Читать книгу Court Beauties of Old Whitehall: Historiettes of the Restoration - W. R. H. Trowbridge - Страница 5

St. Evremond.

Of all the brilliant moths that flitted round the beauty, charm, and hospitality of the Duchesse de Mazarin, St. Evremond was the wittiest, gayest, best educated, most popular, and sincerest. He was over thirty years her senior, a man past sixty when she came to England, and, from the day of their meeting to the day of her death, Madame de Mazarin found in him a devoted friend and a sensible adviser. He was to her father-confessor and duenna in one; while her house was his to enter at will, her society his chief happiness, and her death the one real grief that perhaps he ever knew. The relation that existed between them was purely platonic; and if there are those who see merely a psychological phenomenon in a clean, honest attachment between an upright old philosopher and a young wayward woman, we prefer in this instance to claim it as a virtue for both. Madame de Mazarin's account at least in the Book of Life is so heavily against her that, without letting her off, we can afford to credit her with so small a virtue.

She used to call him playfully her "old satyr," for he was given to satire, and his views of life were so generous as to be Epicurean. His philosophy, he declared, consisted in hatred of vice, indulgence to guilt, and grief for misfortune—a view of duty that alone was calculated to make him a favourite in such loose society as that of the Restoration. But St. Evremond had not always been a sage with "a disfiguring growth of a large wen between his eyebrows which he treated as a subject for a joke." He had once upon a time been young, good-looking, and unsteady, one of six sons in an old Norman family. In their youth, he says, his brothers were known at home by nicknames that hit off their characters well. There was St. Evremond the Honest, St. Evremond the Crafty, St. Evremond the Soldier, St. Evremond the Beau, St. Evremond the Hunter. He himself, even then, was known as St. Evremond the Wit. His father gave him a brilliant education and destined him for the Bar, but the Thirty Years' War was just then seducing all the young men of Europe to the career of arms, so St. Evremond gave up studying law and got a commission. He saw a vast amount of active service and was dangerously wounded at the Battle of Nordlingen. He who for forty years wielded the pen had previously carried a sword for thirty. In fencing he had few, if any, superiors—St. Evremond's pass was famous in the art of self-defence.

Even in those days he was noted for his sarcasms, and it was to his pen that he owed the loss of his sword. An intercepted letter ruined him. It contained a scathing satire on Cardinal Mazarin, in which he declared, with poisoned irony à propos of a certain treaty which Mazarin had signed, that "a Minister does not so much belong to the State as the State to the Minister." Mazarin was dead, but Anne of Austria took upon herself to resent the sneer. St. Evremond was obliged to flee in order to escape the Bastille. He arrived in England in 1661, aged forty-eight, and of all the French exiles who lived on the charity of Charles none were so worthy of it. When Madame de Mazarin came to England he had been established fourteen years in that country. His reputation was European, and among his many admirers and correspondents abroad he counted the famous courtezan, Ninon de Lenclos. Most of his friends led openly profligate lives, his was conspicuously clean. In an age of corruption he preserved his honour without earning the contempt of his companions. Over-rigid in morals, he was indulgent to others; irreligious, he respected religion. He was one of the forerunners of Voltaire, or, rather, Voltaire might have been like him had he been born a century earlier. St. Evremond's wit was Voltairean with the poison left out. Once towards the end of her long life Ninon wrote him repining she had come to the conclusion with La Rochefoucauld that "old age was the hell of women." "Don't let M. de La Rochefoucauld's hell frighten you," he replied; "it is a hell specially contrived for a maxim. Speak boldly the word Love and let that of Old Woman never come out of your mouth."

Regarded then as one of the most intellectual luminaries of his time, he is remembered now merely as one of the flashlights that history turns on the Court and times of the last Stuarts. His place is with Pepys and Evelyn and Gramont; no book on Restoration society could be written without mentioning him. It was the age of Satire. At Whitehall the good-natured, cynical King and his courtiers enjoyed the lampoons and couplets of the coffee-houses, provided they were witty. At the Duchesse de Mazarin's the satire was refined, the banter delicate. "Ah, Monsieur Vossius," she cried, as the clerical sceptic entered her rooms one day, "perhaps you who read all sorts of good books, except the Bible, will explain a point we are discussing?" As she never cherished resentment, and detested nothing so much as dissension, it was understood that those who wished to enjoy her hospitality and friendship should leave their private spites and ill-temper at home. At no place in London was pleasure so unclouded as at the Duchesse de Mazarin's. "The greatest freedom in the world is to be seen there," wrote St. Evremond, "and an equal discretion; everybody is more commodiously served at Madame de Mazarin's than at home and more respectfully than at Court. 'Tis true there are frequent disputes, but then it is with more knowledge than heat; it is not done out of a spirit of contradiction, but only to discover fully the matters in agitation; rather to animate conversation than to inflame it. What they game for is inconsiderable, and as they play only for diversion, you cannot discover in their faces either the fear of losing or the annoyance of having lost. Gaming," adds the honest old Epicurean, "is relieved there by the most delicious repasts in the world."

In time, however, to St. Evremond's dismay, the spirited, cultured discussions began to flag, and finally almost entirely ceased. The passion of gambling took possession of the Duchesse; with her to flee from temptation was to yield to it, desire only ceased when she had drained it to the dregs. A shady croupier, Morin by name, obliged to leave Paris, came over to London and introduced basset. This game became the rage, and Morin dethroned the whole intellectual areopagus at Madame de Mazarin's. St. Evremond protested in vain, but he could not resist lending her money when she asked for it. To show that she was alive to his remonstrances at her extravagance, he was the only one of her creditors she ever repaid. In this way the gay, thoughtless years sped by; but if the thrilling adventures of her early life, consisting chiefly of flights in men's apparel, were over, there were still many strange and dramatic sensations in store for her. The most indolent of women, she was destined from first to last to live in a whirl of excitement.

Oates denounced her as an accomplice of all the Popish plots that agitated the country. That was an anxious time for the Duchesse as to all the French at Court. But it was as nothing to the experience that followed. In 1683, when not far off her fortieth year, the Baron Banier, a handsome, romantic young boy and son of one of Gustavus Adolphus's generals, came to London, and fell in love with Madame de Mazarin. It mattered not to him that she laughed at him, he went about the town with her name on his lips heedless of ridicule. Suddenly this harmless flirtation became tragic. Her nephew, the young Chevalier de Soissons, a brother of the yet-to-be-famous Prince Eugene of Savoy and son of her sister Olympe, came at this time to pay his aunt a visit. Like Baron Banier, the Chevalier de Soissons fell head over ears in love with her. Maddened by his horrible passion, he must needs take it into his head to be jealous of his Swedish rival. The two young fellows, blind to all sense of decency, to the éclat of such a duel, met, and the Chevalier de Soissons left Banier dead upon the field of dishonour. The noise of such a scandal may be imagined. The Chevalier would not, or could not, flee; he was arrested and tried, and without doubt, but for the pulling of many strings behind the scenes, would have been executed. "It is fire not blood that flows in the veins of us Mancinis," he is reported to have said. Thanks to the laxity of the laws in his time, the flaming young Chevalier was suffered to go to Malta and join the Order of the Knights Templars, among whom, far from his beautiful aunt, the fates granted him a few years of obscurity in which to cool.

"I could not have believed it possible," wrote Madame de Sévigné, "that the eyes of a grandmother could have wrought such havoc." But this shocking scandal, which called to mind the things that had been said of Madame de Mazarin and her brother years before, and made people even in that day of antique vice shudder, overwhelmed her. Shame, despair, and perhaps cunning, made her dive till the storm was spent. She closed her house, hung her salon in black, and saw nobody but the ever-faithful St. Evremond.

The scandal had not yet subsided when a fresh one burst over her head. Her eldest daughter, whom she had not seen for nearly twenty years, escaped from a convent, in which, in spite of her prayers, her father insisted she should take the veil, and fled to her mother. She was accompanied by the Marquis de Richelieu, a younger son, penniless, profligate, and as handsome as Adonis. The arrival of the couple could offer nothing but embarrassment to the Duchesse de Mazarin. For this elopement had attracted universal attention by the absurd behaviour of the Duc de Mazarin and the ridicule to which it exposed this strange family. Instead of removing every obstacle at once to his runaway daughter's marriage, even with so undesirable a parti as the marquis, the Duc de Mazarin went about consulting monks and priests all over France as to whether he should consent to the marriage or not. In the meantime the fugitives were obliged to live as lover and mistress for two years before M. de Mazarin yielded.

Perhaps the fact of such a rake as de Richelieu remaining faithful for a period of such duration may be more mercenary than it appears. But if he counted on this unexceptional fidelity to win him some of the Mazarin millions that his father-in-law had not yet frittered away, he was mistaken. The Duc gave his daughter a paltry dowry and a pardon signed by the King—the first ever granted for the abduction of a novice from her convent. Marriage, however, spoilt the romance, for the habits contracted when she was an outlaw, and perhaps also the Mancini "fire not blood" in her veins, prevented the Marquise de Richelieu from settling down. She climbed over a wall one night and went off with another man, to a life which, while possessing all the elements of that adventurous libertinage that history so often condones in condemning, can be described by no stretch of the imagination as anything else than vulgar prostitution. As for M. le Marquis, he went back to his pot-house companions and the bottle—the latter a liquid solace that enabled his mother-in-law as well to sustain the shafts of outrageous fortune.

For the ridicule that never made the least impression on the Duc de Mazarin was the only thing apparently that could make the least impression on his scandal-proof Duchesse. Ridicule and debt produced in her a black melancholy which she tried to drown in whisky. In sober moments the once insouciante beauty talked of retiring to the same convent in Spain as her still more unhappy sister, Madame la Connétable. St. Evremond was in despair and used all his powers of persuasion and influence to combat so morbid a resolution and the drunkenness that prompted it. At the same time her ridiculous husband slyly took advantage of her unnerved state to try to get her into his power; he invited her to return to his roof and submit her life to his will. But unlike the Bourbons, Madame de Mazarin had learnt something from experience. She still had the sense to refuse and the wit to reply, "Point de Mazarin!"

The result of all these accumulated troubles was a serious illness, but with the recovery of her health she regained her former gaiety. To St. Evremond's delight the drink habit lost its hold upon her—for a time; her salon was once more the rendezvous of wit and fashion; cowed by her dazzling beauty, that nothing could impair, ridicule slunk out of her path. The last year of the orgy of the Restoration found her still basking in the sunshine of prosperity; she was one of the three sultanas who were with Charles that Sunday night in the grand gallery at Whitehall when the Merry Monarch was stricken with apoplexy. What a scene that must have been! What a terror and warning! The death of Charles in the prime of life finished the mad dance of pleasure; to none of the dancers had it been sweeter than to the Duchesse de Mazarin.

She shed floods of tears over her royal companion to whom she owed so much happiness, and whose Queen she might have been but for a miscalculation on the part of her uncle, the Cardinal. Well might she weep, for with the passing of Charles the dam that she had so successfully erected against misfortune burst. It is true that James II. continued to her the pension his brother had allowed her; but his reign was short, and his successor, the cold William of Orange, had other uses for his money than the pensioning of beautiful exiles. Moreover, the Restoration was over; public opinion had changed; it was a disgrace to have been connected with the Stuart Court. The very people who had once welcomed the Duchesse de Mazarin as a possible and popular King's mistress in place of the hated Duchess of Portsmouth now clamoured that she should be packed out of the country. Nothing could have been more disastrous for her than an order of banishment; it meant the choice between sordid poverty in Amsterdam or Brussels, or submission to her persecuting husband and imprisonment in France. What a fate for one who had queened it for fifteen joyous years at Whitehall! Fortunately, yet strangely, her enormous debts saved her from this degradation. Her creditors noisily protested against her expulsion, which would have meant to them a total loss, and they interceded with the new King in her favour. William finally granted her a pension of two thousand pounds and his protection.

For the next ten years, tormented by her creditors, whose prisoner now she virtually was, and persecuted by her husband, who brought a suit to deprive her for ever of any claim to her uncle's fortune, the Duchesse de Mazarin led a feverish life. "In the daytime," says Forneron, "she might be seen searching for Oriental curiosities in the ships that had freshly arrived from India. At Newmarket, she was up and out on horseback at five in the morning. On racing days there were the excitements of betting and of being jostled in the crowd on the course. In the evening there was the theatre. After the play came the oyster supper and then basset. Bacchus consoled her as she descended towards the grave." Occasionally her sisters and children visited her, and St. Evremond and a little court of admirers were ever in attendance. But her day was over, and the shadows of the everlasting night had begun to fall on her. In the summer of 1699, in her fifty-third year, her health failed rapidly; death had no terrors for her, she met it with indifference. The end to this turbulent life came at Chelsea, then a riverside village, whither she had gone for a change of air. Her sister, the Duchesse de Bouillon and her son, the Duc de la Meilleraye, had come over a few days before from Paris, and were with her at the last. St. Evremond, her constant friend for twenty-five years, was inconsolable; the famous wit followed her four years later at the age of ninety, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

But even in death the adventures of the Duchesse de Mazarin were not finished; the corpse of the notorious beauty could not get buried. It was seized by her creditors, who wrangled and haggled over it with her husband, whom the news of her death overwhelmed with a late remorse. He was obliged to pay her debts in full before her body was suffered to leave the country. But even when he finally got possession of it he did not bury it. This strange, half-mad old man, who had so often compelled his wife when alive to accompany him on his interminable wanderings, once more set out with her when dead. "For over a year," says Saint Simon, "M. de Mazarin, who had been so long separated from her, carried her body about with him from one estate to another. Once he suffered it to rest for a short time in the church of Notre Dame de Liesse, where the peasants treated it as that of a saint and touched it with their beads. At last he took it to Paris and buried it beside her famous uncle, the Cardinal, in the church of the 'Collège des Quatre Nations'"—now the Palais de l'Institut!

The following pasquinade of the day will serve as well as another for her epitaph:—

"Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,

Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!

Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin!

Ses enfants seraient sans chagrin

Si leur père était avec elle;

Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,

Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!"

My Lady Castlemaine. Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland.) After Wissing.