MADAME DE MONTBAZON.

Amongst the celebrated women of the first half of the seventeenth century, many were, says Bussy Rabutin, “pitiable,” whilst some were “brazen.” We must assert unhesitatingly that Madame de Montbazon belonged to the latter class. She was “one of those personages, however, who made the most noise” at the courts of Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, as we are told by Madame de Motteville, and as we have already seen by the prominent political part she played in the factions of the Importants and the Fronde. In summing up her character, we shall be silent upon the subject of many of her faults, though it is not our wish to excuse one of them.

“She was not wanting in wit,” remarks Tallemant; “for she had been acquainted with so many witty people!” There is a spice of flattery in this, for we must agree with Madame de Motteville and M. Cousin that the wit of the dazzling rival of Madame de Longueville was far from being as delicate and attractive as was her handsome person, though we cannot at the same time look upon Tallemant’s phrase as a calumny. Both space and courage would alike fail us, should we attempt to produce a list of all the lovers, titled and untitled, who had peculiar opportunities of sharpening the wit of Madame de Montbazon.

Among the first of her adorers, beside the name of Gaston d’OrlÉans, must be cited that of the Duke de Chevreuse, her husband’s kinsman. Their liaison furnished matter for a ballad, and was very nearly the cause of a duel at the door of the king’s apartments, between the Duke de Montmorency and the Duke de Chevreuse; but that did not hinder Madame de Montbazon from becoming the friend of her step-daughter, who, older and more experienced in the political world than she was, often used her as an instrument. The young Duchess was a more dangerous rival to Madame de GuÉmÉnÉ, her other step-daughter, from whom she carried off, not her husband, but the Count de Soissons. And it was not enough that she obtained an easy conquest over her, for she instigated the Count to add outrage to desertion, and he docilely compromised his forsaken mistress by a gross and shameful perfidy.

But, passing rapidly over the errors of her youth, it is the close of Madame de Montbazon’s political career with which we are now concerned. The influence which the gay and gallant Duchess long exercised over the Duke de Beaufort had sometimes proved useful to the interests of the Court, and during the early troubles of the Fronde the Queen and Mazarin took care to keep her favourably disposed towards them. But the importance which Beaufort’s infatuated passion gave or seemed to give her, speedily made the Duchess one of the heroines of the Fronde—though, it must be owned, one of the secondary heroines. Her allies were careful not to allow her to take upon herself a part she was unable to sustain. Violent, unreflecting, accessible to the most contradictory suggestions, ready for any turn, and the sport of every caprice, she was wanting in all the better qualities of a political woman. Her indiscretion became formidable on all occasions when secresy was necessary, and more than once the Duke de Beaufort was obliged to be excluded from the assemblages at which the chiefs of the Fronde took counsel together. It was well known that he dare not keep anything from his mistress, and it might chance that a royalist might turn to account the confidence which she wormed out of her lover, for conformity in political sentiments was not one of the conditions which she imposed upon the adorers whose homage she welcomed. Her correspondence with Marshal d’Albret exposed her moreover to be subject to, without being aware of it, the influences of the Court, and her intimacy with Vineuil tended to make her an ally, in spite of herself, of the Prince de CondÉ. Hence it is easy to explain the mistrust with which she inspired the Coadjutor of Paris, the future Cardinal de Retz. She herself did not fail to perceive the surveillance which he exercised around her; and she was irritated to see with what facility he modified in his own fashion the line of conduct which she had just previously dictated to the Duke de Beaufort. She was forced to confess that his authority prevailed over her own. One evening, disheartened by the incapacity of the grandson of the great Henry, and terrified by the dangers to which their imprudence exposed the Frondeurs, and esteeming the political talent of Gondi to be more truly worthy of her own, she opened her heart to him, and proposed that they should enter into a treaty of alliance. The gallant Coadjutor would only consent to accept one portion of the treaty, and, happily for the Duke de Beaufort, who was busily occupied with a game at chess during that strange conversation, he stipulated to eliminate from the proposed association everything that related to politics. But the Duchess would not consent to those terms.

In love, Madame de Montbazon was very mercenary; we say it once for all, and beg to be excused from citing proof of the assertion. In politics, she also surrendered herself very willingly to any representation the eloquence of which was aided by crowns or pistoles. It was thus that in the month of August, 1649, she promised that the Duke de Beaufort should not oppose the return of the Court, at the same moment that she opened her hand to receive a considerable sum. It was thus that, the same year, she accepted two thousand pistoles from the Spanish envoys, who, desirous of rendering her favourable, promised besides that the sum of twenty thousand crowns and a pension of six thousand livres if she would secure to them the concurrence of the Duke de Beaufort. But she did not always meet with debtors so honest as Mazarin and the Spanish ambassadors. In 1650, whilst the treaty was preparing which sought to unite the Frondeurs with the Princes, then prisoners at Havre, a negotiation was entered into with Madame de Montbazon in which the Prince de Conti was offered to her as a husband for her daughter. The proposition was not accepted. The proposers were not discouraged, and a sum of a hundred thousand crowns was offered to her. This time the Duchess could not resist, and the treaty was signed in all due form. Unfortunately, when the Princes were liberated, she was imprudent enough to confide her voucher to the Princess Palatine, who, with perfidious haste, had promised to take care of her interests. She never saw the precious contract again, and the Prince de CondÉ only answered her demands by cruel and cutting jeers. In that adventure, it was not Madame de Montbazon who played the shabbiest part.

The aid which the Duchess had often lent the Court amidst intrigues the most contradictory, did not preserve her from exile when the King made his entry into Paris, on its definite pacification in October, 1652. She did not return thither till 1657. “She was still beautiful, and as much carried away by vanity as though she had been only in her twenty-fifth year,” says Madame de Motteville, when noting her reappearance. “She relied all the same upon her charms,” she adds with a somewhat malicious finesse, “for she returned with the same desire of pleasing; and those who saw her assured me that the mourning garb which she wore as a widow, and to which she added everything in the shape of ornament that self-love could suggest, rendered her so charming, that in her case it might be said that the course of nature was changed, since so many years and so much beauty could meet together.”[5] Thus, by dint of care and art, did Madame de Montbazon succeed in preserving her beauty much longer than she could have hoped for, since, in the pride of her eighteen summers, she declared that old age commenced at thirty, and requested it as a favour that she might be flung into the river and drowned so soon as she reached the dreaded period. Who would have dared to remind her of that imprudent proposal in 1640? And who could have refused her a respite even in the latter moments of her existence?

Permission had scarcely been given her to appear at Court, when she was attacked by an illness which seemed nothing more than a common cold, but which turned out to be the measles. In the course of a few days the malady proved fatal. Three hours only were accorded to this earthly-minded woman to prepare for death. She made confession and received the sacrament with every indication of the most lively piety and the most sincere repentance, saying to her daughter, the Abbess of Caen, “that she regretted not having always lived in a cloister as she had, and that she looked with horror upon her past life.” Up to those last three hours, she had refused to believe that there were degrees in the morality of women, and to admit that they were not all equally virtuous.

“She was little regretted by the Queen,” Madame de Motteville tells us, “as she had frequently forsaken her interests to follow her own caprices. The minister heard of her death with the feeling one entertains for one’s deceased enemy. Her former lovers looked upon her with contempt; and those who admired her still, were but little touched at her loss, because each, jealous of his rival, left tears and grief as the share of the Duke de Beaufort, who was at that moment the most beloved.”

On that point Madame de Motteville was in error. Which of the two—M. de Beaufort or M. de RancÉ—was most beloved it would be difficult to determine. But this is so far certain, that M. de RancÉ, the future founder of La Trappe, was the lover who regretted her the most sincerely. He had hastened to her sick couch so soon as he heard of her illness; and he had arrived, not too late, and only to find himself the spectator of a most horrible sight, as has frequently been related with much romantic and dramatic detail, but soon enough to pass within her chamber the last hours left to her of life. “Already balancing and wrestling between heaven and this world,” says Saint Simon, who was in his confidence, “the sight of that so sudden death achieved in him the determination of withdrawing from the world which he had for some time meditated.”

Among the different versions of this catastrophe, Laroque asserts that, after an absence on a long journey, on De RancÉ’s return, he called at the HÔtel Montbazon, and then learned, for the first time, the death of the Duchess; that he was shown into her room, where, to his horror, the headless body lay in its coffin. The head had been cut off, either because the lead coffin was not made long enough or for the purpose of an anatomical study. Some assert that De RancÉ took the head, and that the skull of the woman he loved so well was found in his cell at La Trappe. History, however, will not accept this romantic incident.

Touching the fate of De RancÉ’s rival—when Louis XIV. returned to Paris in 1652, the Duke de Beaufort submitted to the royal authority, and took no further part in the civil war, which the Prince de CondÉ carried on for several years longer. Later, the Duke obtained the command of the royal fleet. In 1664 and 1665, he was at the head of several expeditions against the African corsairs. In 1666 he commanded the French men-of-war ordered to join those of Holland against England. Finally, in 1669, he went to the aid of the Venetians, attacked by the Turks in the island of Candia. The galleys and vessels, newly constructed in the port of Toulon, disembarked seven thousand men under Beaufort—a contingent too weak for such a dangerous undertaking. That aid only served to retard the taking of Candia for a few days, and was the means of useless bloodshed. In a sortie, the rash and impetuous grandson of Henry the Great was cut to pieces in the most merciless way; and as his body could not be found after the fight, his death gave rise to fables sought to be rendered probable by the remembrance of the eccentric part he had previously played.

[5] The same sentiments were thus versified by Loret, when announcing that the Duchess had obtained permission to return to Court:

“Montbazon, la belle douairiÈre,
Dont les appas et la lumiÈre
Sous de lugubres vÊtements
Paraissent encore plus charmants....”