The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Rafael Sabatini [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

yet she was never of

a temper to bear reproaches long. Under his scorn her anger kindled

and her humility was sloughed.

 

“What then?” she cried at last, eyes aflash through lingering tears.

“Is the blame all mine? If all this is true, it is no less true

that I was driven to it by my love for you and the despair to which

your heartlessness and infidelity reduced me. To you,” she

continued, gathering force at every word, “I sacrificed everything

- my honour, a noble husband who loved me, all that a woman prizes.

And what did you give me in exchange? Your cruel fickleness exposed

me to the low mockery of the lick-spittles of your Court. Do you

wonder that I went mad, and that in my madness I sacrificed what

shreds of self-respect you had left me? And now it seems I have

lost all but life. Take that, too, if it be your pleasure. Heaven

knows it has little value left for me! But remember that in

striking me you strike the mother of your children - the legitimate

children of France. Remember that!”

 

He remembered it. Indeed, he was never in danger of forgetting it;

for she might have added that he would be striking also at himself

and at that royal dignity which was his religion. And so that all

scandalous comment might be avoided she was actually allowed to

remain at Court, although no longer in her first-floor apartments;

and it was not until ten years later that she departed to withdraw

to the community of Saint Joseph.

 

But even in her disgrace this woman, secretly convicted among other

abominations of attempting to procure the poisoning of the King and

of her rival, enjoyed an annual pension of 1,200.000 livres; whilst

none dared proceed against those who shared her guilt - not even

the infamous Guibourg, the poisoners Romani and Bertrand, and La

Filastre - nor yet against some scores of associates of these, who

were known to live by sorcery and poisonings, and who might be

privy to the part played by Madame de Montespan in that horrible

night of magic at the Chateau de Villebousin.

 

The hot blast of revolution was needed to sweep France clean.

 

VI. THE NIGHT OF WITCHCRAFT

 

LOUIS XIV AND MADAME DE MONTESPAN

 

If you scrape the rubbish-heap of servile, coeval flattery that

usually smothers the personality of a monarch, you will discover a

few kings who have been truly great; many who have achieved

greatness because they were wisely content to serve as masks for

the great intellects of their time; and, for the rest, some bad

kings, some foolish kings, and some ridiculous kings. But in all

that royal gallery of history you will hardly find a more truly

absurd figure than that of the resplendent Roi Soleil, the Grand

Monarque, the Fourteenth Louis of France.

 

I am not aware that he has ever been laughed at; certainly never

to the extent which he deserves. The flatterers of his day,

inevitable products of his reign, did their work so thoroughly that

even in secret they do not appear to have dared to utter - possibly

they did not even dare to think - the truth about him. Their work

survives, and when you have assessed the monstrous flattery at its

true worth, swept it aside and come down to the real facts of his

life, you make the discovery that the proudest title their

sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity accept - Le Roi Soleil,

the SunKing - makes him what indeed he is: a king of opera bouffe.

There is about him at times something almost reminiscent of the

Court buffoons of a century before, who puffed themselves out with

mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excite laughter; with

this difference, however, that in his own case it was not intended

to be amusing.

 

A heartless voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to

wrap himself in what Saint-Simon has called a “terrible majesty.”

He was obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity - of

kingship. I cannot believe that he conceived himself human. He

appears to have held that being king was very like being God, and

he duped the world by ceremonials of etiquette that were very

nearly sacramental. We find him burdening the most simple and

personal acts of everyday life with a succession of rites of an

amazing complexity. Thus, when he rose in the morning, princes of

the blood and the first gentlemen of France were in attendance: one

to present to him his stockings, another to proffer on bended knee

the royal garters, a third to perform the ceremony of handing him

his wig, and so on until the toilette of his plump, not unhandsome

person was complete. You miss the incense, you feel that some

noble thurifer should have fumigated him at each stage. Perhaps

he never thought of it.

 

The evil fruits of his reign - evil, that is to say, from the point

of view of his order, which was swept away as so much anachronistic

rubbish - did not come until a hundred years later. In his own day

France was great, and this not because but in spite of him. After

all, he was not the absolute ruler he conceived himself. There were

such capable men as Colbert and Louvois at the King’s side’; there

was the great genius of France which manifests itself when and as

it will, whatever the regime - and there was Madame de Montespan

to whose influence not a little of Louis’s glory may be ascribed,

since the most splendid years of his reign were those between 1668

and 1678 when she was maitresse en titre and more than Queen of

France. The women played a great part at the Court of Louis XIV,

and those upon whom he turned his dark eyes were in the main as wax

under the solar rays of the SunKing. But Madame de Montespan had

discovered the secret of reversing matters, so that in her hands it

was the King who became as wax for her modelling. It is with this

secret - a page of the secret history of France that we are here

concerned.

 

Francoises Athenais de Tonnay-Charente had come to Court in 1660 as

a maid of honour to the Queen. Of a wit and grace to match her

superb beauty, she was also of a perfervid piety, a daily

communicant, a model of virtue to all maids of honour. This until

the Devil tempted her. When that happened, she did not merely eat

an apple; she devoured an entire orchard. Pride and ambition

brought about her downfall. She shared the universal jealousy of

which Louise de la Valliere was a victim, and coveted the honours

and the splendour by which that unfortunate favourite was surrounded.

 

Not even her marriage with the Marquis de Montespan some three years

after her coming to Court sufficed to overcome the longings born of

her covetousness and ambition. And then, when the SunKing looked

with favour upon her opulent charms, when at last she saw the object

of her ambition within reach, that husband of hers went very near

to wrecking everything by his unreasonable behaviour. This

preposterous marquis had the effrontery to dispute his wife with

Jupiter, was so purblind as not to appreciate the honour the SunKing

proposed to do him.

 

In putting it thus, I but make myself the mouthpiece of the Court.

 

When Montespan began to make trouble by railing furiously against

the friendship of the King for his wife, his behaviour so amazed the

King’s cousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, that she called him

“an extravagant and extraordinary man.” To his face she told him

that he must be mad to behave in this fashion; and so incredibly

distorted were his views, that he did not at all agree with her.

He provoked scenes with the King, in which he quoted Scripture,

made opposite allusions to King David which were in the very worst

taste, and even ventured to suggest that the SunKing might have

to reckon with the judgment of God. If he escaped a lettre de

cachet and a dungeon in the Bastille, it can only have been because

the King feared the further spread of a scandal injurious to the

sacrosanctity of his royal dignity.

 

The Marchioness fumed in private and sneered in public. When

Mademoiselle de Montpensier suggested that for his safety’s sake

she should control her husband’s antics, she expressed her

bitterness.

 

“He and my parrot,” she said, “amuse the Court to my shame.”

 

In the end, finding that neither by upbraiding the King nor by

beating his wife could he prevail, Monsieur de Montespan resigned

himself after his own fashion. He went into widower’s mourning,

dressed his servants in black, and came ostentatiously to Court in

a mourning coach to take ceremonious leave of his friends. It was

an affair that profoundly irritated the SunKing, and very nearly

made him ridiculous.

 

Thereafter Montespan abandoned his wife to the King. He withdrew

first to his country seat, and, later, from France, having

received more than a hint that Louis was intending to settle his

score with him. By that time Madame de Montespan was firmly

established as maitresse en titre, and in January of 1669 she gave

birth to the Duke of Maine, the first of the seven children she

was to bear the King. Parliament was to legitimize them all,

declaring them royal children of France, and the country was to

provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for them and their

heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolution a century

later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasitic anachronism

of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerable burden

it imposed upon them?

 

The splendour of Madame de Montespan in those days was something

the like of which had never been seen at the Court of France. On

her estate of Clagny, near Versailles, stood now a magnificent

chateau. Louis had begun by building a country villa, which

satisfied her not at all.

 

“That,” she told him, “might do very well for an opera-girl”;

whereupon the infatuated monarch had no alternative but to command

its demolition, and call in the famous architect, Mansard, to erect

in its place an ultra royal residence.

 

At Versailles itself, whilst the long-suffering Queen had to be

content with ten rooms on the second floor, Madame de Montespan was

installed in twice that number on the first; and whilst a simple

page sufficed to carry the Queen’s train at Court, nothing less than

the wife of a marshal of France must perform the same office for the

favourite. She kept royal state as few queens have ever kept it.

She was assigned a troop of royal bodyguards for escort, and when

she travelled there was a never-ending train to follow her six-horse

coach, and officers of State came to receive her with royal honours

wherever she passed.

 

In her immeasurable pride she became a tyrant, even over the King

himself.

 

“Thunderous and triumphant,” Madame de Sevigne describes her in

those days when the SunKing was her utter and almost timid slave.

 

But constancy is not a Jovian virtue. Jupiter grew restless, and

then, shaking off all restraint, plunged into inconstancy of the

most scandalous and flagrant kind. It is doubtful if the history

of royal amours, with all its fecundity, can furnish a parallel.

Within a few months, Madame de Soubise, Mademoiselle de

Rochefort-Theobon, Madame de Louvigny, Madame de Ludres, and some

lesser ones passed in rapid succession through the furnace of the

SunKing’s affection - which is to say, through the royal bed -

and at last the Court was