoch, at times amiable, witty, affectionate, at others grave, precise, and altogether politic, full of facts, plans, exact details, worthy of a minister, and of a great minister too, shows the extraordinary genius of the woman. It was not she alone, certainly, who saved the dynasty, for it was necessary to fight and conquer to do that, but she was unquestionably one of the most vigorous instruments ever made use of by Providence to work out its own purposes in defence of a nation.

She had some ideas about war too—we do not say they were of the best, but she had some—and about plans of defence and the choice of generals. She anticipated coming dangers, which she laid bare and exposed without allowing herself to be discouraged by them. She described the native troops in their true colours, the places of importance entirely unprovided for, according to Spanish custom; she energetically claimed help from France, and after asking for strong battalions in the body of her letter, adds in a postscript that she has advised the King of Spain to have prayers offered up. She did not forget to send appropriate flatteries also to Madame de Maintenon.

A few days after the arrival of the Duke of Berwick, in order to thank Madame de Maintenon for such aid, she spoke to her about Saint-Cyr, well aware that nothing could be more agreeable, and knowingthe weakness of mothers.

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