FRANCE.—HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO LOUIS XIII.

The memoranda we have already given will enable the reader to form an idea of the state of society at large. It remains to say something of the court, which, in some respects, was France.

From Louis IX. to Charles V. inclusive, it is said that the kings of France set no example of debauchery, and that the court rather encouraged virtue than vice. When the sisters-in-law of Philip the Handsome scandalized Paris by their loose life in the Tour de Nesle, into which they were said to make a practice of inveigling students, whom they assassinated when their lubricity was satiated, the king had them brought to punishment and dealt with as though the popular scandal was well founded in fact. When Charles VI. ascended the throne the scene changed. This unfortunate monarch was not only himself weak and depraved, but his wife, Isabel of Bavaria, was more vicious still. The pair encouraged every practice that could shock modesty or outrage decency. The queen lived almost openly with her lover, the Duke of Orleans. The king, so long as he retained his reason, was a leading actor in the scandalous masquerades of the court, and narrowly escaped losing his life on one occasion when he disguised himself as a devil, and danced immodestly before the ladies of the court. Round his loins, as round those of his fellow-demons, a sort of girdle of tow had been fastened, and all the masqueraders were chained together. In the midst of their dances, some foolish person threw a lighted torch at them. Their girdles took fire, and all were burned to death except the king, whom the Duchess of Berri saved by courageously raising her skirts and throwing them over the burning monarch.Charles had had many mistresses in his youth. When he went mad, the physicians directed the queen to refuse to discharge her conjugal duty. Charles had enough of his former nature left to resent this privation. He even employed force, and succeeded at last in compelling his wife to resume her place in the royal couch. She contrived, however, to defraud him by hiring a pretty girl to take her place. It is said Charles never detected the fraud. His wife, meanwhile, gave the reins to her loose passions, and was known to have had at least a score of lovers.

A very striking picture of the manners of the time is afforded by the story of Agnes Sorel. She was, as is known, the mistress of Charles VII., a lady of good family, and, otherwise than as the king’s mistress, of spotless reputation. Her influence over the king she used for the best of purposes. It was she who roused him to make the efforts which eventually expelled the foreigner from France. Her private character was laudable: she was amiable, generous, kind, and true; yet when she visited Paris in company with the king, the crowd followed her whenever she appeared in the streets, insulting her, and calling her a prostitute in the grossest terms. The king lived with her eighteen years, but never ventured to acknowledge her publicly as his mistress. Of the four daughters she bore him, three only were legitimated by his successor.

Louis XI. had a seraglio and a colony of bastards before he became king, nor did he alter his mode of life when he assumed control of the kingdom. His favorites were usually chosen from the lowest class of his subjects, many of whom had gone through an apprenticeship for the king’s service in the houses of prostitution of the capital. Louis never pretended to bear them any affection; he used them as he used the men of letters who composed for his diversion the lewd tales which have reached us.

Charles VIII. appears to have been more virtuous than his predecessors, though, of course, he did not pique himself upon any conjugal fidelity. A story is told which reflects credit upon his character. It is said that during his campaign in Italy, when he retired to his chamber one evening, he found there a young girl of marvelous beauty in a state of complete dÉshabillÉ. She was kneeling and in tears when the king entered. On Charles inquiring the cause of her sorrow, she confessed that her parents had sold her to the king’s valet for the use of his majesty, and conjured Charles to spare her. The king was touched by her distress. He inquired into the facts, and, finding that they were as she stated, and, farther, that she was betrothed to a youth of the neighborhood, he sent for him and married the young couple forthwith.

It appears certain that Charles’s death was caused by his indiscreet commerce with the sex. All the chroniclers state that he fell a victim to the indulgence of his passions, being frail of body and of feeble constitution.

The court of Louis XII. was purer than that of his predecessors, owing to the austere virtue of the queen. Louis himself had shared the profligacies of his family in his youth, but, on becoming king, he allowed his wife to regulate his household according to her principles. For the first time for many years, say the old chroniclers, prostitution was banished from court.

We shall have something to say of Francis I. in connection with syphilis, of which he was a conspicuous and an early victim. At the age of eighteen his mother stated that he had been punished where he sinned. The misfortune did not operate as a warning. His life was notoriously dissolute at a time when profligacy was so much the rule that it was hardly likely to be noticed. Brantome asserts positively[188] that his expedition to Italy was prompted by the desire to make acquaintance with a courtesan of Milan whose charms Admiral Bonnivet had extolled. Previous to his time, it seems, there had always been attached to the court a body of prostitutes for the use of the courtiers. Francis suppressed this body, and actually invited the ladies of the court to take their place. Brantome reviews this policy, and while he praises it in view of the “joyous pastimes” to which it led, he is bound to acknowledge that it produced the greatest immorality ever known in France. The ladies of the town followed the example of those of the court, and but little was wanting but that every woman in France became a prostitute.

It was the custom during this reign for the king to invite all his courtiers and their wives and daughters to lodge at the royal palaces from time to time. The ladies had apartments by themselves, and to each room the king had a key. We are assured that the husbands, fathers, and brothers of ladies who refused to submit to the royal demands had but little chance of retaining their offices. If they had been guilty of maladministration or peculation, as was the case with most of them, they could hope for pardon only through the complaisance of their female relatives. The story of M. de St. Vallier, who was reprieved on the scaffold in payment for the favors which his daughter, the beautiful Diana of Poictiers, had granted to the king, is too well known to need repetition here.

It was the boast of Francis that he had always respected the honor of the ladies of the court, and the boast was just, from his point of view. His visits to his mistresses were always made in a mysterious manner, and at night. Even to the Duchess of Etampes, who was his acknowledged mistress and procuress for a period of nearly twenty years, he never behaved in public in a manner to compromise her reputation. In private he was not so scrupulous. When this lady’s husband disturbed the king one evening, Francis drew his sword on him, and threatened to kill him instantly if he dared to reveal what every one knew, or to punish the wife at whose adultery he had connived for years. His idea seems to have been that words alone constituted the sin of debauchery. On one occasion he took all the ladies of the court to see the royal deer in the rutting season; but when a gentleman ventured a very obvious pleasantry on the scene, he exiled him from court for life.

His death has been frequently described. Some writers imply, by their silence, doubts of the authenticity of the story of La Belle FerronniÈre; but it rests on very tolerable evidence. This lady, who was uncommonly beautiful, was the wife of a lawyer or a merchant (the authorities do not agree on the point). The king solicited her favors, but, strange to say, was met with a positive refusal. On consultation with the court lawyers, however, Francis was informed that he could, by the exercise of his royal prerogative, enjoy the company of any woman he pleased, and the FerronniÈre was accordingly notified that the king commanded her to yield to his desires. She confided the order to her husband, who, on reflection, counseled her to submit. Meanwhile FerronniÈre himself used his best endeavors to catch a syphilitic disease, which he communicated to his wife. She gave it to the king, who died of it after much suffering.

Henry II. had the merit of fidelity, not to his wife, but to his mistress. The latter was the famous Diana de Poictiers, whose successful intercession with Francis I. on her father’s behalf has been already noticed. Brantome asserts that she did not emulate the constancy of her royal lover, saying that in her youth she had “obliged many persons.” He tells a story which, if true, reflects credit on the temper of the king. Visiting his mistress one day, he surprised her in the company of a courtier named Brissac, who had only time to hide himself under the bed. After spending some moments with Diana, the king asked for some refreshments. Some boxes of confectionery were brought him, and in the midst of his meal he took a box and threw it under the bed, saying, “Halloo, Brissac, every body must live!” Diana lost no portion of her lover’s heart in consequence of her infidelities. This she owed in some degree to her extraordinary beauty, which she preserved so late in life that it was commonly reported she was in the habit of using soap made of liquid gold. Henry was proud of his mistress, and never concealed their liaison. He had his arms interwoven with hers on many public buildings and pieces of plate. He used constantly to ride through the streets with the beautiful Diana on his crupper; and he showed her so marked a preference over his wife that judicious courtiers never made the mistake of courting the latter.

But the orderly life of the king was not imitated by the court. According to Brantome and Sauval, the excesses of the age of Francis were aggravated under Henry. It was rare, says the former, that ladies presented their virginity to their husbands; and husbands who objected to the intimacy of their wives with “kings, princes, noblemen, and others of the court,” were eschewed from society. A woman was held to be virtuous because she begged her lover to wait till she was married to gratify his desires; married women who retained their love for the same galant for several years were considered models of purity. Brantome intimates distinctly that ordinary debauchery fell short of the desires of the courtiers; incest, sodomy, and similar enormities could alone satiate the passions of the old debauchees of the day.

The same writer partially explains the spread of vice by saying that within the last half century the ladies of France had acquired the arts of Italy; nor is it doubtful that with the Medicis many of the monstrous vices which have been peculiar to Italy ever since the age of Imperial Rome were imported into France. We hear of all kinds of instruments of debauchery; of lewd books and lewd pictures; of indecent sculptures and bronzes being sold without let or hinderance in the stores of Paris. It was the age of Aretino; and besides that famous or infamous writer, a number of other Italians had competed for the prize of lewdness in composition. Poets, painters, sculptors, seemed to try how far art could be prostituted. Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Giulio Romano, Nicollo dell’ Abate, and, indeed, almost all their contemporaries, debased their genius by the execution of indecent works. Many of these found their way to Paris. When Pope Clement VII. undertook to prosecute the authors of indecent works, whether in letters or art, most of the compositions that were endangered by his bull were transported to France. Brantome alludes to many of them as being quite common in his time. He describes, for instance, a silver goblet on which the most indecent scenes were graven, and which a nobleman of the court always obliged the ladies who visited him to use at table. Other noblemen had their rooms painted in fresco in similar taste. It is stated that Anne of Austria caused three hundred thousand Écus worth of frescoes of this kind to be removed from the ceilings of the palace at Fontainebleau.[189] But in the reign of Henry II. it does not appear that any one was ever prosecuted for dealing in this kind of merchandise.

During the three following reigns, it was Catharine of Medicis who gave the tone to the court, and really ruled the kingdom. All historians concur in stating that she used prostitution as the mainspring of her policy. She had a court of sometimes two to three hundred ladies of honor, whom she employed to worm out the secrets of the politicians of the day. They were known as the Queen’s Flying Squadron, and it appears they performed their duties successfully; of course, at the cost of whatever virtue or decency the court still retained. Brantome is still our authority for asserting that they introduced a new feature of debauchery; they took the initiative in affairs of this kind, and instead of yielding to the entreaties of lovers, it was they who pressed their lovers to meet them half way. He likewise informs us that they aided the establishment in France of other vices which had hitherto been peculiar to Southern and Eastern climates, by the revival of practices which had been common among the hetairÆ of Athens.

It has been asserted that Catharine willfully tutored her children in habits of debauchery, in order to divert their minds from politics, and retain control over the kingdom, but this scandal does not appear to rest on authentic evidence. It is unquestionable, however, that Charles IX., the author of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, lived in incestuous intercourse with his sister Margaret, and there seems no reason to doubt the truth of the story that Catharine more than once entertained the king and court at a banquet at which nude females served as waiters.

Perhaps the best idea of the morals of the time can be obtained from the adventures of the Margaret just mentioned, who married Henry IV., King of Navarre, and afterward King of France. It is said that at the age of eleven she had two lovers, both of whom claimed to have robbed her of her virtue. Marrying the King of Navarre, she found means to leave her husband and reside at Paris, whose air suited her better than the country. Here her debaucheries were a common theme of scandal, her lovers being counted by the score. Happening at last to give birth to a child which mysteriously disappeared, her brother Henry III. sent her to her husband in a quasi-disgrace. Henry of Navarre refused to cohabit with her. The king vainly endeavored to reconcile the couple. With more zeal than tact, he used as an argument with his cousin that the mother of the King of Navarre had not herself led an irreproachable life. At this Henry burst into a laugh, and remarked to the envoy that the king was very complimentary in his letters, his majesty having in the first described the vices of the wife, and in the second alluded to the frailties of the mother.

He persisted in refusing to receive Margaret, and she took refuge in the little town of Agen, but no sooner began to lead her usual life there than the people rose and expelled her. She found a second refuge in the fortress of Usson, and there she lived twenty years in a sort of prison which she converted into a brothel. She was debarred from the society of men of fashion and courtiers, but for her purposes, servants, secretaries, musicians, and even the peasants of the neighborhood answered as well, and of these there was no lack. Returning to Paris in her old age, she did not alter her course of life. She became outwardly devout, and established a nunnery and monastery near her hotel; the latter, the people said, in order to have monks always at hand; but the list of her lovers remained undiminished to the very verge of her death.[190]

Nor did her husband present any striking contrast to his wife, though he reflected so severely upon her in the work published under the title Le divorce Satirique. Bayle remarks that, had he not expended so large a portion of his energy in the pursuit of sensual pleasures, he would have been one of the greatest heroes of history.[191] He was profuse and indiscriminate in his attachments; duchess or farmer’s daughter, it was all the same to him. He changed his mistress once a month at least. As an exception to this rule, his affection for Gabrielle d’EstrÉes, a very lovely creature, whom he shared with the Marquis of Bellegarde, and who bore him, or them, three children, lasted several years. He was not faithful to her, and made no secret of his infidelities, but he loved her passionately. On one occasion he left his army in the midst of a campaign, disguised himself as a peasant, and traveled through the enemy’s country to meet her. He once went to see her, but was stopped at the door with the announcement that Bellegarde was with her. His first impulse was one of rage. Drawing his sword, he rushed toward the door, but stopped half way, and saying, “No, it would make her angry,” he returned home. Gabrielle was a very beautiful and charming person. She was in the habit of having herself painted in a state of perfect nudity, with her children playing around her.

When she died, Henry proposed to replace her by Mademoiselle D’Entragues, whose beauty had made some sensation at court. Negotiations were opened with the lady, who dutifully placed the matter in the hands of her family, and father, mother, and brothers began to treat with the king for the prostitution of their daughter and sister. They asked a hundred thousand crowns. The king thought the sum large, and offered fifty thousand, but the family refusing to give way, he acceded to their demands. They then added that they would like to have a promise of marriage, conditioned upon the lady’s bearing a male child within a year. To this likewise Henry agreed, in spite of Sully’s remonstrances; and Mdlle. D’Entragues became the acknowledged mistress of the king. It need not be added that the promise of marriage was never fulfilled.

Some time afterward Henry fell in love with a young lady who was betrothed to Marshal Bassompierre. As ardent as ever, he sent for the marshal, explained his feelings, and ordered Bassompierre to renounce his claims. The marshal obeyed, and Henry married the lady (who was a Montmorency) to the Prince of CondÉ. The marriage was hardly over before the king opened negotiations with the bride. It will be scarcely credited that the emissary he employed was the mother of the Prince of CondÉ, who left no means untried to effect the dishonor of her son. The prince, of less complacent temper than most other courtiers, refused to allow his wife to become the king’s mistress. He removed her from France, and, just as Henry was about to send after her, the assassin Ravaillac freed CondÉ from the danger.

The disorders of Henry III., the predecessor of the King of Navarre, are shamefully notorious. There was a time during his reign when, for the same reason which induced the establishment of Dicteria at Athens, prostitution almost seemed a desirable institution at Paris. In his youth he had been a famous seducer of the ladies of honor. An anecdote of his life at this period not only reveals the tone of the court, but happily shows that depravity was not so universal as might be imagined. When Henry was chosen King of Poland, he was anxious to settle his mistress, Mdlle. de Chateauneuf, by finding her a husband. He applied to a courtier, the Provost of Paris, M. de Nantonillet, but received the scathing reply that “M. de Nantonillet would not marry a prostitute till the king had established brothels in the Louvre.”

It is best, perhaps, to throw a veil over the later stories of Henry III., his mignons, and the frightful infamies that were practiced in Paris in his time. They may be divined from the fact that Brantome mentions some orgies in which the king and a party of friends, male and female, stripped themselves naked, and tried to place themselves on a level with the brute creation, as rather redeeming instances of his sensuality.

We shall take occasion hereafter to follow the history of the court from Louis XIII. to modern times. Meanwhile, some features of society bearing on prostitution in the age we have sketched must be briefly noted.

It is asserted by all the chroniclers that the influence of the League (Ligue) was most pernicious. A sort of religious enthusiasm seems to have been kindled by the sectarian strife of the period, and practices which purported to be religious, but were only immoral, were encouraged by the highest authorities. Religious fanaticism ruled throughout France. Men and women walked naked in processions which were led by the curates. As was natural at an age of civil war, violence was freely used toward females by both of the contending armies. At every city that was taken, either by the Leaguers or the Huguenots, all the women, married and single, were violated by the soldiery; such, at least, is the statement of a contemporary historian. Moreover, in the general confusion, no proper police was enforced either at Paris or elsewhere, and the windows of print-shops teemed with lewd pictures, which no one, says the historian, thought of having seized. It was, in fact, a period of anarchy. The Moyen de parvenir, by Beroalde de Venille, which has reached us, affords some criterion of the popular literature of the day. Aretino, text and plates, was much in vogue; and Sanchez and Benedicti left their lay rivals far behind in the composition of works which may contend for the palm of lewdness with Martial or Petronius.[192]

Throughout the Middle Ages, and, indeed, up to the middle of the seventeenth century, great complaint was made by the clergy of the indecency of the dress of the people of France. About the thirteenth century it became fashionable to adorn the toe of the shoe or boot with an ornament in metal; either a lion’s claw, or an eagle’s beak, or something of that kind. Some immodest person ventured to substitute a sexual image in bronze for the usual appendage, and the fashion soon became general. Women even adopted it, and all the best society of Paris soon exhibited the indecency on their feet. The king forbade their use by royal edicts,[193] and a special bull was fulminated against them by Pope Urban V.,[194] but the monstrous shoes held their ground against both, and were only disused when fashion set in a different direction. The Braguette was another enormity of the same character. Originally, it is said, the working-classes invented the idea of a small bag hanging between the knees in which a knife or other utensil could be carried. The fashion was adopted about the beginning of the fifteenth century by men of rank, and became immediately of an immodest nature. All the arts of fashion were called into requisition to give the braguettes the most novel and remarkable appearance, and every possible means was used to render them at once disgustingly indecent and extravagantly rich. They were attached to the dress with gay-colored ribbons, and, when the wearer was a rich man, were adorned with jewels and lace. At the time Montaigne wrote, braguettes had almost gone out of vogue: they were worn only by old men, who, in the language of the essayist, “make public parade of what can not decently be mentioned.” Women, on their side, invented hoops, bustles, and low-necked dresses. The libraries contain a large collection of works written by moralists and preachers of the time against these “indecent abuses” of the ladies. As they are all in use at the present time, we may perhaps conclude that the old French moralists were unnecessarily alarmed; but it is likely that the form of the bustle was by no means as modest as that of modern crinoline skirts, and that the fashion of ladies’ drawers had not yet come in. Such, at least, is the inference from some of the criticisms they provoked. The exposure of the breasts was checked for a time under Louis XIV., but the reform was evanescent, and the custom against which churchmen thundered in the sixteenth century survives to-day.

Some allusion has already been made to the theatre. Theatricals were forbidden by the early French kings, at the instigation of the Church, but the prohibition was evaded by the performance of scenes from the Gospel dramatized. From the remains of these Moralities it would appear that they were always coarse and often immoral. The devil always played a prominent part, and would have been inconsistent had he not outraged decency. Under Henry III. women began to appear on the stage, and farces very broad in ideas and language began to be played instead of the old Moralities. We are led to believe that nothing was too scandalous to be represented on the stage; in fact, the idea seems to have been to crowd as much sensuality and vice into the farces as possible. Scarcely any incident of life was too indecent to be either portrayed or described, and if the latter, the description was given in the most undisguised language. It is altogether impossible to transcribe scenes of this nature. Enough to say that women were made to go through the pains of childbirth on the stage; husband and wife went to bed in presence of the public; and when modesty prompted the retirement of actors for causes still more indecent, a colleague rarely failed to explain why they had retired and what they were doing behind the curtain. Many of La Fontaine’s most grivois stories were taken from farces which were once acted with copious pantomime before the ladies of Paris. Even as late as the reign of Henry IV., plays of this character were commonly acted at Paris at the Hotel de Bourgogne. It was usual for the star actor to speak a prologue or an interlude, which was invariably recommended by its indecency. We have some of the titles of these prologues, and they were generally of the same character as the one on the question, Uter vir an mulier se magis delectet in copulatione.Of the number of regular prostitutes exercising their calling in France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no correct estimate can be made. It was undoubtedly large. During the religious wars, a writer on the side of Protestantism undertook to draw up a statement of the number of prostitutes and lewd women whose vices were chargeable to the clergy. His estimate is, of course, open to suspicion, as being a sectarian performance; but, allowing for great exaggeration, it will still appear alarming. He calculates that there were at that time one million of women, more or less, who led habitually lewd lives, and ministered to the passions of the clergy. These were independent of the married women who were led into adultery, and of the pimps and procuresses who were in clerical pay.[195]

To return to the laws regulating prostitution, it appears that a serious effort was made to put it down under the sovereignty of Catharine of Medicis. An ordinance of Charles IX., dated 1560, prohibited the opening or keeping of any brothel or house of reception for prostitutes in Paris. For a short period it seems that the practice was actually suppressed, and the consequence is said to have been a large increase of secret debauchery. A few years after the passage of the ordinance, a Huguenot clergyman named Cayet proposed to re-establish public brothels in the interest of the public morals, but the authorities of his Church assailed him so vehemently that his scheme fell to the ground without having had the benefit of a public discussion, and he was himself driven to join the Romanists. In 1588 an ordinance of Henry III. reaffirmed the ordinance of 1560, and alleged that the magistrates of the city had connived at the establishment of brothels. Ordinances of the provost followed in the same strain, and all prostitutes were required to leave Paris within twenty-four hours. An ordinance dated 1635 was still more rigorous. It condemned all men concerned in the “traffic of prostitution” to the galleys for life, and all women and girls to be “whipped, shaved, and banished for life, without any formal trial.” As might be imagined, this ordinance was alternately disregarded and made to serve the purposes of private malice. Men who wished to revenge themselves on their mistresses accused them of being prostitutes; but it does not appear that the actual supply was ever seriously diminished.