Project Gutenberg's Court Beauties of Old Whitehall, by W. R. H. Trowbridge This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Court Beauties of Old Whitehall Historiettes of the Restoration Author: W. R. H. Trowbridge Release Date: January 16, 2013 [EBook #41852] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT BEAUTIES OF OLD WHITEHALL *** Produced by sp1nd, srjfoo, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber's note: On devices that support the feature, clicking on a portrait will display a larger version of it. COURT BEAUTIES OF OLD WHITEHALL BY THE SAME AUTHOR Cloth, 6s. A DAZZLING REPROBATE. A GIRL OF THE MULTITUDE. THE SITUATIONS OF LADY PATRICIA. Paper Cover, 1s.; Crown, 2s. THE LETTERS OF HER MOTHER TO ELIZABETH. THE GRANDMOTHER'S ADVICE TO ELIZABETH. LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN Elizabeth Hamilton Countess of Gramont. from the picture by Lely. COURT BEAUTIES OF OL D WHITE HAL L HISTORIETTES OF THE RESTORATION BY W. R. H. TROWBRIDGE WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS "A Court without fair women is like a year without a spring, a spring-time without flowers." A Sigh of Francis I., when prisoner in Spain LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MCMVI I [All rights reserved.] TO ETHEL and HERBERT NICOL Preface F we may believe so eminent an authority as M. Emile Bourgeois, whose "Le Grand Siècle," is a fascinating proof of his statement, "the age we live in delights in inquiry into the private lives of the great and into the spirit of society of the past. It loves to interrogate them directly, so that it may get at the secrets of their passions and find out their state of mind at different periods. This curiosity is not culpable. 'It almost ceases to be curiosity,' said Voltaire, 'when it has epochs and men who attract the gaze of posterity for its object.'" Such an epoch in English history is par excellence the Restoration. It is a subject on which an immense number of books has been written. Of the eight beautiful women whose extraordinary careers are described in the following pages, the names of all are probably more or less familiar to the reader, while some—such as "Madame" and the Duchess of Portsmouth—have provided several historians with themes that have elevated them to the proud height of classical authority. Forneron's "Louise de Kéroual" is not only a monumental study of the English Restoration, but a fascinating romance and a work of real literary merit. And many distinguished writers, from the spirituelle Madame de La Fayette down to M. Anatole France, have found in the life of "Madame," the most brilliant of all the Stuarts, a constant source of inspiration. To enter, therefore, into competition with such a galaxy of talent would seem almost presumptuous, more especially as this book makes no claim to literary erudition or grace. On the contrary, my object has been not to paint finished portraits of beautiful women, but rather to popularise characters who helped to colour one of the most memorable periods of our history. From this point of view the Restoration will be found to be a mine containing a vein from which ore may still be extracted—the ore of amusement from the vein of curiosity. As regards the illustrations, I am especially obliged to— The Duc de Guiche for obtaining for me the permission of his father, the Duc de Gramont, to engrave his portrait of Armand, Comte de Guiche. This portrait is, I believe, the only one of the Comte de Guiche known to exist, and is now published for the first time. I am also indebted to Earl Spencer, the Earl of Sandwich, Dr. G. C. Williamson, and the Strand Magazine for their courtesy in granting me permission to reproduce the portraits respectively of the Countess of Shrewsbury, the Duchesse de Mazarin, "Madame," and the medals of the Duchess of Richmond. * * * * * A list of the principal sources from which the information necessary to compile this book has been gathered is herewith appended:— Amédée Renée's "Les Nièces de Mazarin." St. Réal's "Mémoires de la Duchesse de Mazarin." St. Evremond's "Œuvres." { Vizetelly's Notes. Hamilton's "Mémoires de Gramont" Walpole's Notes. Scott's notes. Madame de Sévigné's "Lettres." Saint-Simon's "Mémoires." Marquise de Courcelles' "Mémoires." Steinman's "Memoir of the Duchess of Cleveland." Vincent's "Lives of Twelve Bad Women" (Duchess of Cleveland). The "Life" of Robert Feilding. The Wentworth Papers. Pepys' "Diary." Evelyn's "Diary." [9] [10] [11] Tatler No. 50. Delman's "Barbara Villiers." Mrs. Manley's "Rivella" Clarendon's "Life." "Archæologia Cantiana," Vols. XI., XII. Mrs. Jameson's "Beauties of the Court of Charles II." { Catherine of Braganza. Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England" Mary of Modena. Mary II. and Queen Anne. Ulster Journal of Archæology, Vol. V. Pennant's "Account of London." Pennant's "Antiquities of London." Steinman's "Althorp Memoirs" {Duchess of Tyrconnel. Countess of Shrewsbury. Walpole's "Anecdotes." Lodge's Portraits. Burnet's "History of My Own Times." Macaulay's "History of England." Macaulay's "The Comic Dramatists." Mrs. Cartwright's "Madame." Jusserand's "French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II." Rait's "Five Stuart Princesses" ("Madame"). Baillon's "Henriette-Anne d'Angleterre." Bossuet's "Oraison Funèbre sur Henriette d'Angleterre." Mrs. Green's "Lives of the Princesses of England" ("Madame"). Bussy-Rabutin's "Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules." The Princess Palatine's "Correspondance." Marquise de La Fayette's "Mémoires." Forneron's "Louise de Kéroual." Jesse's "Court of England." Bourgeois' "Le Grand Siècle." Reresby's "Memoirs." "La Grande Encyclopédie." "Nouvelle Biographie Générale." "Dictionary of National Biography." W. R. H. TROWBRIDGE. London, February, 1906. Contents PAGE Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin 17 An Adventuress of the Restoration. Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland 59 A Courtezan of the Restoration. "La Belle Stuart," Duchess of Richmond 105 A Prude of the Restoration. "La Belle Hamilton," Comtesse de Gramont 137 A Good Woman of the Restoration. "The Lovely Jennings," Duchess of Tyrconnel 163 A Splendid Failure of the Restoration. [12] [13] "Wanton Shrewsbury," Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury 193 A Messalina of the Restoration. "Madame," Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans 221 The French Court—The Evil Genius of the Restoration. Louise de Kéroual, Duchess of Portsmouth 271 A Spy of the Restoration. List of Illustrations "La Belle Hamilton," Comtesse de Gramont Frontispiece Facing page Duchesse de Mazarin 17 Duc de Mazarin 24 St. Evremond 47 "My Lady Castlemaine," Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland 59 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon 68 Wycherley 77 John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough 80 Nell Gwynn 86 Jacob Hall 95 "Handsome Feilding" 101 The Duchess of Richmond 105 Charles the Second 111 The Rotiers' Medals 124 The Duke of Richmond 131 The Chevalier de Gramont 144 Count Anthony Hamilton 159 "The Lovely Jennings," Duchess of Tyrconnel 163 The Duke of York 166 Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel 184 "Wanton Shrewsbury," Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury 193 The Duke of Buckingham 204 The Duke of Shrewsbury 215 "Madame," Duchess of Orleans 221 "Monsieur," Philippe d'Orléans 237 Armand, Comte de Guiche 241 Mademoiselle de la Vallière 246 The Chevalier de Lorraine 266 The Duchess of Portsmouth 271 Louis XIV. 281 Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prieur 313 [15] [16] I Photo. Goupil. Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin. From the Portrait by Mignard, in the possession of the Earl of Sandwich. HORTENSE MANCINI, DUCHESSE DE MAZARIN AN ADVENTURESS OF THE RESTORATION T was the dream of Richelieu, as everybody knows, to make the French monarchy independent and absolute. This dream was only half realised when the Cardinal died, but as he was too astute not to foresee that after his death there would be a violent reaction against his policy, he had sought a successor who would be capable of finishing what he was obliged to leave undone. He found the man he wanted in an obscure Italian, who proved in the end to be even more subtle and slippery than his Eminence Rouge himself. It was not so much hatred of Mazarin that inspired the civil war with which France was rent during the childhood of Louis XIV. as inarticulate hatred of Richelieu's statecraft. The Fronde was the dernière espérance of a proud and turbulent nobility bent on reducing their King to the condition of a Venetian doge. This revolt against the throne ended with the complete triumph of Mazarin—a triumph embellished by the passion with which he inspired the haughty, treacherous Anne of Austria. There are men who on finding themselves in his shoes would have given free rein to ambition and desire. The sly Italian adventurer, however, apparently considered himself sufficiently recompensed by amassing the greatest fortune in Europe and winning the heart of a queen. Having "arrived," as we say nowadays, the Cardinal sent to Rome for the children of his sister, Hieronima Mancini, to come to France and share his prosperity. Five little girls and a little boy, perfectly beautiful children, according to all accounts, on receipt of this invitation were got ready as soon as possible, and sent off to the Palais Mazarin in Paris, where they had a king and his brother for playmates. Few children ever had more splendid advantages—certainly no children in that day—and none ever benefited less by them. Perhaps it was not altogether their fault, for though affectionate and intelligent they were afflicted with an incurable spiritual infirmity. The Mancinis altogether lacked the moral sense. Furthermore, the system of education to which they were subjected, with its espionage and inducements to deceit, coupled with the demoralising mixture of indulgence and severity with which their uncle treated them, was anything but calculated to correct the faults of nature. These quick-witted, wilful children were, as retribution for his sins, said his enemies, constantly dashing the hopes and outraging the feelings of their uncle, whose life within the splendid walls of the Palais Mazarin they caused to resemble that Fronde with which he had battled so desperately in the State. "At least," he used to plead when they objected to hearing Mass, "if you don't hear it for God's sake, hear it for the world's." But the Mancinis never showed the slightest aptitude for learning lessons in hypocritical respectability; vice with [17] [18] [19] them was ever naked and unashamed. The Cardinal had intended, as was but natural, to leave his immense fortune and his name, which he desired to perpetuate, to his nephew, Philip, on whom he had already bestowed the title of Duc de Nevers. But this young man, who had as little brains as he afterwards lacked importance, took it into his head one Good Friday to celebrate Mass over a pig, an enormity that cost him Mazarin's name and fortune. In other respects the Duc de Nevers was a harmless nonentity and turned out well—for a Mancini. He seems to have spent the greater part of his useless life in composing doggerel verses which he addressed to his sisters. The names of these celebrated beauties were Laure, Olympe, Marie, Hortense, and Marie Anne. The Cardinal married the first to the grandson of the "Charmante Gabrielle" and Henri IV., by whom she had a son destined fifty years later to win renown in the Marlborough Wars as the Duc de Vendôme, a man whose memory Saint-Simon has preserved for us in vitriol. Laure was the only one of Mazarin's nieces on whom there is no slur. She died young. The youngest, Marie Anne, became the Duchesse de Bouillon. She had the ready wit of all the Mancinis, and her repartees in the "Poison Affair," the cause célèbre of the reign of Louis XIV., should still be remembered, as well as her patronage of La Fontaine. Her life was, on the whole, decorous enough, according to the seventeenth-century standard of propriety, but, while more or less eventful, extremely uninteresting by contrast with that of Olympe, Marie, and Hortense. It is these three that one means when one mentions Mazarin's nieces. They gave Europe much to talk of in their day, and have given it much to write about since. It was lucky for Olympe that she was not born in the present century; if she had lived now she would probably have spent the greater portion of her career in prison and died on the gallows. But with over two hundred years between her and us she seems rather picturesque. Brought up in the same nursery, so to speak, with Louis XIV. and his contemptible brother, Philippe d'Orléans, Olympe Mancini aspired to be Queen of France. This splendid destiny seemed possible of fulfilment, for the young King was smitten and the Cardinal was favourable. But if Anne of Austria was ready enough to be Mazarin's mistress, she objected to marrying her son to Mazarin's niece. Anne was a Spaniard and a Hapsburg; she could stomach anything but a mésalliance. The result of Olympe's aspirations was, we know, such a mauvais quart d'heure with Anne for the Cardinal as to terrify him. Olympe, however, was intrigante, and waged a sort of Fronde of her own in the Palais Mazarin, till Louis, who had never been very fond of her, fell head over ears in love with her sister Marie. Then she suffered her uncle to marry her to a younger son of the House of Savoy, the Comte de Soissons. One of their sons was afterwards world-famous as Prince Eugene of Savoy. But marriage did not, unfortunately for her, "settle" the Comtesse de Soissons; plotting and mischief-making generally, mixed up with a liaison or two, kept her busy till the bursting on society of the "Poison Affair," in which she was implicated. The order for her arrest was issued, but Louis, glad to be rid of her, gave her the chance to flee the country. She lived henceforth the shadiest of lives wandering about Europe. Quite as chequered was the career of Marie. The harassed Cardinal, who had no intention of incurring a second time the displeasure of the Queen Mother, no sooner discovered the attachment of the young King for his lovely niece than with all possible haste he sent her back to Rome, where she eventually married the Constable Colonna. Her parting with Louis is celebrated; it has inspired poems, novels, essays, and plays. For the sake of the story it is a pity that he should have treated her so shabbily years after when she appealed to him in her troubles. As these were mixed up with those of her sister, Hortense, with much éclat at a later period, we will defer their description and hasten to introduce our heroine, the most beautiful and best known of the famous nieces of Mazarin. Hortense's intelligence and sweet disposition had from the first made her the Cardinal's favourite, and after his nephew had offended him he decided that she should be his heir. The report that she was to inherit the Mazarin millions naturally induced many splendid offers for her hand, which her own dazzling charms quickly coloured with a passion for herself. "The destiny," she declared in the memoirs she dictated, "that has rendered me the most unhappy of my sex began by dangling a crown before my eyes." It is a notorious fact that Charles II., roi sans couronne, twice proposed for her hand, and was twice refused by the Cardinal, who was at the time the ally of Cromwell and not shrewd enough to foresee the future. In like vain manner the splendid prize was sought by the Prince, afterwards King, of Portugal; the Duke of Savoy; and the great Turenne. Her uncle finally gave her to Armand de la Porte de la Meilleraye, son of a brilliant Maréchal of that name, for no other reason, apparently, than because he was a relation of Richelieu—an evidence of Mazarin's sense of gratitude that throws a curious light on the cunning Italian's character. It was not a bad match for Hortense Mancini, whose father was but a petty Roman knight. De la Meilleraye was rich and boasted a great name, although Saint-Simon in his caustic way makes him descend from an apothecary, adding that one of his ancestors was a porter, whence the name de la Porte—a slur to which de la Meilleraye might have replied like the witty Marquise de Créquy when some one suggested that La Rochefoucauld was descended from a butcher: "Ah," she said, "that must have been when the kings were shepherds." Be it as it may, the bridegroom got with his bride the title of Duc de Mazarin and some thirty million francs. His wedding gift to his wife was a cabinet containing ten thousand pistoles in gold, which the Duchesse, not without craft, at once proceeded to share with her brother and sisters to propitiate their jealousy of her huge fortune. But she carried this generosity to a degree that augured ill for the preservation of Mazarin's millions. For she had so little regard for money that she left the key in the cabinet that any who cared might help himself, and at last literally flung out of the windows what remained for the amusement of watching the passers-by scramble for the coins. This prodigality so alarmed the Cardinal that it was thought to have hastened his end; eight days later he died. The news of this event was received by the Duchesse de Mazarin's brother and sisters, who, though well provided for, not unnaturally resented their uncle's favouritism, by exclamations of, "God be thanked, the Cardinal's gone!" This marriage of convenience might possibly have been fairly happy, as such marriages go, but for the strange [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] character of the Duc de Mazarin; for his wife was amiable and long-suffering, if giddy and volatile. Considering all that we have read of this man, we are almost inclined to agree with Madame de Sévigné when she says, that "the mere sight of him was a justification of his wife's conduct." Molière took him as the model of Orgon in his "Tartuffe." Religion was the subject on which his peculiarities were most offensively noticeable. He was a Jansenist, a sort of Roman Catholic Puritan, and the willing tool of the Jansenist monks and nuns with whom he surrounded himself, and on whom he, in other respects miserly, lavished enormous sums. Duc de Mazarin. For nearly sixty years his outré acts of devotion afforded small-talk for the Court of France. The superb statues and pictures in the Palais Mazarin—now the Bibliothèque Nationale—in which he resided having offended his sense of decency, he proceeded, with a handkerchief in one hand and a hammer in the other, to cover up or destroy his rare marbles and subject his Titians and Coreggios to the same radical reforms. Colbert, whom the King, on hearing of this vandalism, sent to expostulate with him, arrived during the process of demolition. The Minister, who knew to a farthing what the chefs d'œuvre had cost the Cardinal, did what he could to save such works of art as remained undesecrated. But the Duc de Mazarin complained to the King, who, being in the habit of borrowing money from him, contented himself with deploring his aberration. His zeal in behalf of purity did not, however, rest here. His mind, crippled with bigotry and superstition, imagined temptations in the most innocent and natural things. He wished to pull out the front teeth of his daughters to prevent coquetry; and he forbade the women on his estates to milk the cows for fear of the evil thoughts that such an employment might suggest. From conscientious scruples he likewise resigned the governorship of several provinces and the important post of Grand Commander of Artillery. Further, as the devil was ever in his thoughts, he fancied he appeared to him in his sleep, and he would wake his wife in the middle of the night to look for evil spirits by the light of flambeaux. He was, in a word, one of those mad people who are just sane enough to keep out of an asylum. To such a man the dazzling beauty of his wife was a perpetual torment. It filled him at once with a horrible jealousy and a fear for the safety of her soul. She seemed to him the incarnation of temptation. He dared not let her out of his sight, and subjected her to an espionage as base as it was intolerable. To retain the servants she liked she was obliged to pretend she hated them; if she wished to go into society or to the play her husband preached her a sermon on the evil of the latter, and objected to the toilette a woman of rank and fashion was obliged to wear at the former. The innocent "patch," then the rage, was the cause of many a quarrel between this ill-matched pair. "Ah," said people on rare occasions when they appeared in public together, "the Duc and Duchesse de Mazarin have 'patched' up their differences again." For seven years their private life was the pièce de résistance at every feast of scandal served at Paris and Versailles. But, as if this asphyxiating atmosphere of suspicion and religious prudery that the Duc de Mazarin forced his lovely wife to breathe was not sufficient penance for her charms, he dragged her about with him from province to province in all sorts of weather and seasons, compelling her to sleep in peasants' huts and sheds, or lodge for weeks in lonely castles. Once even she was forced to accompany him two hundred leagues when she was enceinte. [24] [25] [26] To this vindictive religious mania he was afflicted with another for law-suits. He was said to have had more than three hundred, nearly all of which he lost. At the end of seven years the Duchesse de Mazarin, who had borne her husband three daughters and one son, in spite of her own disregard of the value of money, became alarmed at the rapidity with which her uncle's millions were being squandered on the crowd of becowled hangers-on who directed the life and conscience of their cranky dupe. She protested on behalf of her children. The Duc de Mazarin answered by seizing her jewels, on the ground that jewels encouraged vanity and immodesty, and ordered her to accompany him to Alsace, of which province he was governor, intending to keep her with him there for the rest of her life. After a scandalous attempt at force, witnessed by the entire domestic establishment of the Palais Mazarin, the Duchesse escaped to her brother's, the Duc de Nevers. In this age of the emancipation of women it is amusing to read of the grave scandal the Duchesse de Mazarin caused by leaving her husband. Such an action, which to-day would scarcely cause a ripple of excitement, was then a criminal offence. It was the first step in defiance of convention that gave her freedom and deprived her of her reputation. But, considering the life she had led, the wonder is not that she did not leave her husband sooner, but that she had ever put up with him at all. Arguing, perhaps, from her indolent and easy-going temperament, which, because it had endured for seven years the vagaries of such a husband, seemed to prove an unlimited capacity of endurance, she was pestered by the Duc, her relations, and even the King himself, to return to the Palais Mazarin. But she refused to listen to all offers of reconciliation and mediation. Any fate, she declared, was preferable to living again under the same roof with her husband. He, in his exasperation, seized the power the law gave him and had her arrested and imprisoned in the convent of Les Filles de St. Marie, a sort of aristocratic home for fallen women. The Duchesse, now as alert and vindictive as she had previously been indolent and submissive, retorted from her convent-prison with a demand for her jewels, an allowance, and a separation. As usual in a scandal of this sort, the sympathy of society was divided between the husband and the wife. For while there was no excuse for the absurd and irritating behaviour of the Duc de Mazarin, there was no doubt but that the Duchesse herself was not above reproach. The looseness of her later life is of itself a sufficient warrant for the suspicion that the corruption associated with her name was of early origin. We read of strange flirtations before her marriage, one with a handsome eunuch attached to the household of her uncle, the Cardinal; of a duel fought over her by servants; of visits paid her by the King; and of the charge brought against her by her husband of too close an intimacy with the Duc de Nevers, her poetising, godless brother—a charge which she passionately resented and denied, which we, personally, do not know whether to credit or not, and which of itself was a justifiable cause for separation. While the case between her husband and herself was pending, Madame de Mazarin made the most of her imprisonment. Philosophic resignation is nothing to the airy indifference with which she appeared to regard her situation. Perhaps this unrepentant frame of mind could have found its vindication, if it required one, in nothing more likely to encourage it than the companionship of a young and fascinating woman who was also a prisoner at Les Filles de St. Marie. Even more talked about at this period than the Duchesse de Mazarin herself was Sidonie de Lenoncourt, Marquise de Courcelles, who was also the victim of an insupportable husband. This "Manon Lescaut of the seventeenth century," as she has been wittily called, deserves a word or two, not so much on her own account as on account of the light she casts on certain phases of the social life of her day. Born heiress of a noble family, Sidonie, who had lost both parents in her infancy, was brought up by an old aunt, an abbess of Orleans. When she was fifteen the orphan, who was as innocent as she was beautiful, was suddenly removed from the pure life of the abbey at Orleans, by order of the King, whose ward she was, and placed at the Hôtel de Soissons, then the centre of the gayest and loosest society in Paris. The instigator of this spiritual seduction was Colbert, who, wishing to enrich and ennoble his family, conceived the idea of marrying the heiress to his brother. But at the Hôtel de Soissons the lovely Sidonie fired all sorts of ambitions. If Colbert coveted her name and wealth, Louvois lusted for her person. During the intrigues to which she was exposed she was married off-hand to the Marquis de Courcelles, a man devoid of all principle, who helped to corrupt her on purpose on the day of her ruin to get complete possession of her fortune. Surrounded by such pitfalls, it is not surprising that Sidonie fell, and fell noisily. To escape the thought of her villain of a husband, the girl flung herself into the arms of Louvois. This powerful Minister was able to protect her from the designs of de Courcelles for a time, but she sought consolation elsewhere, and got herself so talked and written about in the lampoons that deluged Paris and were said to "temper despotism," that her husband had no trouble in getting an order from the King to shut her up at Les Filles de St. Marie. No worse influence could have come into the life of the freshly emancipated and besmirched Duchesse de Mazarin than this captivating young adultress, whose misfortunes, though unworthy of sympathy, won it and admiration as well, by reason of the gaiety with which they were borne. "The pleasure of remaining innocent does not make up for the pain of being continually browbeaten and insulted," she said—an opinion to which the Duchesse was only too ready to agree. For three months these two were inseparable. Although Sidonie was the younger, a mere child, she was the more experienced, the cleverer. It was she who instigated the Duchesse to kill the tedium of imprisonment by filling the nuns' holy-water stoup with ink, putting wet sheets on their beds, letting loose dogs in their dormitory, and by perpetrating practical jokes continually. At last the unfortunate nuns pleaded to be relieved of such intolerable charges. The Duchesse was transferred to another convent to await the settlement of her case, while Sidonie was herself shortly after released and went back to her husband, and more adventures. Escaping from one convent in which she was afterwards imprisoned, she met a young man who fell in love with her at sight and joined her in her flight. But she ran away from him too in the end, and many another, and finished sadly enough. The Abbé Prévost might, indeed, have taken her for the model of his Manon Lescaut. To see Sidonie was to adore her, and she was not without an agreeable wit, as her poor little memoirs, which [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] she found time to write, testify. "I am tall," she wrote, in her gay way that suggests a wink of the eye, "I have a good figure, the best possible deportment, fine hair, and a beautiful complexion, although pitted in a couple of places by small-pox. My eyes are big, and I never open them completely, which, though an affectation, gives them a very sweet and tender expression. I have not much to boast of in the shape of my mouth, but my teeth are like pearls. Hands exquisite, arms passable—that is to say, they are rather thin—but I find compensation for this defect in knowing that my legs are perfect." Poor little Sidonie! At length the Duchesse de Mazarin's suit for separation and an allowance was settled in her favour. She returned to the Palais Mazarin, and the Duc took up his abode at the Arsenal. But it was merely a truce. M. de Mazarin appealed, and fearing lest she might once more fall into his hands, the Duchesse, who had tasted liberty, aided by a friend of her brother's, the Chevalier de Rohan, fled in male attire, accompanied by her maid similarly disguised and two men- servants. The Duc de Mazarin wormed a lettre de cachet out of the reluctant King, and had his wife hotly chased. The fugitives, however, succeeded in getting out of the country in safety, and had a series of adventures that are very suggestive of Dumas. No one ever fled with a lighter heart or more casually, so to speak, than the Duchesse de Mazarin; and no one ever more thoroughly entered into the spirit of adventure than she. At Neuchâtel they took her for the Duchesse de Longueville, the celebrated heroine of the Fronde, and she received an embarrassing ovation. Only Madame de Longueville, they said, went about dressed as a man. At a small garrison town in the Alps "we were all liked to be knocked on the head, owing to our ignorance of the language," and on arriving at the village of Altdorf, on Lake Lucerne, the party were quarantined for forty days, on account of the indisposition of the Duchesse, caused by an injury to her knee received some days before. In this wretched little village she says that a farrier was the local surgeon, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty he could be got to agree that it would not be necessary to amputate her leg. Finally Milan was reached, where the Constable Colonna and his wife, Marie Mancini, the Duchesse's sister, were waiting to receive her. At Paris the scandal caused by this flight was the talk of the town and the Court; the reputation of the Duchesse de Mazarin was torn to shreds. She considered her freedom, however, cheap at the price, and, joined by her brother, the Duc de Nevers, she and the Colonnas spent several months touring about Italy. This delightful jaunt was but a lull in the cyclone that had swept her into Italy, and was to sweep her back to France. At Rome, where she hoped to make her residence, humiliations as insupportable as any she had known in the Palais Mazarin awaited her. Penniless and déclassée, the beautiful fugitive was an embarrassing incubus to her Roman relations. They passed her on from one to the other, snubbing and quarrelling with her, till at last, reduced to pawning her "little" jewels, as she called them, to distinguish them from her "big" ones still in the Duc de Mazarin's hands, she decided that the fire from which she had escaped was preferable to the frying-pan into which she had fallen. So, accompanied by her brother, who was returning to marry a niece of Madame de Montespan, she went back to France with the intention of throwing herself on the mercy of her husband. Like true Mancinis, they spent six months on the journey. In the meantime the Duc de Mazarin, warned of his wife's intention, took the course that might have been expected of him. On arriving at the Château de Nevers, the Duchesse found the park infested with police, who had orders to arrest her and imprison her in the Abbey of Lys. But her relations were active at Court as well as her husband, and within a week the King, whose playmate she had been as a child, sent a company of dragoons to force the doors of her prison and release her. And to the mortification of her husband, and the astonishment of society, Madame de Mazarin entered Paris in the carriage of Colbert, and had an audience of Louis. The King, who arrogated to himself the right to arbitrate in the domestic squabbles of his subjects, high and low, tried to induce the Duc de Mazarin to take his wife back, but at this suggestion the emancipated Duchesse replied wittily but firmly with the cry of the Fronde: "Point de Mazarin! Point de Mazarin!" The King, however, concluded an arrangement, much to the stingy Duc's despair, by which Madame de Mazarin was to return to Italy on an allowance from her husband, as long as she remained out of the country, of 24,000 francs a year—a sum inadequate enough for one whose dot had been the greatest in Europe! "She will eat it at the first inn she comes to," remarked the courtier Lauzun cynically. In much less time than it had taken her to reach France from Rome, Madame de Mazarin found herself back in the Eternal City, and once more under the roof of her sister, Madame la Connétable. Much had transpired in the Palazzo Colonna since her departure. The Constable and his wife were no longer on friendly terms. The Constable had become faithless and cruel, while Madame la Connétable was in bad odour in Roman society on her own account—mixed bathing in the Tiber, Madame la Connétable in a gauze bathing costume, and the Chevalier de Lorraine all but living in the Palazzo Colonna! When the Duchesse arrived on the scene she found her sister, egged on by the Chevalier, the handsomest and most disreputable man of his century, and whose wit, vices, and exploits are plentifully sprinkled through its literature, bent on flight. At first, seeing in such a proposition fresh trouble for herself, she tried to smooth matters. But her efforts proving ineffectual, and perhaps also from a love of further adventures, she finally determined to aid and accompany her sister. One night, when the Constable was visiting at a country house near Rome, Madame la Connétable and the Duchesse de Mazarin donned men's clothes and, attended by their maids in similar apparel, drove off in a coach to Civita Vecchia. They arrived there at two in the morning and, not finding the fishing-boat they had engaged beforehand, were obliged to wait till dawn in a wood without the town. "The coachman," says the Duchesse in her memoirs, "having hunted high and low without finding our boat, was fain to hire another, which he got for a thousand crowns. While he was thus employed the postilion becoming impatient took one of the coach-horses and had the luck to meet with our boat, but it was late when he came back, and we were obliged to walk five miles on foot and go on board about three in the afternoon without having eaten or drunk since we left Rome. We had the luck to fall in with a very honest captain; for, as it was easy to see that we were women and not beggars, any other but he would have murdered us and thrown [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] us overboard. His crew asked us 'if we had not killed the Pope?'" In eight days these two extraordinary grandes dames disembarked from their fishing-smack at the little port of Ciotat, near Marseilles, whither they went on horseback, after one of the most thrilling journeys the Duchesse de Mazarin ever took. For their boat had been nearly lost in a storm and chased by Turkish pirates; the latter was a peril perhaps less terrifying to them than shipwreck, as it would have meant a new series of adventures. At Marseilles they were met by the Chevalier de Lorraine and another dazzling reprobate, and the four, who had no longer any reputations to lose—for, as the Duchesse says, "there was no fable horrible enough to be invented by the wickedness of man but was reported of us"—set out light-heartedly on a tour through Provence. The ladies, still wearing men's clothes, which mightily became them, at length reached Aix-les-Bains. Here their rank and unparalleled adventures afforded them the reception curiosity always offers to unconventionality—if it is feminine and beautiful. Some were for whipping them at a cart's wheel, others for putting them in a lunatic asylum; while Madame de Grignan, the wife of the governor, sent them proper clothing with the message "that they travelled like true heroines of romance, with abundance of jewels but no clean linen," and wrote to her mother, Madame de Sévigné, that their beauty was divine. Their stay at Aix, however, was but of short duration, for the approach of the Duc de Mazarin's police agents so alarmed the Duchesse that she abandoned her sister and slipped across the frontier to Chambéry, where one of her former suitors, now become the reigning Duke of Savoy, afforded her his protection. As for Madame la Connétable, she soon after fell into the hands of her ruthless Constable, who shut her up in various convents, from which she was always escaping, only to be caught again. Her last prison was a convent in Madrid, where she passed the greater part of her life—an imprisonment, however, nominal rather than real, for we find her frequently at the Spanish Court festivities. Madame de Villars, who saw her there, wrote to a friend in France that "she was even more beautiful at forty than at twenty, when Louis XIV. had loved her." But she was never happy. Of a different temperament from her sister Hortense, Marie Mancini had not the bravade necessary to conquer the hostility of the world. She could never live down her past, and finding herself free at the death of her husband, who begged her pardon in his will for the misery he had caused her, she returned to Italy, only to meet everywhere with a cold reception. History is not quite clear as to her last years, but it is believed that her children, at any rate, forgave her, as there is a monument to her memory in the cathedral at Pisa, where she died. For the first time in her career the fates were really kind now to the Duchesse de Mazarin. In Savoy she found the peace and quiet that her naturally indolent temperament craved, and for three years the infatuated Duke supported her in luxury at his Court. Pleasure, of which she was ever a devotee, was agreeably tempered by a taste for literature, art, and philosophy, which she developed at this time. Nor was love abandoned. She shared her heart between the unexacting Duke and a certain César Vischard. It was to the latter that she dictated her memoirs during her stay in Savoy, and as he played for a time a rather important part in her life a word about him will not be amiss. The Abbé de St. Réal, as he called himself, though never consecrated, was a chevalier d'industrie with a literary bent. Among his works, which had a certain ephemeral popularity, were a romance entitled "Don Carlos," which Schiller afterwards made use of for the stage, and a "Vie de Jésus." But he was best celebrated at the time and remembered now for the profligacy of his career. He may be said to have plumbed the bottomless pit of vice, and some of his letters which were intercepted by the agents of the Minister Louvois, whom Forneron says was a connoisseur in indecency, made even him shudder. Such was the man whom Madame de Mazarin now admitted to the closest intimacy, and with whom, on the sudden death of the Duke, she fled from Savoy to escape the vengeance of the jealous Duchess. "I learnt on arriving here," wrote from Geneva her whilom friend, the Marquise de Courcelles, with whom she had fallen out before her first flight from France, "that Madame de Mazarin had some days ago gone to Germany, I believe to Augsburg, and that because the Duchess of Savoy, immediately after the death of her husband, had ordered her out of the country. How miserable it must be for her to see herself hunted from place to place! But what is uncommon is that this woman triumphs over disgrace by follies that have no parallel, and that after having tasted shame she thinks only of enjoying herself. When passing through here she was on horseback dressed as a man and with twenty men in her suite, talking only of music and hunting and everything that suggests pleasure." In such costume and company she arrived at Amsterdam with the lightest of hearts after passing through countries aflame with war. As if she had taken the idea to visit her former suitors in turn, she decided upon going to England, which she reached in the month of December, 1675, and where she was destined to remain till her death in 1699, twenty-four years later. The real motive of the greatest heiress in Europe, now become a pure adventuress, in going to England was, no doubt, to lay siege to the heart of Charles II. But her ostensible motive was to visit her cousin by marriage, Mary of Modena, whom she had met when that princess passed through Savoy on her way to marry the Duke of York, and with whom she had struck up a friendship. The Duchess of York, as she expected, welcomed her warmly. Charles II. fell an instant victim to her charms, and she entered London society with unprecedented éclat. She was now thirty, and of the fourteen years since her marriage she had passed seven principally on the highway dressed as a man. This life, which would have broken the health of any other woman, had agreed with her wonderfully. Her appearance on her arrival in London may be imagined by the following description by Forneron: "The Duchesse de Mazarin was one of those Roman beauties in whom there is no doll-prettiness, and in whom unaided nature triumphs over all the arts of the coquette. Painters could not say what was the colour of her eyes. They were neither blue nor grey, nor yet black nor brown nor hazel. Nor were they languishing nor passionate, as if either demanding to be loved or expressing love. They simply looked as if she had basked in love's sunshine. If her mouth were not large, it was not a small one, and was suitably the fit organ for intelligent speech and amiable words. All her motions were charming in their easy grace and dignity. Her complexion was softly toned and yet warm and fresh. It was so harmonious that though [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] dark she seemed of beautiful fairness. Her jet-black hair rose in strong waves above her forehead, as if proud to clothe and adorn her splendid head. She did not use scent." Though fond of it, he might have added, and unlike her uncle the Cardinal, who was always perfumed like the garden of Armida. Ruvigny, the French Ambassador, wrote to Louis: "She is to all appearances a finely developed young girl. I never saw any one who so well defies the power of time and vice to disfigure. When she arrives at the age of fifty she will have the satisfaction of thinking when she looks in the mirror that she is as lovely as she ever was in her life." King Charles, in that characteristic way that made him most popular when most undeserving popularity, gave this superb beauty apartments in St. James's Palace and a pension of four thousand pounds sterling a year. The ball was at the feet of the adventuress. She at once became the centre of State intrigues, a party was formed around her. She saw herself on the point of dethroning, not the Queen, but the favourite, the all-powerful Duchess of Portsmouth. The corruption of the Court had reached the Parliament, and tinged even the patriotism of the people. The Duchess of Mazarin was chosen by Protestant England as the means of ridding the country from the harlot who had made it the satellite of France. They accepted her as the avenging champion; she at least was above-board and never resorted to trick or artifice. The situation is one of the most extraordinary spectacles in English history. Louis XIV. became alarmed. Ruvigny, honest Huguenot, was not the man to succeed in threading the maze of the foul diplomatic labyrinth in which he suddenly found himself by the success of the Duchesse de Mazarin. He suggested that, as the star of the Duchess of Portsmouth appeared to be declining, the French Court should throw her over and make terms with her rival. But the shrewd French Court was unwilling to desert a harlot whom they could trust for a harlot who had a grievance against them. Ruvigny was replaced by the crafty Courtin, one of Louis' ablest servants. Before going to England he went to see the Duc de Mazarin in the hope of ingratiating himself with that Tartuffe-ridden man, as well as the nation to which he was accredited, by bringing the Duchesse news that her plea for a fitting maintenance, strongly backed by Charles to Louis, was heard. But he little understood the man he had to deal with. The Duc de Mazarin, thoroughly unable to admit that he had ever given the least cause for the scandalous conduct of his wife, demanded that she should return to France and suffer herself to be incarcerated in a convent. The answer of Madame de Mazarin, who was living sumptuously at St. James's and the object of almost universal admiration, was such as might have been expected. When Courtin arrived in London the French influence seemed ruined at Whitehall. Every night Charles visited the fascinating Duchesse, and every day on repairing to the Duchess of York, his sister-in-law, who was ill at the time, he found the enchantress at her bedside. Nevertheless Courtin paid his court to the new favourite and studied her every action. "I saw Madame de Mazarin at High Mass at the chapel of the Portuguese ambassador, who is dying of love for her," he wrote to Louis, "but could not help noticing that she betrayed disgust at the length of the service." The conversion of England to Catholicism, no less than the French influence, seemed doomed by the sway of the fair agnostic. Her position was so important that Courtin advised Louis to force the Duc de Mazarin to accede to her demand that he should allow her fifty thousand a year of the Cardinal's fortune, send her her jewels, laces, and precious furniture, and swear never more to molest her if she returned to France. The great Louis humbled himself to plead with her; even the Abbé de St. Réal, who still hung about her and talked of Charles like an aggrieved husband, was not neglected. Courtin promised him the favour of the French Court. But suddenly in the heyday of her triumph the fears and hopes that the Duchesse had raised to such a pitch were dashed by the Duchesse herself. She was not equal to the position; none of the Mancinis had the ambition or political instinct of their famous uncle, the Cardinal. Pleasure, not power, was what Madame de Mazarin really craved. Never had the enemies of the Duchess of Portsmouth leant on a weaker reed. As usual the Duchess let her heart get the better of her head; she flung herself, cost what it might, into the arms of the dashing Prince of Monaco, who was on a two months' visit to the English Court and stayed two years for sake of La Belle Mazarin. Her political rôle was over, and perhaps to no one connected with this intrigue did it give greater relief than to the protagonist herself. St. Réal, who had got together for his light-hearted mistress a good library, including such works as Appian and Tacitus, eaten up with jealousy, took the violent resolution of leaving England in the hope that she would call him back at Dover. But, as Forneron says, "she bore his absence with Roman fortitude and perhaps, like Louvois, who had perused some of his letters seized in the post, thought his room more agreeable than his company." As for Charles, he was furious and stopped her pension. But Charles's furies never lasted long; like the Duchesse, whose character and exciting career closely resembled his own, he was too easy-going to cherish resentment. He gave her back her pension shortly afterwards, saying, "It was in repayment of sums advanced him years before by the Cardinal," and treated her henceforth as the best of friends. But this method of repaying debts was not at all to the fancy of the Duc de Mazarin. He despatched a friend to England to tell the King that he considered such payment valueless, to which Charles replied with a cynical laugh, "Quite so; I do not ask for a receipt." Now began for the Duchesse the happiest and most brilliant period of her life. It lasted for the rest of the reign, during which, basking in the favour of the King and the Royal Family, and worshipped by the young Countess of Sussex, Charles's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland, she gave herself up to a life of pleasure. The consideration she enjoyed gave her great influence, which, as she detested politics, she made no use of save to increase her credit with the tradespeople. At first she did not feel the chain of debt to which she was fastened. Courtin wrote to Louvois, "If you had seen her dancing the furlano to the music of a guitar, which s...