But grief was coming quickly on the heels of joy. The King was seized with a sudden and serious illness, after a banquet shared with his ally, the King of Prussia; and in a few days a malignant fever had brought him face to face with death. Madame de Chateauroux watched his sufferings with the eyes of despair. "Leaning over the pillow of the dying man, aghast and trembling, she fights for him with sickness and death, terror and remorse." With locked door she keeps her jealous watch by his bedside, allowing none to enter but Richelieu, the doctors, and nurses, whilst outside are gathered the Princes of the Blood and the great officers of the Court, clamouring for admittance.
It was a grim environment for the death-bed of a King, this struggle for supremacy, in which a frail woman defied the powers of France for the monopoly of his last hours. And chief of all the terrors that a.s.sailed her was the dread of that climax to it all, when her lover would have to make his last confession, the price of his absolution being, as she well knew, a final severance from herself.
Over this protracted and unseemly duel, in which blows were exchanged, entrance was forced, and Princes and ministers crowded indecently around the King"s bed; over the d.u.c.h.esse"s tearful pleadings with the confessor to spare her the disgrace of dismissal, we must hasten to the crowning moment when Louis, feeling that he was dying, hastily summoned a confessor, who, a few moments later, flung open the door of the closet in which the d.u.c.h.esse was waiting and weeping, and p.r.o.nounced the fatal words, "The King commands you to leave his presence immediately."
Then followed that secret flight to Paris, "amidst a torrent of maledictions," the d.u.c.h.esse hiding herself from view as best she could, and at each town and village where horses were changed, slinking back and taking refuge in some by-road until she could resume her journey.
Then it was that in her grief and despair she wrote to Richelieu, "Oh, my G.o.d! what a thing it all is! I give you my word, it is all over with me! One would need to be a poor fool to start it all over again."
But Louis was by no means a dead man. From the day on which he received absolution from his manifold sins he made such haste to recover that, within a month, he was well again and eager to fly to the arms of the woman he had so abruptly abandoned with all other earthly vanities. It was one thing, however, to dismiss the d.u.c.h.esse, and quite another to call her back. For a time she refused point-blank to look again on the King who had spurned her from fear of h.e.l.l; and when at last she consented to receive the penitent at Versailles she let him know, in no vague terms, that "it would cost France too many heads if she were to return to his Court."
Vengeance on her enemies was the only price she would accept for forgiveness, and this price Louis promised to pay in liberal measure.
One after the other, those who had brought about her humiliation were sent to disgrace or exile--from the Duc de Chatillon to La Rochefoucauld and Perusseau. Maurepas, the most virulent of them all, the King declined to exile, but he consented to a compromise. He should be made to offer Madame an abject apology, to grovel at her feet, a punishment with which she was content. And when the great minister presented himself by her bedside, in fear and trembling, to express his profound penitence and to beg her to return to Court, all she answered was, "Give me the King"s letters and go!"
The following Sat.u.r.day she fixed on as the day of her triumphant return--"but it was death that was to raise her from the bed on which she had received the King"s submission at the hands of his Prime Minister." Within twenty-four hours she was seized with violent convulsions and delirium. In her intervals of consciousness she shrieked aloud that she had been poisoned, and called down curses on her murderer--Maurepas. For eleven days she pa.s.sed from one delirious attack to another, and as many times she was bled. But all the skill of the Court physicians was powerless to save her, and at five o"clock in the morning of the 8th December the d.u.c.h.esse drew her last tortured breath in the arms of Madame de Mailly, the sister she had so cruelly wronged.
Two days later, de Goncourt tells us, she was buried at Saint Sulpice, an hour before the customary time for interments, her coffin guarded by soldiers, to protect it from the fury of the mob.
As for Madame de Mailly, she spent the last years of her troubled life in the odour of a tardy sanct.i.ty--washing the feet of the poor, ministering to the sick, bringing consolation to those in prison; and she was laid to rest amongst the poorest in the Cimetiere des Innocents, wearing the hair-shirt which had been part of her penance during life, and with a simple cross of wood for all monument.
CHAPTER XXVII
A MISTRESS OF INTRIGUE
"On 11th September," Madame de Motteville says, "we saw arrive from Italy three nieces of Cardinal Mazarin and a nephew. Two Mancini sisters and the nephew were the children of the youngest sister of his Eminence; and of the sisters Laure, the elder, was a pleasing brunette with a handsome face, about twelve or thirteen years of age; the second (Olympe), also a brunette, had a long face and pointed chin. Her eyes were small, but lively; and it might be expected that, when fifteen years of age, she would have some charm. According to the rules of beauty, it was impossible to grant her any, save that of having dimples in her cheeks."
Such, at the age of nine or ten, was Olympe Mancini, who, in spite of her childish lack of beauty, was destined to enslave the handsomest King in Europe; and, after a life of discreditable intrigues, in which she incurred the stigma of witchcraft and murder, to end her career in obscurity, shunned by all who had known her in her day of splendour.
It was a singular freak of fortune which translated the Mancini girls from their modest home in Italy to the magnificence of the French Court, as the adopted children of their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, the virtual ruler of France, and the avowed lover (if not, as some say, the husband) of Anne of Austria, the Queen-mother. "See those little girls,"
said the wife of Marechal de Villeroi to Gaston d"Orleans, pointing to the Mancini children, the centre of an admiring crowd of courtiers.
"They are not rich now; but some day they will have fine chateaux, large incomes, splendid jewels, beautiful silver, and perhaps great dignities."
And how true this prophecy proved, we know; for, of the Cardinal"s five Mancini nieces (for three others came, later, as their uncle"s protegees), Laure found a husband in the Duc de Mercoeur, grandson of Henri IV.; two others lived to wear the coronet of d.u.c.h.ess; Olympe, as we shall see, became Comtesse de Soissons; and Marie, after narrowly missing the Queendom of France, became the wife of the Constable Colonna, one of the greatest n.o.bles of Italy.
Nor is there anything in such high alliances to cause surprise; for their future was in the hands of the most powerful, ambitious, and wealthy man in France. From their first appearance as his guests they were received with open arms by Louis" Court. They were speedily transferred to the Palais Royal, to be brought up with the boy-King, Louis XIV., and his brother, the Prince of Anjou; while the Queen herself not only paid them the most flattering attentions and treated them as her own children, but herself undertook part of their education.
It was under such enviable conditions that the young daughters of a poor Roman baron grew up to girlhood--the pets of the Queen and the Court, the playfellows of the King, and the acknowledged heiresses of their uncle"s millions; and of them all, not one had a keener eye to the future than Olympe of the long face, pointed chin, and dimples. It was she who entered with the greatest zest into the romps and games of her playmate, Louis XIV., who surrounded him with the most delicate flatteries and attentions, and practised all her childish arts and coquetries to win his favour. And she succeeded to such an extent that it was always the company of Olympe, and not of her more beautiful sisters, Hortense, Laure, or Marie, that Louis most sought.
Not that Olympe was always to remain the plain, unattractive child Madame de Motteville describes in 1647. Each year, as it pa.s.sed, added some touch of beauty, developed some latent charm, until at eighteen she was very fair to look upon. "Her eyes now" says Madame de Motteville, "were full of fire, her complexion had become beautiful, her face less thin, her cheeks took dimples which gave her a fresh charm, and she had fine arms and beautiful hands. She certainly seemed charming in the eyes of the King, and sufficiently pretty to indifferent spectators."
That she had wooers in plenty, even before she was so far advanced in the teens, was inevitable; but her personal preferences counted for little in face of the Cardinal"s determination to find for her, as for all his nieces, a splendid alliance which should shed l.u.s.tre on himself.
And thus it was that, without any consultation of her heart, Olympe"s hand was formally given to Prince Eugene de Savoie, Comte de Soissons, a man in whose veins flowed the Royal strains of Savoy and France.
It was a brilliant match indeed for the daughter of a petty Italian baron; and Mazarin saw that it was celebrated with becoming magnificence. On the 20th February, 1657, we see a brilliant company repairing to the Queen"s apartments, "the Comte de Soissons escorting his betrothed, dressed in a gown of silver cloth, with a bouquet of pearls on her head, valued at more than 50,000 livres, and so many jewels that their splendour, joined to the natural eclat of her beauty, caused her to be admired by everyone. Immediately afterwards, the nuptials were celebrated in the Queen"s chapel. Then the ill.u.s.trious pair, after dining with the Princesse de Carignan-Savoie, ascended to the apartments of his Eminence, the Cardinal, where they were entertained to a magnificent supper, at which the King and Monsieur did the company the honour of joining them."
Then followed two days of regal receptions; a visit to Notre Dame to hear Ma.s.s, with the Queen herself as escort; and a stately journey to the Hotel de Soissons, where the Comtesse"s mother-in-law "testified to her, by her joy and the rich presents which she made her, how great was the satisfaction with which she regarded this marriage."
Thus raised to the rank of a Princess of the Blood, Olympe was by no means the proud and happy woman she ought to have been. She had, in fact, aspired much higher; she had had dreams of sharing the throne of France with her handsome young playmate, the King; and to Louis, wife though she now was, she had lost none of the attraction she possessed when he called her his "little sweetheart" in their childish games together. "He continued to visit her with the greatest regularity," to quote Mr Noel Williams; "indeed, scarcely a day went by on which His Majesty"s coach did not stop at the gate of the Hotel de Soissons; and Olympe, basking in the rays of the Royal favour, rapidly took her place as the brilliant, intriguing great lady Nature intended her to be."
It is little wonder, perhaps, that Olympe"s foolish head was turned by such flattering attentions from her sovereign, or that she began to give herself airs and to treat members of the Royal family with a haughty patronage. Even La Grande Mademoiselle did not escape her insolence; for, as she herself records, "when I paid her a thousand compliments and told her that her marriage had given me the greatest joy and that I hoped we should always be good friends, she answered me not a word."
But Olympe"s supremacy was not to remain much longer unchallenged. The King"s vagrant fancy was already turning to her younger sister, Marie, whose childish plainness had now ripened to a beauty more dazzling than her own--the witchery of large and brilliant black eyes, a complexion of pure olive, luxuriant, jet-black hair, a figure of singular suppleness and grace, and a sprightliness of wit and a _gaiete de coeur_ which the Comtesse could not hope to rival. It soon began to be rumoured in Court that Louis spent hours daily in the company of Mazarin"s beautiful niece; a rumour which Hortense Mancini supports in her "Memoirs." "The presence of the King, who seldom stirred from our lodging, often interrupted us," she says; "my sister, Marie, alone was undisturbed; and you can easily understand that his a.s.siduity had charms for her, who was the cause of it, because it had none for others."
And as Louis" visits to the Mancini lodging became more and more frequent, each adding a fresh link to the chain that was binding him to her young sister, Madame de Soissons saw less and less of him, until an amused tolerance gave place to a genuine alarm. It was nothing less than an outrage that she, who had so long held first place in the King"s favour, should be ousted by a "mere child," the last person in the world whom she could have thought of as a rival. But the Comtesse was no woman to be easily dethroned. Although at every Court ball, fete, or ballet, Louis was now inseparable from her sister, she affected to ignore these open slights and lost no opportunity in public of vaunting her intimacy with His Majesty, even to the extent on one occasion, as Mademoiselle records, of taking Louis" seat at a ball supper and compelling him to share it with her.
But such shameless arrogance only served to estrange the King still further, and to make him seek still more the company of the young sister, who had already captured his heart as the Comtesse had never captured it. When Louis made his memorable journey to Lyons to meet the Princess Margaret of Savoy, it was to Marie that he paid the most courtly and tender attentions. "During the journey," says Mademoiselle, "he did not address a word to the Comtesse de Soissons"; and, indeed, on more than one occasion he showed a marked aversion to her.
At St Jean d"Angely, Louis not only himself escorted Marie to her lodging; he stayed with her until two o"clock in the morning. "Nothing,"
her sister Hortense records, "could equal the pa.s.sion which the King showed, and the tenderness with which he asked of Marie her pardon for all she had suffered for his sake." It was, indeed, no secret at Court that he had offered her marriage, and had taken a solemn vow that neither Margaret of Savoy nor the Infanta of Spain should be his wife.
But, as we have seen in a previous chapter, both the Queen and Mazarin were determined that the Infanta should be Queen of France; and that his foolish romance with the Mancini girl should be nipped in the bud.
There was also another powerful influence at work to thwart his pa.s.sion for Marie. The indifference of the Comtesse de Soissons had given place to a fury of resentment; and she needed no instigation of her uncle to determine at any cost to recover the place she had lost in Louis"
favour. She brought all her armoury of coquetry and flatteries to bear on him, and so far succeeded that, we read, "the King has resumed his relations with the Comtesse; he has recommenced to talk and laugh with her; and three days since he entertained M. and Madame de Soissons with a ball and a play, and afterwards they partook of _medianoche_ (a midnight banquet) together, pa.s.sing more than three hours in conversation with them."
Meanwhile Marie, realising the hopelessness of her pa.s.sion in face of the opposition of her uncle and the Queen, and of Louis" approaching marriage to the Spanish Princess, had given him unequivocally to understand that their relations must cease, and the rupture was complete when the Comtesse told the King of her sister"s dallying with Prince Charles of Lorraine, of their a.s.signations in the Tuileries, of their mutual infatuation, and of the rumours of an arranged marriage. "_Cela est bien_" was all Louis remarked, but the dark flush of anger that flooded his face was a sweet reward to the Comtesse for her treachery.
A few days later her revenge was complete when, in the King"s presence, she rallied her sister on her low spirits. "You find the time pa.s.s slowly when you are away from Paris," she said; "nor am I surprised, since you have left your lover there"; to which Marie answered with a haughty toss of the head, "That is possible, Madame."
One formidable rival thus removed from her path, Madame de Soissons was not long left to enjoy her triumph; for another was quick to take the place abandoned by the broken-hearted Marie--the beautiful and gentle La Valliere, who was the next to acquire an ascendancy over the King"s susceptible heart. Once more the Comtesse, to her undisguised chagrin, found herself relegated to the background, to look impotently on while Louis made love to her successor, and to meditate new schemes of vengeance. It was in vain that Louis, by way of amende, found for her a lover in the Marquis de Vardes, the most handsome and dissolute of his courtiers, for whom she soon developed a veritable pa.s.sion. Her vanity might be appeased, but her bitterness--the _spretoe injuria formoe_--remained; and she lost no time in plotting further mischief.
With the help of M. de Vardes and the Comte de Guiche, she sent an anonymous letter to the Queen, containing a full and intimate account of her husband"s amour with La Valliere--the letter enclosed in an envelope addressed in the handwriting of the Queen of Spain. Fortunately for Maria Theresa"s peace of mind the letter fell into the hands of Louis himself, who was naturally furious at such treachery and determined to make those responsible for it suffer--when he should discover them. As, however, the investigation of the matter was entrusted to de Vardes, it is needless to say that the culprits escaped detection.
Madame de Soissons" next attempt to bring about a rupture between the King and La Valliere, by bringing forward a rival in the person of the seductive Mlle de la Motte-Houdancourt, proved equally futile, when Louis discovered by accident that she was but a tool in Madame"s designing hands; and for a time the Comtesse was sent in disgrace from the Court to nurse her jealousy and to devise more effectual plans of vengeance.
What form these took seems clear from an investigation held at the close of 1678 into a supposed plot to poison the King and the Dauphin--a plot of which La Voisin, one of the greatest criminals in history, was suspected of being the ringleader. During this inquiry La Voisin confessed that the Comtesse de Soissons had come to her house one day "and demanded the means of getting rid of Mile de la Valliere"; and, further, that the Comtesse had avowed her intention to destroy not only Louis" mistress, but the King himself.
Such a confession was well calculated to rouse a storm of indignation in France, where Madame de Soissons had made many powerful enemies. The Chambre unanimously demanded her arrest; but before it could be effected, Madame, stoutly declaring her innocence, had shaken the dust of Paris off her feet, and was on her way to Brussels.
During her flight to safety, we are told, "the princ.i.p.al inns in the towns and villages through which she pa.s.sed refused to receive her"; and more than once she was compelled to sleep on straw and suffer the insults of the populace, which reviled her as sorceress and poisoner.
"We are a.s.sured," Madame de Sevigne writes, "that the gates of Namur, Antwerp, and other towns have been closed against the Countess, the people crying out, "We want no poisoner here"!" Even at Brussels, whenever she ventured into the streets she was a.s.sailed by a storm of insults; and on one occasion, when she entered a church, "a number of people rushed out, collected all the black cats they could find, tied their tails together, and brought them howling and spitting into the porch, crying out that they were devils who were following the Comtesse."
In the face of such chilling hospitality Madame de Soissons was not tempted to make a long stay in Brussels; and after a few months of restless wandering in Flanders and Germany, she drifted to Spain where she succeeded in ingratiating herself with the Queen. She found little welcome however from the King, who, as the French Amba.s.sador to Madrid wrote, "was warned against her. He accused her of sorcery, and I learn that, some days ago, he conceived the idea that, had it not been for a spell she had cast over him, he would have had children.... The life of the Comtesse de Soissons consists in receiving at her house all persons who desire to come there, from four o"clock in the evening up to two or three hours after midnight. There is, sire, everything that can convey an air of familiarity and contempt for the house of a woman of quality."
That Carlos" suspicions were not without reason was proved when one day his Queen, after, it is said, drinking a gla.s.s of milk handed to her by the Comtesse, was taken suddenly ill and expired after three days of terrible suffering. That she died of poison, like her mother, the ill-fated sister of our second Charles, seems probable; but that the poison was administered by the Comtesse, whose friend and protectress she was and who had every reason to wish her well, is less to be believed, in spite of Saint-Simon"s unequivocal accusation. Certainly the crime was not proved against her; for we find her still in Spain in the following spring, when Carlos, his patience exhausted, ordered her to leave the country.
After a short stay in Portugal and Germany, Madame de Soissons was back in Brussels, where she spent the brief remainder of her days--"all the French of distinction who visited the City" (to quote Saint-Simon) "being strictly forbidden to visit her." Here, on the 9th October, 1690, her beauty but a memory, bankrupt in reputation, friendless and poor, the curtain fell on the life so full of mis-used gifts and baffled ambitions.
CHAPTER XXVIII
AN ILL-FATED MARRIAGE
Few Kings have come to their thrones under such brilliant auspices as Milan I. of Servia; few have abandoned their crowns to the greater relief of their subjects, or have been followed to their exile by so much hatred. But a fortnight before Milan"s accession, his cousin and predecessor, Prince Michael, had been foully done to death by hired a.s.sa.s.sins as he was walking in the park of Topfschider, with three ladies of his Court; and the murdered man had been placed in a carriage, sitting upright as in life, and had been driven back to his palace through the respectful greetings of his subjects, who little knew that they were saluting a corpse.