2
THE EARLY HISTORY of the Grimaldis, “an ambitious, hot-blooded, unscrupulous race, keen to plunder, swift to revenge and furious in battle,” is entangled from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries not only with the wars of the Genoese but with the quarrels and hatreds, the conquests and stratagems of other Italian republics. Whenever there was fighting to be done, it seemed, a Grimaldi laid his hand upon a sword and led his followers into battle.
Monaco’s position was exactly suited for the role which its successive rulers were to play. A huge, bare rock with precipitous sides, it was connected to the mainland by the narrowest strip of ground; and its strategic location, jutting out into the Mediterranean, and its natural defenses made it a place of much importance. The tremendous cliffs of the Southern Alps guarded it from danger on the north, a restless sea almost encompassed it, and its inhabitants—however small in number—were cunning providers, skilled in all the arts of defense. If their territory did not produce corn and wine, these rovers knew where to find such supplies without paying for them. Free trade was their rule, and they never paid import duties.
Centuries before the Grimaldis took possession of Monaco, the Carthaginian general Hannibal used its port for his fleets in 221 B.C. during his struggle with the Romans. In his conflict with Pompey in 69 B.C., Julius Caesar anchored his ships there. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, it was ruled by the Lombards, an ancient Germanic people. When they were driven out by Charlemagne in 774, it became a prey to the Muslim tribes of Saracens who originated in northwest Arabia, and in subsequent years it was a vital fortress in the constant conflicts between the Guelf and the Ghibelline parties, the opposing political factions in Italy and Germany. In 1190, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, crowned King of Germany and Italy, gave Monaco to Genoa on condition that its fortifications should be reserved for the service of the Holy Roman Empire.
Throughout this time Monaco appears to have been any warring country’s refuge. When first heard of in about 200 B.C., it was an uninhabited rock at the foot of which sailors who voyaged along the coast of Liguria (which we now know as the Italian Riviera) and of Provence came to seek shelter from tempest and attack. Greek and Roman geographers called it “Portus Monachus” or “Portus Monachi” because there was said to have been, in more ancient times, at the extremity of this promontory, a temple dedicated to Hercules and served by a single priest, the monk Monachus. But the men who sailed their ships into the port referred to it most commonly as “the Rock.”
Monaco was still a wild, uninhabited place, without bounds and without jurisdiction, when on August 16, 1174, the powerful Genoese drew up a charter granting themselves the right to construct a castle on the Rock to defend the adjacent coast.
The Genoese, who were interested in Monaco strictly for maritime usage, intended the castle to be “for the defence of the Christians against the Saracens and for the use of imperial troops in case of war between the [Holy Roman] Empire and the Provençals.” Construction was begun and the Genoese kept a small contingent of soldiers to protect their interests.
The Grimaldis were not yet connected with Monaco. Their first known ancestor, Otto Canella, was a consul of Genoa in 1133. The youngest of his three sons, Grimaldo, was also active in the affairs of the Genoese republic, and it was he who gave his name to the family. They were an ambitious tribe, greedy for power within Genoa, always with an eye toward their own enrichment. The family, who were Ghibellines in the long struggle between the popes (Guelfs) and the emperors (Ghibellines), were pitted against the Doria and Spinola families on the Guelf side.
By the late thirteenth century, during the years when Marco Polo was journeying throughout the Orient, Rainier Grimaldi, a wealthy sea trader, became the head of the family. He was an elegant, darkly handsome man, and a bold sailor who commanded ships in the service of Charles II, King of Naples. Respected and feared both by his family and his enemies, he brought the name of Grimaldi into prominence. His home in Genoa was a palace equal to the king’s and he ruled his kinsmen with a just but iron hand.
One who envied Rainier’s wealth and resented his power was his nephew François Grimaldi, nicknamed The Spiteful. Perhaps in a bid to strengthen his position in the family, in 1295 François successfully commanded an army of Ghibellines in Liguria against his uncle’s enemies, the Genoese Guelfs, forcing them to flee and take refuge on the Rock, where in 1215 the Genoese had built a fortress. François waited two long years for his chance to attack. On the dark, cold night of January 8, 1297, a near-gale wind blowing, the sea lashing against the base of the Rock, he led a small band of followers up the precipitous side of the cliff to the fortress. While his men were pressed against the stone walls, well hidden by the darkness, François—disguised as a Franciscan monk—knocked on the postern gate and asked for hospitality for the night.
The modest detachment of half-asleep Genoese soldiers who manned the fortress let him in. Once inside, François drew his sword from beneath his friar’s robes and shouted to his waiting companions, who burst through the door to assist him in overcoming and killing all of the surprised Genoese.
Monaco was for the first time under the rule of a Grimaldi. But cunning as François was, he did not have the army or the funds to resist the continuing attacks of the Genoese, and only four years later he was forced to flee Monaco. The family, their fortunes increased by sea trade, did not give up in their efforts to regain it, and in 1338 Charles Grimaldi, the son of Rainier, through purchase from Genoa, which held title to the Rock, became sole lord of Monaco, which consisted of a fortress and some narrow rows of simple houses that were home to the two hundred or so Monégasques.
Along with dreams of expansion, Charles envisioned a great castle being constructed on the crest of the Rock. These aspirations were set aside when the dynastic quarrel between Philip VI of France and Edward III of England erupted into what was to become known as the Hundred Years’ War. Edward invaded France in 1349 and Charles went off to fight in the service of Philip as Admiral of the French fleet.
During his long absence the aggressive character of the Monégasques exhibited itself in acts of relentless piracy. From the craggy height and vantage point of the Rock, they could sight approaching ships early enough to man their own craft and take the alien vessels by surprise. Monaco, because of its impregnability, became the home of bankrupts and the refuge of criminals and pirates who ravaged the coasts of Liguria, ruining commerce and showing no mercy for their victims.
When Charles finally returned after a decade’s absence, he put an end to piracy in the waters surrounding Monaco, and having been rewarded handsomely by Philip VI for his wartime service, he bought the small neighboring villages and farmlands of Roccabruna and Mentone (later Roquebrune and Menton). A township soon grew in the shadow of the fortress, and within thirty years Charles Grimaldi had become the richest of the feudal lords, or seigneurs, along the Riviera. But the Genoese republic, now fearing Monaco’s alliance with France, in 1355 attacked by sea and land with four thousand troops. With an army only one-tenth that size, unable to resist such a superior force, Charles Grimaldi surrendered, his fortunes lost. Shortly after the last battle in 1357 he died, and his son Rainier II was forced to flee and never returned. Yet once again the resilient Grimaldis accumulated great wealth through sea trade, and in 1419 Rainier II’s three sons—Ambroise, Antoine and Jean—purchased Monaco in the name of Grimaldi from its current owner, Queen Yolande of Aragon. The citadel of Monaco had been embroiled for centuries in battles for its limited land and had flown more flags than any Mediterranean neighbor. The Grimaldis had recovered their Rock and the three brothers ruled their small dominion in yearly rotation.
Jean was the last to die and it was his will and testament, written in 1454 in Italian (which was the official language of Monaco), that would regulate the succession of the Grimaldis down to the present. The eldest son would inherit, and if there was no male issue, the eldest daughter would succeed on condition that her husband assumed the name and arms of Grimaldi. In 1487 Lambert Grimaldi amended the laws of succession to exclude those family members who had entered the Church.
Over the next two centuries four seigneurs of Monaco died violently; this was, after all, a time when Italian princes poisoned each other, the Spanish Inquisition burned its prisoners at the stake, and England’s Henry VIII had two of his wives beheaded. The lust for power and the power of lust were not limited to the great states a|id their popes and monarchs. Even rulers whose small empire was a rock with under a thousand subjects were vulnerable. In 1505 Jean II was murdered by, and then succeeded by, his brother Lucien, who in turn, along with Augustin, another brother, was assassinated by his nephew François. In 1604, after reigning for fifteen years, Lucien’s grandson Hercule (infamous for his debauchery) was stabbed to death in a narrow, dark alley in Monaco by a group of Monégasque men whose daughters he had defiled. His body was thrown over the cliff into the sea.
The Grimaldis survived these incursions on family unity and good name. But they became wary. Hercule had left a seven-year-old son as heir. Fearing that the boy, who was now Honoré II, and his younger sister, Jeanne, might be murdered by the same men who had killed their father, family retainers hid the children in the vaults beneath the castle until their maternal uncle Federico Landi, Prince de Valdetare, a Milanese, arrived with his wife and was declared Regent. He saw that Honoré received the oath of loyalty, instituted criminal proceedings against Hercule’s murderers and then—leaving the children in his wife’s care—returned to Milan, where he signed an agreement with the Spanish government to allow its troops to garrison in Monaco. A few months later, the Spanish regiment installed, he went back to Monaco. After a week’s stay he set out again for Milan—this time with Honoré. The boy remained in Milan with his uncle for the next ten years.
Milan was under Spanish domination after having flourished for years as one of Italy’s most important duchies, and the proud, arrogant Milanese bridled with resentment. Prince de Valdetare was most conscious of rank, and was determined to have his nephew assume the title of Prince de Monaco. To this end, in 1612, in a document requiring Honoré’s signature, he inserted the words: “Honoré II, regnant, prince and seigneur by the grace of God of Monaco, Mentone, and Roquebrune.” The Spanish government let this pass, and thus Monaco became known as a principality.
Honoré II, now designated first Prince de Monaco, returned to his Principality in 1615, shortly before his twentieth birthday. The shock must have been tremendous. He had left the sophistication and culture of Milan for life on a rock with no roads for fine carriages, nor castles for balls, nor beautiful ladies to dance with or from whom to find a suitable bride. His sister, Jeanne, now married, had remained in Monaco while he was in Milan. Fortunately her husband had a fifteen-year-old sister—demure, slim, dark-haired, a potential beauty, raised by nuns in a nearby convent. Named Hippolyte, she proved to be Honoré’s salvation. They married a few months after his return and settled down to live in Monaco. Well-educated, his appearance refined and urbane, and with none of the lustiness that had marked his ancestors, Honoré occupied his time extending and refurbishing the castle in the style of the Milanese splendor of his youth.
Despite this idyllic existence, and his happy marriage, Honoré considered himself a prisoner of the Spanish. He had no real power in his small principality as long as Spanish soldiers occupied the garrison. And with so few other men on the Rock, Monégasque women were marrying Spaniards. Honoré’s one aim was to disengage Monaco from Spain, and the only country powerful enough to help him succeed was France. He turned to Cardinal Richelieu, head of the Roman Catholic Church and chief minister to Louis XIII. (Earlier that year, 1630, Richelieu, had gained full control of the French government.) But what did Monaco have to offer in exchange?
For one thing, it occupied a position between French-and Spanish-held territory. For another, it would be a viable port in time of war. Nonetheless, five years were to pass before a treaty was drawn up by the Cardinal and signed by Louis XIII which assured Honoré II and Monaco the protection of France. The treaty then had to be put into effect and the Spanish made to leave the Principality. But French troops were pledged to help Sweden’s King Gustavus II when he entered into the vast conflict, later called the Thirty Years’ War, against Germany. In 1635, France entered openly into the battle which had spread to include most of Europe. Despite their treaty, the French could not concern themselves with Monaco’s trials, and the Principality was no better off than before.
A plan for the small Monégasque army to infiltrate and overpower the Spanish garrison failed and Honoré found himself in desperate straits. Monaco was an occupied zone and Honoré’s letters imploring Richelieu’s assistance were ignored. This situation lasted for a decade. Finally, on the evening of November 17, 1641, the wind at hurricane velocity, Honoré commanded a loyal band of Monégasques in an attack on the Spanish garrison and eventually overpowered it. The victory was much admired by Louis XIII, who sent Honoré a royal command for an audience. This, Honoré knew, was his chance to achieve from France the protection that had been pledged by Richelieu.
Because no roads yet connected Monaco with France, on April 25, 1642, Honoré traveled by sea to Marseilles and then on to the royal field headquarters near Perpignan, where he was met by a company of a hundred French soldiers. Two leagues farther on, a royal coach waited; one league more, and a guard of honor presented arms and Honoré was welcomed by the King and invested with the Order of the Saint Esprit. The two men took an immediate liking to each other. At Narbonne, on his return journey, Honoré received letters from Louis XIII creating him duke and peer of the realm, with title to the duchy of the Valentinois (in Provence and ten times the area of Monaco) and its revenues.
It was one thing to hold the title of Prince de Monaco; quite another also to be the Duc de Valentinois, recognized by the French Court with all the additional rights and privileges of such a high and esteemed peerage. Honoré immediately set forth on a campaign to upgrade his image and style of life to suit his new prestige. He funded a ballet company, hung Gobelin tapestries in his palace alongside paintings by Titian, Rubens, Raphael and Dürer, and encouraged and bought work from local artists. He also inaugurated colorful religious festivals that united his own family with his people in worship.
But with the deaths of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642 and Louis XIII a year later, and the expense of Honoré’s refurbishments and acquisitions, Monaco needed money and a vital connection with the new Court of Louis XIV.
Honoré’s only son died in 1651, making his grandson, Louis, godson and namesake of Louis XIII, his heir at the age of nine. The young man had spent a happy childhood on the Rock, adored by his grandfather and the Monégasques. To strengthen his sense of dedication to Monaco, Honoré had permitted him to travel abroad. Now Honoré was aging and the time was right for the future Prince de Monaco to marry a rich bride with close ties to the French monarchy. One of Honoré’s last acts was to find for Louis a prestigious wife, the daughter of a high noble in the French Court.
Although a principality as inconsequential as Monaco to the power balance of Europe might not have seemed the greatest bait with which to catch a wealthy, well-connected bride, there were many advantages in such an alliance. First, French nobility was passed on only in the male line. This meant that noblemen wishing their daughters to marry into their rank had to pay huge dowries even if it meant going heavily into debt. The higher the rank of the prospective son-in-law, the larger the dowry. And a foreign sovereign prince with rank and peerage in the Court was close to the top of the social scale.
The French Court was hierarchically arranged. On top of the pyramid was the King. Then came the Queen and the immediate heir to the Crown; next the legitimate descendants in the male line of the present or former kings of France, followed by the princes of royal blood (comprising all those who descended from former French kings other than those of the present line), and—after them—the so-called foreign princes, whose title was that of ducs et pairs étrangers, who were recognized by the Crown and who were deemed to owe a special loyalty to France. At this time there were only seven: Bouillon, Rohan (Brittany), Lorraine, Soissons (Savoy), Gonzaga-Nevers (Mantua), La Tremoille (Neuchâtel) and Grimaldi (Monaco).
As Honoré’s first loyalty had always been to his Principality, he had never spent time in the French Court, where the foreign princes were accorded extra privileges and took precedence over all other ducs et pairs: the descendants of families which from the dawn of the French monarchy had held hereditary fiefs. The foreign princes walked immediately behind the princes of royal blood in all processions such as Te Deums and royal marriages and funerals, and their wives were entitled to bring two carriages into the royal courtyard, one for themselves and another for their entourage, and to be seated on tabourets in the presence of the Queen.
By marrying Louis, a nobleman’s daughter would thus be assured of social, economic and Court preeminence as well as of retaining the guarantees of the aristocracy: the right to be heard in a high court of law, to be exempt from corporal punishment, to be beheaded rather than hanged if found guilty of a capital offense. At this time, nobles also had total immunity from direct taxation—an inadequate tradeoff, for nobles were debarred from increasing their wealth through manufacturing or business, and their lands and a life at Court were expensive to maintain. Many of them were impoverished and the real income of nearly all was declining, which would prompt France’s great statesman and diplomat Charles Talleyrand later to write: “A Court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars.”
Nonetheless, the advantages of life as a courtier seemed to outweigh all other considerations. The King moved from the Palais Royal in Paris to Fontainebleau and then to Versailles, the center for the arts and fashion. There were about ten thousand members of the Court (which included the nobles and their entourages) as well as fifteen thousand members of the King’s staff and servants. Most of the courtiers had their own homes and estates. Since proximity to the King had real advantages, they did not want to be left behind and had to be housed at the royal palaces, where the best accommodations were allocated to the highest-ranking members.
Understandably, a nobleman would overlook a great deal in a prospective son-in-law to see that his daughter not only remained part of the Court but was married to a duc et pair étranger. Honoré had a good chance, therefore, of finding a suitable wife for Louis. His own marriage had been happy and his life had centered around his family and the Principality. If Louis married into the French aristocracy, he would have to spend most of his time at the French Court. But in the interest of the future security of Monaco, this seemed a small enough sacrifice.
The aging Prince sat down with several of his advisers and went through the list of French aristocrats with marriageable daughters. At last they agreed that Charlotte-Catherine de Gramont, daughter of the influential Maréchal (Duc) de Gramont and grandniece of the late Cardinal Richelieu, perfectly fitted the bill. Gramont’s elevated position as Maréchal (Grand Marshal of Lodgings, who allocated rooms wherever the King took his Court) brought him into close contact with the King, and his daughter was said to be not only beautiful but also witty and intelligent. True, Louis was only seventeen, and she was twenty, but it was understood that she was unmarried because she had been passionately in love with a cousin whom her father refused to allow her to wed. Honoré had been assured the affair was over. All the more reason, the wise men of Monaco concurred, for the Duc de Gramont to accede to their request on behalf of young Louis.
They were proved right. But what they had not anticipated was the young woman’s tempestuous nature.
3
WHEN LOUIS AND CHARLOTTE-CATHERINE first came face to face, they were to be married in March, 1660. He saw a sophisticated young woman of twenty with piercingly direct dark eyes, aristocratic nose, a mocking smile, flawless white skin and a voluptuous figure swathed in an expensive gold silk décolleté gown that framed the soft curves of her body and set off the magnificent diamond and pearl necklace that caressed her long, graceful neck. She held her head in an arrogant manner, and even a young man far less sensitive than Louis could have seen that she was a willful, defiant woman, spoiled and disdainful of those who did not arouse her interest. She had been educated at the fashionable Convent of the Visitation de Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris, which was attended by many aristocratic young women, most of whom resented the restrictive rules and the unattractive habits they were made to wear. Queen Christina of Sweden had recently visited France, and Charlotte-Catherine had been much impressed with her flamboyant personality and her philosophy that “the more passions and desires one has, the more ways one has of being happy.”
Considered a rebel even by her peers, Charlotte-Catherine had a taste for adventure and was of a highly sensual nature. The inexperienced youth of seventeen, hair not yet grown on his face, who was her prospective bridegroom did not win her heart. And although he possessed a gentle manner, a soft, sensitive smile and wistful green eyes, he was unfamiliar with the gallantry, wit and fashion of the French Court.
Charlotte-Catherine’s family lived on a royal scale, but like many of the aristocrats of the time, her father was short of funds and had been forced to borrow 100,000 livres from Cardinal Mazarin and another 200,000 from the royal treasury for her dowry. Furthermore, the King had approved the wedding contract and his generous wedding gift to the groom had been the Duchy of Valentinois in Dauphiné, the Duchy of Carladez in Lyonnaise, the Marquisate of Baux and the Lordship of Buis in Provence, with an income of 75,000 livres annually from rents.
True, Louis’s principality was the smallest in Europe and could not increase its territories because it was hemmed in by France. Still, Charlotte-Catherine would be married to a duc et pair étranger and would be the Duchesse de Valentinois, and after the death of her bridegroom’s grandfather, she would become Princesse de Monaco. And her father had assured her that at least while Honoré II was alive, she and her husband would not have to move to Monaco. However, her cousin, Antonin Nompar, Marquis de Puyguilheim, Captain of the King’s Household Troops and a man with a notorious romantic reputation, also lived in Paris and despite her father’s opposition was still her lover.
Louis, with his unworldly past (for it was he, not his bride, who was entering this union as a virgin), was unprepared for what he would encounter once wed to this astonishing young woman. He only knew that he had never seen anyone quite like her, and was satisfied with the choice his grandfather had made for him.
Charlotte-Catherine had tried her best to avoid this marriage. But her father had been determined, Puyguilheim was unwilling to incur the King’s wrath and the consequences if they eloped, and the King was too distraught over his own marriage arrangements to be sympathetic to the romantic complications of a nobleman’s headstrong daughter—even though he was not without understanding.
Only twenty-one years old himself, the King had been desperately in love for several years with Cardinal Mazarin’s niece Marie Mancini. He had just been informed that for political, dynastic and economic reasons (the dowry was to be 500,000 gold écus) he must marry his first cousin, Marie Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV, King of Spain. Brokenhearted but dutiful, he had said good-bye to his great love only a few days before the Duc de Gramont asked permission for Charlotte-Catherine to marry.
They were wed at the Gramonts’ Château de Pau in the Pyrenees. “The whole house is among the most lavish and festive in the region,” wrote a wedding guest. “The palm court, the amount of marble all gave the place a very lavish feeling . . . the King’s Chamber, former bedroom of the Kings of Navarre, had been reserved for the [bridegroom] and the walls had been decorated with fine tapestries.” The newlyweds remained at Pau for the month of April and then left for Paris, where they occupied the second floor of the Gramonts’ magnificent town house on the rue de l’Autriche. Having spent all his life in the provincial atmosphere of the Rock, Louis had difficulty adjusting to the dramatic change in his social position and life at Court.
The King was married less than three months later and to counteract the dolorous effect of Marie Thérèse’s ponderous Spanish piety, the summer of 1660 was filled with Court balls, ballets and gambling, either at cards or at hoca, a forerunner of roulette, played for exceptionally high stakes.
Louis was overwhelmed by the King’s tremendous public presence, so unlike the homespun warmth of his grandfather. The French King had only to enter a room and all the chattering courtiers instantly fell silent. There was a grace about all his movements—even the way he took off his hat to a lady. As a young man he had studied ballet to give him command of his body. In 1653, when he was fourteen, he had been costumed as the Sun in a Court ballet, an appearance that was responsible for his becoming known as the Sun King. The training in ballet had been invaluable for one whose métier included making an entrance, assuming a mask for his public persona, and controlling his demeanor at all times when he was on view. Above average height, broad-shouldered and muscular, the King was a striking figure. He loved women, and once he had overcome the grief of his first lost love and accepted the idea that having a mistress did not diminish his ability to be a good husband, he found that beautiful women gave themselves quite willingly to him.
Within a year the King was desperately in love with the fair, blue-eyed Louise de La Vallière, whose artistic temperament and cultural interests influenced the Court. But opera, poetry and plays (including the works of Molière, which Louise encouraged and had presented at Fontainebleau) were all too strange to Louis Grimaldi. Nor would he be drawn into Court intrigues or don costume for the popular masquerades. He was awkward and unsure, uncomfortable in a Court where men wore satin and brocade, bought jewels, rode about in gilded carriages, gave glittering parties and gambled for high stakes.
Charlotte-Catherine gave birth to a son, Antoine, on January 25, 1661. Honoré II died in 1662 at the age of sixty-five and the new Prince and Princesse de Monaco (Charlotte-Catherine under great protest) and their child left Paris and the glamour of the Court to take up rule of the Rock. The Princesse cried for the whole length of the journey. Her lover, Puyguilheim, according to a contemporary diarist, “followed her coach now disguised as a merchant, now as a postilion, or in any travesty, which would render him unrecognizable to her attendants [and her husband].”
Whatever little Charlotte-Catherine expected of Monaco, what she found was a tremendous shock to her. The town comprised just three narrow parallel streets rimming the rocky plateau and ending by the old castle in a square about eighty yards wide. Ramparts protected any access from the harbor, and the roads could not accommodate a proper carriage. There were no fine houses apart from the castle, and the Court consisted of Grimaldi relatives and a lackluster group of ministers and army officers.
Although the exterior of the castle was severe and the garrison occupied the main building, which had the view of the sea, the interior, which had been entrusted to Italian artists during the reign of Honoré I (1532–1581) and refurbished so magnificently by Honoré II, was quite impressive. Along with the great tapestries and paintings, there was a splendid hall, fine mythical frescoes in the Hercules Gallery and a great staircase built to resemble the more famous one at Fontainebleau.
Charlotte-Catherine’s apartments in the Royal Quarter were quite pleasant and commodious, and there was also the lovely small Palatine Chapel. But Monaco still remained little more than a garrison. The artists and intellectuals whom Honoré II had gathered around him had departed with his death, leaving the wives and daughters of the soldiers, the townspeople and the palace staff. There were none of the glamorous courtiers and aristocratic foreign visitors of the French Court. Charlotte-Catherine had no one at all to confide in or to share her interests.
Within three years she gave birth to as many daughters and then, leaving Louis and their children, returned to Paris. The story circulated that she had gone for a carriage ride and simply continued on to Paris (via Menton and Nice) without giving any notice to her husband. On her return to the French Court she was taken in by the King’s sister-in-law, Henriette, Duchesse d’Orléans, daughter of Charles I of England and his exiled Queen, Henrietta of France.
Rumor persisted that Charlotte-Catherine (“a little cocky, proud of her rank and beauty”) and the Duchesse d’Orléans were romantically involved. Obviously the Princesse de Monaco enjoyed the exhilaration of liaisons dangereux, for she resumed her affair with Puyguilheim, and only a few months were to pass before she became the King’s mistress (although Louise de La Vallière remained his maîtresse en titre), making objections on her husband’s part almost impossible because of his allegiance to France. The King ordered Puyguilheim out of Paris on a pretext; and when Puyguilheim refused the royal command, Louis XIV sent him to the Bastille for six months. By the time he was released, the King’s affair with Charlotte-Catherine was over. Court gossip had it that one night the King did not find the key to her room in its usual place, as it had been taken by another admirer. But the King also had fallen in love with Madame de Montespan, his mistress for the next fifteen years. Puyguilheim bitterly blamed his imprisonment and lost esteem on his former lover and humiliated her in the presence of the King and the Court. The King described the incident in a letter to his envoy at The Hague, where Louis had gone to consult with Charlotte-Catherine’s brother Armand, Comte de Guiche:
“Last Monday at Versailles a trinket worth twelve hundred pistoles was being played for in the salon, and the ladies had sat down on the floor itself to be all the cooler. I was standing up and watching the play with some interest to see who would win. It happened that as I stepped back a couple of paces to have a better view, those who were between me and the wall were obliged to move. Among them was Puyguilheim, and in his haste to make way for me he accidentally stepped hard on one of the Princesse de Monaco’s hands; she was propping herself on it as she sat on the floor, as I said, but it was covered by her skirt so no one could see it even, and that makes what happened next most remarkable.
“The Princesse looked at her fingers for a while and showed them to the ladies near her, complaining that they hurt, and then suddenly, having raised her voice and having seen that it was Puyguilheim who had stepped on her hand, she began to cry, got up from the floor, angrily throwing down a book she was holding, and withdrew into another room where she wept for some time, while several persons tried in vain to comfort her.”
Fearing a duel between either Louis or de Guiche and Puyguilheim, which would create additional scandal about his own relations with Charlotte-Catherine, the King was doing his best to make the attack (which he actually believed to be spiteful) seem an accident. Louis, caught between his own unfortunate royal cuckolding and his fear that gallantry on his part could cost him the friendship of the King, backed down.
Instead of returning directly to Monaco, he joined de Guiche, his wife’s flamboyant, arrogant and profligate brother, who was in the service of the Dutch Navy, aboard Duevenvoorde, which was headed for Dunkirk to engage the enemy English fleets in a conflict precipitated by the seizure of Dutch merchant ships by England. Once arrived at the scene of battle, “[de] Guiche and Louis fought bravely; their ship was set on fire and they refused to leave her, but the flames reached the gun-room. Clad only in their underdrawers, the two young men were about to jump overboard when they were taken off by the Petite Hollande and in a state of undress fought the English alongside the ship’s crew until she, too, went down. Again they were rescued by a Dutch vessel, taken before the admiral, who congratulated them and had fresh clothing given them.”
Word of their Prince’s bravery in battle instilled pride in the Monégasques and evoked appreciation from the Dutch. Back home, he instantly raised his own regiment, the Monaco Cavalry, and took part in the beginning of French hostilities against Spain in the War of Devolution. From March 1667 to May 1669 when a treaty between France and Spain was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, he distinguished himself at the head of his regiment. His principality appears to have accepted his long absences with the French Army as part of the price of France’s protection.
Louis’s military career kept him from becoming despondent over his wife’s love affairs and the intrigues they gave rise to. The Princesse de Monaco had remained at Court while her husband was fighting the Spanish. Her numerous romantic liaisons were scandalous. She had become embroiled in an affair with the Chevalier de Lorraine, “a coldly vicious mignon . . . beautiful as an angel,” who, unfortunately, was also the lover of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, younger brother of the King (“a funny little fellow, gay and slightly mad,” who wore scent and dressed as a girl at masquerades and had “dallied” with Charlotte-Catherine). Even her former good friend, lover and protector, Henriette, Duchesse d’Orléans (who, in view of her own sexual proclivities, did not find her husband’s a problem), was appalled by Charlotte-Catherine’s poor choice and turned against her.
Because Henriette was extremely powerful at Court, Charlotte-Catherine swiftly became a social outcast. Louis collected her from Paris, and for the next four years, her behavior tempered by recent changes in the French Court, she remained the dutiful wife in Monaco. The Duchesse d’Orléans had died suddenly (believed to have been murdered by one of her husband’s lovers). The King had grown more intensely involved with Madame de Montespan. The Chevalier de Lorraine languished in exile in Italy (perhaps as a suspect in the death of the Duchesse d’Orléans), and Puyguilheim had married. (He was to rise to fame when he brought the family of King James II to safety in France after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and a year later unsuccessfully commanded the Irish expedition to restore James. He was created Duc de Lauzun in 1692.)
In the spring of 1672 France went to war against the Dutch who had put an embargo on imports of French wine and brandy, the tariffs from which France desperately needed to strengthen its currency. Louis joined the army in the field. Charlotte-Catherine, another child on the way, left her children behind and returned to Paris to live at the Palais Royal as first Lady-in-Waiting to Françoise, Madame de Montespan (usually known as Athénaïs because of her intellectual leanings), who had kindly offered her home and protection.
It was easy to see why Charlotte-Catherine was drawn to Athénaïs. The King’s new mistress not only belonged to one of the oldest families in France, she was “sophisticated, witty, sure of herself, voluptuous, experienced, one of those women who knew that the best shop for beauty spots was ‘A la Perle des Mocher’ in Rue St. Denis and knew exactly how to place them: a passionée, near the eye, a baiseuse at the corner of the mouth; knew the smart names for a lady’s three petticoats: the fripon, the modeste and the secret; knew that for a perfect glove the skin must be prepared in Spain, cut in France and sewn in England, while its scent should be ambergris or musk.” Charlotte-Catherine had much to learn from Athénaïs about being seductive and at the same time a woman of style.
For her part, Athénaïs needed a wily and knowledgeable confidante, as she was extravagant but not well off and a heavy gambler whose jewels were forever in and out of pawn. Unlike Louise de La Vallière, Athénaïs was a married woman. Adultery in a king could be condoned, but double adultery was a different matter. Moreover, the Marquis de Montespan was not at all anxious to divorce his wife. Athénaïs, who by now had two children with the King, was in a terrible quandary, and Charlotte-Catherine, if somewhat headstrong, was a woman who would understand and could discuss with her the difficulties of the situation.
Seven months after Charlotte-Catherine returned to Paris, she bore Louis another son, François. Room was made in the Montespan household, but in 1673 Athénaïs obtained a legal separation from her husband and took apartments close to the King. Charlotte-Catherine was given a house in Saint-Germain. She died six years later at the age of thirty-nine, after a long and painful illness (most likely cancer), having never seen her husband or Monaco in the last six years of her life. Louis displayed no grief. “It’s very understandable,” one of his wife’s former friends wrote to another, “that he should show so little regret at losing someone who had left him of her own accord.”
He returned to Paris to take charge of his young son François, who had been in the care of the Gramonts. Monaco was in a stable situation and his ministers appeared to be reliable men. In truth, Louis seemed relieved to be back in Paris. His short time at Court after his marriage had given him an appetite for a more stimulating life than could be found on the Rock. During his six-year separation from Charlotte-Catherine, he was known to have had one great affair. He had fallen in love with and pursued Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, whom he had met on a trip to Rome. He followed her to England where he became Charles II’s rival for her favors. She had arrived in England somewhat short of money after abandoning a husband insufficiently exciting for her tastes.
A mature woman of thirty, Hortense possessed a reckless, passionate personality. A stunning beauty with a Junoesque figure, jet-black hair and jade eyes, she loved to gamble, shoot and swim, and had a remarkable appetite. King Charles was besotted with her at first meeting and set her up in apartments at St. James’s Palace, gave her a thousand pounds from the English treasury to tide her over and agreed to a four-thousand pound yearly allowance.
The Duchesse was more concerned with passion and fun than with money, and Louis’s flattering attention amused her. King Charles’s longtime mistress, Nell Gwyn (“the merciless Nell” as she was called), told him of Hortense’s other amour. In a fit of pique the English King withdrew his allowance. Louis immediately granted her an equal amount to become his mistress, which infuriated King Charles, who upped the ante, took the Duchesse back and then avoided her whenever possible. Louis departed England but his magnanimity to the redoubtable lady did not help his or Monaco’s relations with King Charles.
As for Louis’s children, his eldest daughter, Jeanne-Marie, had entered a convent at sixteen, and her younger sister Thérèse had died at the age of twelve. François was a quiet, religious boy who would later become Archbishop of Besançon. Antoine, Monaco’s heir, came of age in 1682 and established his own household. In the years after Charlotte-Catherine’s death, Louis lived a simple life with the one daughter left to him, his youngest, Anne-Hippolyte, with whom he remained close until she was in her thirties, when she married the seventeen-year-old Duc d’Uzès. She died in childbirth two years later.
From that time Louis lived mainly at Versailles, where he had a home which he called his “pavilion” near the royal stable buildings. Louis XIV’s château of Versailles was a massive complex of brick and gray stone. The main building was a third of a mile long and it was in this block that Court was held when the King was in residence. Originally Versailles had been a royal hunting lodge and the huge stables still held the finest horses in the land. The King rode to hounds several times a week, and the trees echoed to the trompe de chasse as he and his suite galloped wildly through the forests after their prey.
The Prince de Monaco’s pavilion had begun life as a building in which the ladies could wait for the hunters to return for lunch before setting off again for the afternoon’s sport. As Versailles grew, there was a need for a larger pavilion. The King had given the old structure to Charlotte-Catherine when the new one was built at the time of their short affair. Louis had inherited this upon her death, along with the house in Saint-Germain, in which she had spent her last years.
The King had fought in the field during the Dutch War of 1672–1678. When peace was finally concluded, he became a willing slave to Versailles, where much new construction, refurbishment and extensive embellishments of the gardens were taking place. During the fifteen years that Athénaïs was the King’s mistress, sensuousness and vigor reigned in the Court, as was evident not only in the new statuary on the grounds but in the constant procession of fêtes, in the poetry and music of the tragicomedies performed, in the brilliant and lavish firework displays that ravished the night skies, and in the carousels which perpetuated the ceremonial of chivalry.
Louis appears almost to have forgotten that he was Prince de Monaco. His ambitions were turned to the King and the Court. He wanted desperately to wear the blue coat that proclaimed to one and all that he was a companion of the King. Although he received his due as duc et pair étranger, the fact that he had never become an important member of the King’s close circle nettled him.
Even though Louis had used up a sizable portion of his dead wife’s fortune over the years, he was determined to remain in Paris near the King, ambitious for a prestigious ambassadorial appointment and the recognition at Court for which he hungered. The difficulties he had endured during his life had given his face the strength of character it had lacked in his youth. Still he did not have the élan, the intelligence, the wit or the athletic prowess to catch the educated, sophisticated eye of the King. He was unfortunately inclined to excess in his eating habits, and was now a man of considerable girth who suffered painfully from gout.
For ten years he persevered in his efforts to find a means of aggrandizing his position in the French Court, leaving his own principality to be run by appointed officials. His ambition was not entirely due to vanity. He was more than aware that Monaco needed the full support of a powerful Court if it was to survive, and all his cards were in the hands of Louis XIV. With Antoine, his heir, still unmarried, he was pressed to find him a wife as soon as possible. But the Duc de Valentinois had no wish to settle down. Finally, in the spring of 1688, a marriage was arranged between Antoine and Marie de Lorraine, daughter of the Comte d’Armagnac.
One wonders what influenced the Prince de Monaco to agree, for Marie’s dowry (her family having lived for years above their means) was quite meager. Barely sixteen, spoiled by her parents’ fondness for her and very much under her haughty and ambitious mother’s thumb, Marie did possess a saucy beauty that was very appealing. She was high-spirited, loved fêtes, balls and theatricals, and dressed with unusual flair and sometimes rather shockingly; her neckline was scandalously low. She had lively dark eyes and a magnificent mane of chestnut hair that she often styled with jeweled combs in the Spanish fashion. After Louis’s difficulties with the similarly high-spirited Charlotte-Catherine, one would think he might have been wary of Marie de Lorraine as a wife for Antoine. But the prospective bridegroom, who enjoyed the favors of many of the female singers at the Paris Opéra and considered himself a connoisseur of Parisian beauties, was dazzled by her. The Comte d’Armagnac was in the King’s inner circle and the match was approved by Louis.
Also, Queen Marie Thérèse had died in 1683 and Françoise, Madame de Maintenon,1 a widow of forty-five but still a sultry beauty, had recently become the King’s morganatic wife. She had led a clouded life. Her father had been infamous: he had counterfeited money, killed his wife’s lover, and finally been imprisoned for having joined a conspiracy to put Louis XIII’s younger brother, Gascon d’Orléans, on the throne. He married the daughter of the prison governor (having divorced his first, unfaithful wife), and their daughter Françoise was born in the prison precincts. She was brought up by Ursuline nuns and at the age of sixteen married the poet Paul Scarron, twenty-five years her senior and almost entirely paralyzed from the neck down. Eight years later, after Scarron died, she lived as a boarder in a Paris convent and, when Athénaïs had her first child with the King, became nurse and governess to this and the five other children they had together.
The King was drawn to Françoise, and after Athénaïs was found to be involved with black magic (hoping to rid herself of any competition for the King’s favors), he turned to this warm and amusing woman. “Madame de Maintenon knows how to love,” he was once heard to say. “There would be great pleasure in being loved by her.”
The King had become so reliant on Madame de Maintenon that he called ministers to her apartments for discussions and drafting of dispatches while she sat listening and doing her needlepoint. A letter she wrote at this time boasted that the King frequently demanded two bonnes bouches (her euphemism for sexual intercourse) before his coucher, the formal and public ritual where a hundred or so courtiers watched and often assisted the King’s valets in undressing him and seeing that he was secure in bed. Now approaching menopause, she was anxious that the King take no more maîtresses en titre, and Marie de Lorraine had already caught his eye.
Antoine married Marie de Lorraine on June 13, 1688, with Madame de Maintenon’s approval, the King’s blessing and the generous gift of a château just outside Paris. While this was being refurbished, the newly married couple lived with the bride’s parents.
It was not long before Marie, marriage seeming to add to her allure, began enjoying the attentions of the courtiers and the glittering young men who frequented the d’Armagnac house, which was always open day and night. (“More of an elegant flirt than all the ladies of the Kingdom put together” was how one member of the Court, the famous diarist Madame de Sévigné, described her.) Louis had learned by bitter experience the demeaning nature of scandal, and he did all he could to quiet the gossip about his daughter-in-law and his son, who divided his time between the singers’ dressing rooms backstage at the Opéra and on the battlefield in the King’s service.
“I still think excuses should be made for your young wife,” Louis wrote to Antoine in a letter dated June 29, 1690, “because she is so young and that is also why you should bear with her to some extent. I trust that with time, she will act better towards you and will realize more than she does at present where her true and chief interest lies. Your misfortune is entirely due to the fact that you haven’t gained the favor of your mother-in-law, Madame d’Armagnac. She’s the stumbling block . . . as long as you and she don’t get on together, you can’t expect much tenderness from the daughter.” But since Marie’s flirtations were well known in the Court by now, Louis feared a repetition of his own sad marital history.
With Louis’s prodding, the King wrote to Marie that as Antoine was off with his regiment, “the air of the Mediterranean would do her good.” She could do little but comply with what was really a royal command, however gently stated. Accompanied by her father-in-law, Marie went by coach and sea to Monaco, where they received word that Antoine had been seriously wounded at Namur, a battle conducted personally by the King. The estranged couple were reunited when Antoine returned to the Rock to recuperate.
An English visitor to the Court and to Monaco records that Marie was very “grand and enjoyed as it were the sovereignty of a rock, beyond whose narrow limits anybody might spit, so to speak whilst standing in the middle. But the Duchesse soon found that her family had bought the title very dear.
“Her husband was diffident, his face and figure had acquired for him the name of Goliath. He suffered for a long time the haughtiness and the disdain of his wife and her family. At last he and his father grew tired [of her].” Antoine announced that he would rejoin the army. Marie (acting “as if she had been carried off to the Indies”) begged to be allowed to go back to Paris, making “all kinds of promises.” Once there she spread the story that her father-in-law had attempted to rape her.
“I know not who counselled her,” the diarist continues, “but without changing her conduct she thought only how to prevent to return to Monaco and to insure herself against this, she accused her father-in-law of having made vile proposals to her, and of attempting to take her by force.
“Monsieur de Monaco [Louis] had always been known as a kind man although he had a huge pointed billy [beard] which absolutely excited fear it puffed out so far.”
When Antoine heard the scurrilous story being spread by his wife, he was furious, and on returning to Paris he took up private residence in his château on the outskirts of the city. The marital impasse between the equally headstrong Due and Duchesse de Valentinois lasted six years, during which time Marie openly engaged in numerous affairs, many of them unwisely and indiscreetly chosen. In the end it was Louis XIV who intervened and brought about a reconciliation. “The King is going to request Monsieur d’Aumont to deal with your troubles,” Louis wrote to Antoine from Paris in December 1690. “They are being gossiped about here in the oddest way, and Madame d’Armagnac is loud in naming her conditions for agreeing to let her daughter go back to you. [It had been rumored that Antoine had found Marie unappealing. Madame d’Armagnac wanted to be assured that her daughter would soon bear an heir to Monaco.] It would be a good thing if you made the best of them.”
Antoine was cavalier about sex, preferring an evening’s romp to a long-term mistress. He had a leonine appearance, a large head framed by masses of dark hair, a prominent nose, fierce eyebrows and a deeply cleft chin. He was a valiant soldier, injured more than once in battle, a hard man who possessed a sadistic streak that often flashed to the surface.
Marie’s situation was made worse by a story circulating in the Court that Antoine had acquainted himself successively with the names of all her lovers and had hung them in effigy, dressed in full Court costume, in the courtyard of his château. “Not even is this measure retrospective,” wrote Madame de Sévigné, “but folk amuse themselves by informing [Antoine] of what is now going on. The consequence is that the gibbets have to be put closer together and more than half of the courtiers are now dangling in effigy . . . I can assure you that I have had many a laugh over this, and others as well. The King himself laughs at it. This frenzy of hangings passes all belief.” (Alexandre Dumas, the son, wrote a novel several decades later titled La Princesse de Monaco, which dredged up the old scandal.)
The King’s humor soured when Antoine’s gruesome charade continued, and he sent word to him to be more merciful. Antoine replied that his wife’s lovers ought to be thankful that he contented himself with hanging only men made of straw.
Eventually he took Marie back. “Madame d’Armagnac accompanied by her son . . . took her daughter to the Paris house of the Duc de Valentinois [Antoine], Madame d’Armagnac had dinner there, slept there, and what was worse, stayed there,” wrote Madame de Sévigné, adding that Antoine made his adulterous wife pass beneath the effigies of her lovers before she was allowed to enter the château, and that she was then forced to attend a great bonfire in which they were all burned.
The imposed reconciliation was shaky at first. Nonetheless, on November 10, 1697, a girl, Louise-Hippolyte, was born to them. In 1698 Louis finally realized his ambition and was appointed as the King’s Ambassador Extraordinary to the Holy See, at that time a very delicate and important mission. The question of the succession of Spain was on the eve of being raised. Louis XIV had declared himself heir in the rights of his Spanish Queen, Marie Thérèse, notwithstanding his having signed an act of renunciation upon their marriage. This claim to the Crown of Spain was that Spain had failed to pay Marie Thérèse’s dowry, which was to have been compensation for her renouncing her claims to the Crown. The French King did not really want to extend his rule to include Spain, but to ensure the throne for his grandson, the newly crowned Philip V of Spain, formerly Due d’Anjou, grandnephew and heir to the late, childless Charles II of Spain.
Rome would necessarily have a voice in the matter, and Austria was also keen to take possession of Spain and had its representative at the Holy See. The King and his advisers believed that an envoy with the Prince de Monaco’s Italian connections would be better received than a Frenchman.
Louis’s years at Court had developed his appetite for grandeur, and his entry into Rome was accompanied by an extravagant display of pomp. He had waited a long time for this moment of glory, and he spent enormous amounts, very nearly ruining Monaco, which had to pay the bills, to maintain his image. His carriage horses were shod in silver, the vehicle they drew trimmed in gold. His clothes were made by the King’s tailors, and his parties were as opulent as any in the French Court. Funds failing, he exercised his absolute power in Monaco and forced the communes to turn over all taxes for his personal use. He also demanded the title of Highness. A contemporary comments: “It is difficult to comprehend why the King permitted such a man to remain as his representative.” Contrary to instructions from the King that he should act as a French due et pair on a diplomatic mission, Louis had chosen to behave as a sovereign ruler. An already difficult situation was reduced to hopeless immobility.
Louis died, nearly blind and crippled from gout, in Rome in 1701 at the age of sixty-nine, his mission never completed. Antoine and Marie returned to the Rock where they lived together, if not happily, then at least without further public scandal. It does not seem that Antoine ever returned to her bed. He had numerous mistresses and five more children by them, three of whom he acknowledged. One of these, a son, Chevalier de Grimaldi, was closest to his father, but to Antoine’s despair, he could not succeed him because of his illegitimacy. Thus the ruling House of Grimaldi—Marie’s childbearing days over—was without a male heir.
4
MONACO WAS VIRTUALLY UNCHANGED since the sixteenth century. By 1700, its three townships remained little more than a garrison and two villages. To see the Rock at its best one had to climb for four or five hundred yards through olive gardens that skirted the sides of Tête du Chien, a mountain named for its fancied resemblance to a dog’s head. From this elevation the solid gray rocks made a striking contrast to the lustrous, uneasy azure sea, which even in the calmest weather fringed the dark headlands with a ruff of pearly foam. To the east were Menton and Roquebrune, their dense olive groves a rich green against the unusual angular mountains behind them.
A visitor in 1705 recorded that the garrison at Monaco consisted of “five hundred men, paid and officered by the French King. The officer that show’d me the Palace, said with a great deal of gravity that his master and the King of France, amidst all the confusions of Europe, had ever been good friends and allies. The Palace has handsome apartments . . . many of them hung with pictures of the reigning Beauties in the Court of France. But the rest of the furniture was at Rome, where the [late Louis] Prince of Monaco resided [as] Ambassador.”
The Court consisted of fewer than twenty members and their families, all directly related to the Prince and Princesse. Marie had brought her sister-in-law from Paris as Lady-in-Waiting and also her mother (“How can so much rain fall on so small a principality?” she was heard to complain). For Marie, life on the Rock must have seemed a penitence for her adulterous past. Besides her three surviving daughters, Louise-Hippolyte “Coco,” Marguerite-Camille “Poupon,” and Marie-Pelline “Chabeuil,” all she had for entertainment was her needlework and the refurbishment of the Palace—it having been stripped of most items of value to cover her father-in-law’s Roman extravagances. There were few outsiders.
Antoine had acknowledged a woman from Provence, Elizabeth Dufort, as his mistress, and had established her in a villa only a few steps away from a summerhouse called “the Desert,” where Marie spent much of her time in good weather. The leg wound he had received at Namur had never properly healed, and by 1710 it had made him a semi-invalid. He turned his back on France and settled down for the remainder of his life in Monaco, installing “a kind of lift” between the ground and first floors of the palace, enjoying the total dependence the Monégasques, his family and mistress had upon him. Life became more pleasant after the death of his acerbic mother-in-law, but he remained a difficult man, hard to please, easy to arouse to anger.
He had never lost his taste for beautiful opera singers or their music; and with the help of Destouches, the manager of the Paris Opéra, he brought singers, dancers and musicians from Paris and converted a large room of the palace into a concert hall with a stage where programs were conducted, often under his own baton.
As his daughters matured, his greatest concern was the future of the House of Grimaldi. Because Marie had given him no male heir, his daughter Louise-Hippolyte could succeed only if she either married a Grimaldi or her husband changed his name and arms to take on those of the Grimaldis. The legitimate heir to the Principality at this time was Antoine’s younger brother, François-Honoré, Monsieur l’Abbé de Monaco, who—because of his Church affiliations—could be expected to renounce his rights. (He did agree to do so for a price, to be paid by Louise-Hippolyte’s future husband.)
Finding the proper husband for Antoine’s beloved Coco was not an easy task. The man had to be rich enough to pay all of Monaco’s debts, those left by Louis as well as those incurred by Antoine, and to supply dowries for his bride’s two younger sisters. Also, Antoine’s father-in-law, the Comte d’Armagnac, insisted on having his say in the choice of a husband for his granddaughter and had even ventured the bizarre idea of having his own son, Charles de Lorraine (who was her uncle), marry Louise-Hippolyte.
Many candidates were drawn by the prospect of one day becoming Prince de Monaco, and so duc et pair étranger at Court. The field finally narrowed down to two aspirants: the Comte de Roye, a dashing young officer and member of the prestigious Rouchefoucauld family, who was Antoine’s choice, and who would agree to marry Louise-Hippolyte only if he were to receive the lucrative estate of Valentinois, and the Comte de Lux, the sixteen-year-old son of the Duc de Châtillon, a member of the distinguished Montmorency family, sponsored by Louise-Hippolyte’s grandfather, the Comte d’Armagnac. On December 12, 1712, d’Armagnac wrote Antoine a scalding letter about the situation.
“Since you twist everything I write to suit yourself, I must use the kind of language that leaves no room for mistake. It is not fitting that you, as the father of Mademoiselle de Monaco should choose a husband for her other than one whose rank is not lower than her own by birth. What are you thinking of, to want to strip yourself of the duchy of Valentinois in order to get yourself a son-in-law whom you will honor by giving him the hand of my grand-daughter? This son-in-law must have a high rank, be possessed of a good fortune in land and property, with no debts attached, but I can see only beggary in the marriage proposed by you, the young man is known as a rascal and to be always in want of money. What kind of marriage are you being pushed into? I had thought that by referring indirectly to the matter you would see it clearly for what it is, but as you did not, I must talk straight.
“. . . The Duc de Châtillon has a title and honors and safe possessions in a family that is one of the highest in the land. I do not see any comparison between the two. I’m telling you just what I think, for your honor is involved; and I know that mine is. Think all this over carefully. I warn you that the blame will be yours alone, and that I shall oppose anything detrimental to the honor of a grand-daughter of a man like myself, to whom you owe some consideration, I think.”
Antoine would not be compromised by his father-in-law and after many months the impasse remained. Marie’s refusal to sign the marriage contract for her daughter to marry the Comte de Roye was strongly supported by her father, who wrote to her from Versailles, “When you have a good case, stick to it,” adding “. . . do not sign anything whatever unless I or one of your brothers writes personally to say so.”
These quarrels continued over the next two years, to the great displeasure of Louis XIV. Finally Comte de Roucy, the father of Antoine’s candidate, with an eye to the King’s disapproval of the standstill, released the Prince de Monaco from his agreement. In the end the Comte d’Armagnac abandoned his support of the Comte de Lux.
For two years, Louise-Hippolyte had been in the care of the nuns at the Convent of the Visitation at Aix-en-Provence, placed there against her will by her father until her marriage was settled. Marie now took matters into her own hands. Leaving Monaco secretly, under cover of night, she joined her father in Paris and between them they decided on the next candidate, a young man of twenty-five, Jacques de Matignon, Comte de Thorigny, the rich scion and only son of the Comte de Matignon, at the time Lieutenant-Governor of Normandy.
Aware that Antoine would reject any name they put forward, Marie and her father enlisted the Duchesse de Lude, widow of the Comte de Guiche (Antoine’s great-uncle), to act as mediator. The Duchesse presented de Matignon’s name to Antoine as her own suggestion. Not suspecting the duplicity involved, and still smarting over Marie’s defection, Antoine secured the Duchesse de Lude’s promise that the young man’s name would be kept secret from his wife and her father. He then insisted that they agree in advance to the “unknown” future son-in-law he had chosen.
On Christmas Eve, 1714, the Comte d’Armagnac (who must have been privately triumphant at his clever deception) wrote to Antoine: “It gives me great pleasure and I greeted your representative as though he were bringing an olive branch from you. Although he did not explain about the choice you have made, I don’t doubt it is a good one.”
Believing he had outwitted his wife, Antoine got de Matignon to agree to sacrifice his name and coat of arms to obtain a duchy of his own if he married Louise-Hippolyte. He then wrote to Marie to tell her that, providing they obtained the King’s consent (necessary for peers of the Court), the selection of a husband for their oldest daughter had been made. She wrote back congratulating him on a brilliant choice and asked if she could now return home:
“Forgive me, Sir, if I have done something wrong, for the sake of my respect and obedience towards you and of my love for my children . . . I ask your pardon, Sir, and to be allowed to come and tell you myself, more strongly than I can ever do by letter, how willingly I shall meet your wishes for the rest of my life.”
He replied condescendingly: “I shall see whether [your apology] is followed up by the obedience you promise me, that I dare to say you owe me, and I am prepared to believe you are ashamed for having cut yourself off from it in such a scandalous manner. I have no desire at all to go over the past, you know there would be far too much for me to say. I draw a curtain over a sad picture, so as to start a peaceful life with you and the children again.”
The time for action had come. The marriage contract had to be negotiated and Louis XIV’s consent obtained. After protracted dealings the wealthy de Matignon agreed to pay Antoine 700,000 livres to cover all of Monaco’s debts and to give an additional 600,000 livres as dowries for his bride’s younger sisters, as well as to pay their uncle François-Honoré 200,000 livres to renounce all his rights.
It remained for the marriage contract to be signed by the King, but in August 1715, Louis XIV was on his deathbed in his magnificent white-and-gold-paneled bedroom in Versailles. Gangrene had blackened one entire leg and he was in excruciating pain. What conscious moments were left to him he used to prepare himself, his Court, his country and his young heir—his great-grandson, four-year-old Louis, Duc d’Anjou—for his impending demise. (Louis XIV had six children with Queen Marie Thérèse. Only one, Louis, Dauphin of France, survived childhood but predeceased his father. The Dauphin’s son had died suspiciously in 1712, as had his wife and their oldest surviving son. This brought the late Dauphin’s youngest grandson, the Due d’Anjou, into the direct line as heir to the throne.)
“Soon,” Louis told the boy when he was brought to his bedside, “you will be King of a great kingdom. I urge you never forget your obligations to God; remember that you owe Him everything. Try to remain at peace with your neighbors. I have loved war too much. Do not copy me in that, or in my overspending. Take advice in everything; try to find out the best course and always follow it. Lighten your people’s burden as soon as possible, and do what I have had the misfortune not to do myself.”
Louis XIV, who had been a very good friend to Antoine and to Monaco, died on September 1, 1715, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday and having reigned for over seventy-two years. The Duc d’Anjou was now Louis XV, and until his majority he would be controlled by the Regent, Philippe, Due d’Orléans, son of the late king’s effeminate brother and his second wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria. Both the child-king and his Regent signed de Matignon and Louise-Hippolyte’s marriage contract on September 5, their first official signatures of the new reign. The wedding took place on October 20. Antoine and Marie, although never reconciled, did establish a modus vivendi. Once Antoine learned that he had been outfoxed in the matter of his son-in-law, relations between them again became unpleasant so much so that the newly married couple (who had lost a child during their first year together) moved to Paris to be away from his oppressive outbreaks of temper and tyrannical control.
Despite being surrounded by acquisitive countries at a time when they were at constant war with each other, the Principality managed to survive, thanks to the protection of France. Without the reinforcement of French troops, Monaco’s small garrison could not have withstood an outside attack.
The simple fact was that what could be gained by capturing Monaco was not worth retaliation from the French. Monaco was ostensibly a poor and backward principality with no lucrative products and little land for expansion. Not until 1730 did Antoine finally have a carriage road constructed between the Rock and Menton. Before then the only link was ten kilometers over precipitous, rock-strewn paths, which deterred commerce even within the Principality.
The odds were against the small country producing a great philosopher, scientist, poet or artist. During Antoine’s long residence on the Rock, he had commissioned several operas, but had brought few other distinctions to Monaco. The Grimaldis were reliant upon their wives’ or daughters’ dowries to keep things running. There were no big landowners to tax, no customs duties to collect from a busy port. The Grimaldis had increased their prestige and rank at the French Court through marriage. None of them had cared much about Monaco or wished to visit it.
Like his father before him, Antoine had looked for his glory in the service of Louis XIV, an absolute monarch, whose power was not shared by any individual or institution. Even a few days before the French King’s death, Council was still held from his bed. There was no deviation from ritual. The Court and the government had to revolve around the King. And Antoine, who greatly admired Louis XIV, preferred to be in the service of such an omnipotent monarch rather than affirming his own power and bringing any improvements to Monaco. The harvest of fruit and fishing were the chief sources of income to the people.
Marie died in 1724, at the age of fifty-seven, and Antoine did not mourn her death any more than his father had grieved for his mother. Marie’s possessions and a sizable inheritance were to pass to her oldest child, a stipulation set forth in her original marriage contract, making Louise-Hippolyte her heir. But Antoine, in difficult financial straits and in view of his son-in-law’s affluence, pressed a claim in the French courts on his own behalf for control of his late wife’s estate. An acrimonious lawsuit ensued which lasted for several years, by the end of which time Antoine had run out of both cash and credit. He then appealed directly to his son-in-law, to whom he had been cold and uncivil throughout the legal battle.
“You mention the state of your affairs,” the Duc de Valentinois wrote back, “as though you wish me to do all I can to ease your situation. I will willingly help . . . on condition, if you please, that you take no steps to prejudice the future interests of your grandson [who stood to inherit from his mother] . . . He is such a [good-natured] boy that nobody could think of playing a dirty trick on him.”
The Duc de Valentinois was, in effect, offering Antoine a loan on condition that he withdraw his lawsuit. Antoine was furious. His brother, François, who was once again in his good graces, wrote to tell him that he had been invited to visit the de Valentinoises in Paris, to which Antoine angrily replied: “What it all amounts to is this—[those two] are following the fine system they adopted right after [Marie’s] death which is to see me die with rage in my heart because, thanks to them, my situation is no brighter . . .
“So I leave you to judge for yourself, my dear brother, whether in all decency you can accept their offer of hospitality, considering how my relations with them are, and are bound to be . . .”
By 1730 the litigation over Marie’s will had not been settled. Antoine’s health, never good, was failing. Louise-Hippolyte, with her younger son, the Comte de Carladez, then eight years old, made the journey to Monaco to see him, and during their six-week visit father and daughter were reconciled. Antoine died on February 20, 1731, leaving an affectionate unsigned letter to his daughter, which was sent on to her by his doctor “with an account of the Prince’s last hours.”
Louise-Hippolyte had always been a retiring woman, and had been much marked in youth by the angry quarrels between her parents and her enforced two-year convent confinement before her marriage. Her marital life had seemed happy. Her husband was rich. She had homes in Normandy and in Paris. And the Due de Valentinois—rare among his class at that time—had been a faithful family man. What happened next was, therefore, a shock to all who knew her.
Returning to Monaco, this time alone, she took the oath of loyalty and was immediately made Princesse de Monaco without any mention of her husband, who—since he had legally changed his name to Grimaldi—should have ruled with her as Jacques I, Prince de Monaco. But Louise-Hippolyte decreed that she would reign alone; all documents were to be in her name only, and her children and husband would remain in France.
Historians are divided as to what could have been behind her unexpected behavior. One view was that Antoine had convinced his daughter with his dying breath to deny her husband his position and title at her side as a last revenge. The English historian Pemberton sets forth a case against Antoine’s auditor-general, a man named Bernardoni, whom he suspects of stepping in to control the new Princesse de Monaco, wishing to supplant her husband’s influence with his own.
Bernardoni did, indeed, speak out against the Duc de Valentinois, but it seems unlikely that Louise-Hippolyte would have rejected the faithful husband and father of her six surviving children, a man with whom she had lived for fifteen years in apparent harmony, either to appease the vengeance of a dead father or to satisfy the avarice of an auditor-general. Another argument against the latter is that she replaced Bernardoni within six months of her accession.
It is far more likely that she was not truly happy in her marriage. When her husband (having been denied the title of Prince of Monaco) joined her with their children on the Rock several weeks after she had taken the oath of loyalty, he remained only a short time before returning alone to Paris.
In October of that year, Madame de Simiane, a granddaughter of Madame de Sévigné, wrote: “It is said that there has been a quarrel between Monsieur and Madame de Monaco, because he wished to be named with his wife in the proclamation of accession, and she did not wish it; and that they have separated . . .”
Louise-Hippolyte’s rush to have herself pronounced Princesse de Monaco could also have been motivated by her fear that the second Marquis de Cagnes, who was six years old at the time and a direct descendant of Gaspard Grimaldi, first Marquis de Cagnes, a great-grandson of Honoré I, might lay claim to the throne. But the young Marquis’s father was dead and no one on his maternal side bothered to put his name forward to contest the Princesse de Monaco’s claim.
Louise-Hippolyte’s new power appears to have given her the personal strength and sense of independence she had lacked during the years of her father’s tyranny and her husband’s loving but strong hand. Having successfully removed the yoke of male domination from around her neck on December 3, in the Throne Room of the palace, she received the investiture alone, standing erect and regal, a handsome, dark-haired woman of thirty-four, her figure still trim despite her years of childbearing. A portrait executed at that time shows a surprisingly winsome young woman, elegantly gowned, far more determined than her biographers have portrayed her. The Rock with its palace and curving stone walls are pictured behind her, and in her graceful hand she holds a full-sized black mask—not the sort that a woman of that time would wear to a masquerade but more suggestive of a means (reminiscent of Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask) of concealing identity. Perhaps the artist, J. B. Van Loo, was suggesting that she had suddenly revealed her true self.
One would like to believe that this one shining act of self-liberation was enough to satisfy Louise-Hippolyte, for a smallpox epidemic swept the entire Mediterranean coast during the weeks before Christmas, 1731, and on December 29, having known sovereignty for only seven months, she died of the dread disease. With her demise the House of Grimaldi became extinguished and that of Matignon (her husband, and thus her son) succeeded. In appearance, the fair-haired eleven-year-old Honoré III, his features touched with arrogance, resembled the Matignons. The fierce strength of face that so identified Antoine and had shown through at the end in his daughter was not evident. Only in his quick temper could Honoré’s Grimaldi heritage be discerned.
The Duc de Valentinois, now his son’s legal guardian, left immediately for the Principality and, after meeting with its jurists (a small body of five men elected by Monaco’s leading citizens and established at the time that Menton and Roquebrune had been acquired), convinced them that he should rule as Prince de Monaco until Honoré reached the age of twenty-five and, further, that his son “should abdicate [at that time] in favor of his father and thus follow the example of those who relinquished to their father the command of their fiefs inherited through the mother.”
The Due’s action validates the theory that Louise-Hippolyte had a good idea of her husband’s true ambitions and had acted as she did in order to protect her own and her son’s interests. However, the Duc de Valentinois’s aspirations were quickly thwarted. Cardinal Fleury—who, with the recent death of the French Regent and his own new position as chief minister to the young King, was the most powerful man in France—sent letters of condemnation which indicated serious sanctions would be imposed if the Due did not withdraw. Under the circumstances the Due accepted his position as legal administrator to his son, who would be rightfully named Honoré III, Prince de Monaco.
On May 20, 1732, the Due signed a document as Jacques I appointing Antoine’s favorite son, the illegitimate Chevalier de Grimaldi, as Governor-General of the Principality with wide powers. The Due then returned to Paris, but it was not until November 7, 1733, that he signed a formal abdication, though retaining the regency until Honoré III had reached his majority. He returned to Monaco with Honoré for him to take his oath of loyalty in May 1734. Then father and son left Monaco, the former never to return; the latter to remain abroad for fifteen years.
For the next half century, even after Honoré III’s return, the Chevalier de Grimaldi governed Monaco. It could be argued that the Chevalier, although he would never be recognized as Antoine II, was more the Prince de Monaco during his lifetime than Honoré III who, when he reached his majority, gave his first priority to France. The Chevalier did well by Monaco in that peace, if not prosperity, reigned.
Though Honoré was a rich man through the inheritances of his grandmother and his mother, none of his wealth was used to improve conditions in his principality. His father placed his education in the hands of Jesuits until he was fifteen, when he became a musketeer in the King’s Guard. The Due’s ambitions for him became concentrated on his army career, which did not advance as fast as the father would wish.
“He [Honoré III] has now been a musketeer for nearly two years, and this seems a long time to me,” he wrote to his late wife’s uncle François, now a retired archbishop. “I’ve spoken and written to Cardinal Fleury about having a cavalry regiment for him, but I’ve only received vague replies. If it were a request on my own account I should not have been at all surprised . . . after the fine services that rascal Bernardoni did me with His Eminence . . . but it concerns my son, who ought not to be made to suffer because of alleged faults of his father. I wrote to tell the cardinal that if he should not be favored among those wishing for a regiment he would be obliged to remain in his natural position, which is that of a sovereign prince who will one day have an income of a hundred thousand écus; to judge by His Eminence’s reply, he is not used to receiving such pressing applications. He ought also to have considered . . . that the one man of France most able to dispense with favors from the Court is Monsieur de Monaco. I’ve decided to say no more to him on the matter, so I have the honor of writing to ask you to try and find out what his intentions are . . .”
France was a different country after the death of Louis XIV. Although Cardinal Fleury, an astute diplomat and clever at foreign policy, had done his best to maintain his country’s prestige, it had lost much of its predominance in continental Europe and was plagued by serious financial crises. Fleury’s power was enormous; and even after Louis XV reached his majority in 1735, he retained his control. The young King, who had lost both his parents at the age of two, had grown up without affection. Shy, and more comfortable with women and animals than with men, he was “happier choosing a dress for his mistress than drafting an edict for his people.” He relied almost entirely on the Cardinal, who had once been his tutor, to carry out the country’s administration. It was, therefore, not the King but Fleury who must be won over when favors such as the Duc de Valentinois’s request were sought by the nobility.
Finally, after two years of prodding by intermediaries, on payment of fifty-five thousand livres, Honoré III was made a lieutenant and given an infantry regiment. This accomplished, his father concentrated his efforts on finding his son a bride. Negotiations were not easy, for Honoré would not cooperate. After he had twice refused to sign prestigious marriage contracts with the daughters of powerful noblemen, his frustrated father obtained a lettre de cachet from Louis XV and had his son confined to Arras Fortress as punishment. When Honoré was released several months later, he had naturally enough formed a bitter resentment toward his father.
This was a period of much trial for the French armies. The great power held by France during the long reign of Louis XIV had dwindled in the last two decades and been dispersed among several of its neighbors. Although still a significant military force, Spain had been shorn of her European possessions and had lost the primacy she had previously enjoyed. The prestige of Prussia had risen meteorically, and the Prussian Army had become the mightiest on the Continent.
With Prussia’s invasion of the Austrian-Hapsburg province of Silesia in December 1740, the complex War of the Austrian Succession was set in motion and had all Europe in arms. A year later, yielding to his military advisers and his mistress Madame de Châteauroux (one of the three sisters who became Louis XV’s mistresses and the one he claimed was the only woman he ever loved), who wanted him to “play Mars to her Venus,” Louis plunged France into the war. First Prussia was allied with France against Austria and England and then with England against Austria, France and Russia. France’s allies changed constantly as the war progressed in different stages and other countries—the Netherlands, Sardinia, Spain and Bavaria—were drawn in.
With all Europe at war, the echoes of cannon resounded in the mountains that shelter Monaco. Honoré was sent to join Marshal de Saxe, whose armies had been victorious against the British and their allies in Belgium. The regiment of Monaco, under Honoré’s command, displayed immense courage at the memorable battle of Fontenoy, where Honoré’s younger brother, the handsome Chevalier de Monaco, was shot through the thigh.
The orders issued by Marshal de Saxe on the eve of the battle were: “Whether the attack is successful or not, the troops will remain in the position that night overtakes them in, to recommence the attack on the enemy [with daylight].”
Despite de Saxe’s orders, the French retreated at night—leaving hundreds of their dead behind as terrible proof of the losses they had sustained. During the siege of Veroux, Honoré was seriously wounded but recovered sufficiently to take up arms again in the battle of Lauffeld, where his horse was shot from under him. Then he participated at the sieges of Bergen-op-Zoom and Maastricht which brought the war to a conclusion.
Though Honoré and his brother both fought for France, Monaco remained neutral in the war. Once the Monégasques gave help to a distressed British ship; and in 1746, a British admiral seized a Monégasque vessel which he said infringed the laws of neutrality. Monaco’s fleet had long ceased to be a power, though the Principality retained its ancient right to chase and loot any Turkish ship which appeared in the Mediterranean.
On the tenth of May 1748, only twenty-eight years of age, Honoré was made a brigadier-general by royal warrant and returned to Paris to recuperate before rejoining his regiment. Once again he came up against his father, the determined Due de Valentinois. The King, influenced by Madame de Pompadour, who had become his mistress shortly after Madame de Châteauroux’s sudden death,1 agreed with the Due upon the daughter of the Duc de La Vallière as a bride for Honoré. For a third time, Honoré obstinately refused to marry someone chosen for him, and because of his insolence was thrown into the Bastille for three months.
During this period Monaco came under repeated threat. In winter 1746, the War of the Austrian Succession still two years from its end, the French suffered a stunning defeat in Italy and Menton was nearly invaded. Then, in the spring of 1747, when France resolved to take Nice from the Italians and to win back what they had lost in Italy, Monaco again narrowly escaped attack.
By the time Honoré was released from the Bastille, peace had been agreed at Aix-la-Chapelle. He resigned his commission and went to Monaco, but he did not stay long. The Principality was content under the governorship of the Chevalier de Grimaldi, and Honoré felt no close bond, other than his inheritance, to the Rock. Unlike his grandfather, Antoine I, who had spent his childhood in Monaco and who had returned with a wife, family and an established mistress to take up his rule, Honoré was a bachelor without any attachments. He had grown up between his father’s mansion in Paris with all the entertainments and advantages of a family in Court favor and on the vast Matignon estate in Normandy, with its nine thousand acres of splendid hunting grounds (far larger than all of Monaco) and successful stud farm.
Although he was not keen on life at Court, Honoré had a great love for its culture of horseflesh and hunting. He appeared to suffer little guilt about leaving the Chevalier in charge of his country. The importance of Monaco as a possible stronghold during the French and Italian conflict had diminished by the end of the war and France’s repossession of Nice. Monaco was fairly isolated from the problems that faced the rest of Europe, for the political axis had now shifted from the Mediterranean to Austria and Prussia.
Honoré was thirty when he met the alluring Anne, Marquise de Brignole-Sale, at a gala ball at Versailles, and fell in love for what seems to have been the first time. The Marquise was ten years his senior, a handsome, passionate woman from a powerful Genoese family, the Balhis. She was married to the immensely rich Marquis de Brignole-Sale, a dull, cadaverously thin, punctilious man who was no match for his vital, intelligent wife. The socially ambitious Marquise took her eleven-year-old daughter, Marie-Catherine, with her and left the Palazzo Rosso, her husband’s ornate estate, for Paris, where her forceful personality, great wealth and beauty brought her instant success at Court.
With Madame de Pompadour in situ as the mistress of Versailles, the French aristocracy during the mid-eighteenth century was at the height of a period for provocative liaisons. For an older woman to take a young lover was not considered daring by any means. The Marquise de Brignole-Sale fell deeply and passionately in love with Honoré almost at first sight. His motherless childhood and his difficult youth, the painful years of war, and the bitterness of his imprisonment had given him a suspicious character, and he was inclined to swift mood swings. He was sharp and sensual, and gave the impression of being an injured boy in a man’s body, just the sort of personality to capture the heart of an older woman who could be both mother and mistress.
The affair remained passionate for several years, and in 1754 Honoré, flagrantly cuckolding his paramour’s husband, spent three months in Genoa at the Palazzo Rosso. By now the Marquise’s daughter, Marie-Catherine, was a well-developed beauty of fifteen with a handsome widow’s peak, wide, dark eyes, a bewitching smile, a full bosom and slim waist. Under the gaze of his aging mistress, Honoré began to court her daughter. The situation grew tense and Honoré was asked to leave in straight-forward terms—which he did, but only after deciding that he would marry Marie-Catherine. His feelings were obviously reciprocated, for she sent a letter to Honoré upon his return to Paris stating: “I, the undersigned, declare and promise to the Prince de Monaco never to marry anyone but him, whatever may happen and never to listen to any proposal that might tend to release me.”
5
THE MARQUIS DE BRIGNOLE-SALE, whose consent had to be obtained, was not at all pleased with his daughter’s wish to marry the man who had so recently been his wife’s lover. Honoré pressed his case for seventeen months to no avail; the Marquis would not acquiesce. To Marie-Catherine’s chagrin, Honoré did not persist. Instead, he reopened discussions with the Duc de La Vallière for the hand of his younger daughter. In view of the fact that five years earlier Honoré had refused to marry her sister, it was an audacious move. Also, he had never set eyes upon the young woman and was still in love with Marie-Catherine. But he was determined to marry and start a family and the Marquis’s opposition appeared to be impossible to overcome. Mademoiselle de La Vallière and her family were much in favor at Court and in a position for the Grimaldis to regain the French rank and honors lost when Antoine I became the last of the male line. According to the treaty made between Honoré II and Louis XIII in 1642, the duchy of Valentinois could descend to either male or female issue, but the peerage and recognition at Court became extinct if a woman inherited it.
Honoré’s petition was placed before the King, who was much dominated in such matters (and most others as well) by Madame de Pompadour. With her approval, a royal announcement sanctioning the marriage and the restoration of the rank and style of foreign prince was made on July 8, 1756. This caused an angry outcry at Court from the extremely self-righteous aristocracy who had been “scandalized” by Honoré’s recent liaisons with the Marquise and her daughter. It seems more likely that jealousy rather than affronted propriety raged in their breasts, for Honoré had always been considered an outsider at Court.
In the face of such strong protest, the King withdrew his endorsement. Honoré, hoping to force the royal hand, wrote to Louis XV threatening that unless the marriage contract went through, he would, on Monaco’s behalf, “make no proposal for any closer agreement with you beyond that existing between us,” apparently meaning that the Principality would not take up arms in defense of France.
The King was unimpressed and remained adamant. On July 30 he wrote to the Duc de La Vallière: “Cousin [in the French Court one entitlement of being a duc et pair was to have the King address you as cousin], I came to my decision after examining all the communications from Monsieur de Monaco, and I do not wish to change at all. I shall be grieved if this causes the marriage to fall through, but you will lose none of your rights nor any of my kindness towards you.” Immediately thereafter, the marriage negotiations came to an end.
Reenter the vengeful Anne, Marquise de Brignole-Sale, who sent her former lover a scathing letter charging him with vile behavior toward her daughter and herself and with creating havoc in her marriage and her family. “You accuse me of so many dreadful things that I’m obliged to defend myself,” he replied at the start of a thirty-two-page letter. “I may even find good reason for attacking you,” he added before recounting, point by point, his honorable petition for her daughter’s hand, adding that “my respect for the mother is reflected in the choice.”
Honoré’s letter touched a sympathetic nerve in the Marquise, and she suddenly did an about-face and attempted to obtain her husband’s consent to the marriage. For several months she was unrelenting in her crusade. Finally, at the end of October 1756, he capitulated. Still, one more battle had to be fought for he drew up a decree that forbade Marie-Catherine to transfer her large inherited wealth outside the Genoese republic. This was unacceptable to Honoré, and it took the Marquise four more months to persuade her husband to withdraw the decree.
Finally, by June, this restriction was removed and the contract was signed. Honoré sent his fiancée, who was half his age, his mother’s jewels as an engagement present, which she acknowledged as “of perfect splendour . . . Although mama must have sent you my thanks for your beautiful presents, I cannot allow myself not to repeat them . . .”
Bound by royal protocol, Honoré could not travel to his bride to exchange marriage vows, and as the Marquise would not allow her daughter to go to Monaco before the ceremony, the couple were married by proxy in Genoa on June 15, 1757. Marie-Catherine had not seen Honoré for two years. Despite his absence from the ritual she appeared to be in a romantic daze as she said her vows and then with her mother and relations boarded a splendidly decorated galley. Genoese ships, their flags undulating in the soft summer breeze, escorted it ceremoniously as far as the territorial waters of Monaco.
Honoré stood on the landing stage in Court costume, backed by Monaco’s full contingent of soldiers in their dress uniforms. As his bride’s ship pulled into the harbor, the sky and the Mediterranean were a brilliant azure and the sun so dazzling that the Rock glistened. The ship came to a halt. The gangplank was lowered. Honoré waited nearly a quarter of an hour, but his bride did not appear. Finally, a messenger disembarked and presented him with a letter from the Marquise, now his mother-in-law, informing him that “conscious of her birth and rank,” Honoré should board the Genoese ship to greet his wife.
Honoré was indignant. As a sovereign prince, his rank was higher than Marie-Catherine’s and therefore he insisted that she must be the one to advance first. The Marquise refused and the gangplank was raised. A member of Honoré’s regiment wrote some days later:
The Genoese boat had dropped back to outside our waters, taking the precious charge, the object of our regrets with it. These proud republicans still persisted in wanting the Prince to go and collect his Princess from the boat, and the Prince remained unshakable in his determination to do nothing of the kind. After six days of useless negotiations, of letters and messengers being sent back and forth . . . arrangement over the final expedient [was] proposed by the Genoese. This was to make a bridge out from the Condamine landing-stage to join one let down from their boat. The next day . . . a general post was sounded, we all took up our positions for the great event, the fleet arrived in the harbor, the palace guns fired a salute, the galley drew near our bridge and started to lower another, as had been agreed. The Prince grew tired of waiting for the end of what seemed a long job, and became impatient to embrace his darling bride. He jumped into a boat, followed by his most intrepid courtiers, and in spite of the fuss reached the galley’s ladder. He had scarcely put foot on it when the Princess came down followed by her mother, three uncles and a cousin. The flags and banners were hoisted, the galley-slaves saluted, the guns thundered and the people shouted with joy.
They’re now at the Prince’s summer-house at Carnolès [Menton] . . . There are six or seven officers, Monsieur le Chevalier de Grimaldi, a lady-in-waiting, some gentlemen and myself, among the elect. The bride’s family has gone back to Genoa, except for the Marquise de Brignole-Sale, who is a woman of great spirit and merit. The bride is charming, kind and lovely, and she is making her husband happy.
The Palais Carnolès, with its beautiful gardens and spectacular vista of Cap Martin and the sea, had been built by Honoré II early in the seventeenth century on the site of the ancient Franciscan L’église de Notre-Dame-de-Carnolès. Honoré II had engaged two leading Paris architects to design his summer palace and it appears to be the forerunner of Jacques-Ange Gabriel’s Petit Trianon, the small château at Versailles that became the favorite residence of Marie Antoinette and later the Empress Eugénie. Although palatial, with its grand salon, ceiling murals and Greek columns, the ambiance and privacy Carnolès afforded made it an ideal setting for a honeymoon.
Marie-Catherine was a highly emotional woman filled with a sense of fantasy, and she appeared to be euphorically happy. It is difficult to know if she was aware that her mother and her husband had once been passionate lovers. But in the beginning, she did encompass Honoré in a romantic aura. He was the older, experienced man, and she looked up to him with wide, awe-filled eyes.
On May 17, 1758, eleven months after their marriage, she gave birth to a son who was named after his father. But once having captured the heart of his young wife, removed her from her mother’s control and then domesticated her, Honoré grew restless. The Chevalier de Grimaldi still held the administration of Monaco in his hands. Marie-Catherine was occupied with his son, on whom she lavished attention. There was no good hunting in Monaco; no old friends; none of the pleasures of Paris and his family’s estate in Normandy. And so in the summer of 1760, Honoré left his wife and his Principality for an extended visit to France with a promise to Marie-Catherine that she could join him soon.
The Paris and the Court to which he returned were much altered from those he had left a few years earlier. Due to Madame de Pompadour’s influence, France was having to fight simultaneously a war with England and a Continental war as an ally of Austria against Prussia (the Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763) and simply was not equal to such a contest. The effects had been profound. Not only did trade decline, inflation spiral and taxes soar, France lost its empire in India and North America. Pompadour was hated within the Court and her extravagances at a time of such poverty among the unprivileged had cost the King the sympathy of his subjects. Ominous rumblings could be heard beyond Versailles, “[particularly from Paris, where the King did not dare set foot, even for a day.”
Morale was low at Court despite the usual round of galas, balls and masquerades. The King tried unsuccessfully to ward off depression. “Hiding his identity under the name of a Polish count and fortified by a mixture known as ‘General Lamotte’s drops,’ he would slink off to his private brothel in the Parc aux Cerfs [in the village of Versailles]. Returning at dawn, he would grind and prepare himself a cup of strong coffee. ‘What would the world be without coffee?’ he would sigh. And then, sadly add: ‘After all, what is the world—with coffee?’ ”
To add to the gloom, his son the Dauphin died in October 1765 at the age of thirty-six. “Poor France!” Louis cried. “A King of fifty-five and a Dauphin of eleven!” This was the new heir, his grandson, the Duc de Berry—the future Louis XVI.
Honoré found himself in a Court divided between Pompadour’s supporters and the conservatives who opposed her. The intrigue was beyond Honoré’s grasp and he remained in Paris, which was cloaked in dismal vapors. Soon, loneliness set in and he wrote to Marie-Catherine admitting how greatly he missed her. “My dear love,” she replied, “I swear I feel as deeply as you how cruel it is to be separated from the one you love most in the world. My sorrow is ever with me. I’m only truly happy when dreaming, for then I’ve always the feeling of being with you . . . and I’m always happy to see you respond affectionately to the signs I give of my tenderness for you; but waking up is cruel for however much I look I don’t find you . . .”
She joined Honoré in Paris that December, having left her son in Monaco in the care of her parents. The reunion was marred when, on January 12, 1761, the Marquis Sauveur Gaspard, a son of the late Marquis de Cagnes (who had been the direct male heir to Monaco at the time of Antoine’s death) addressed to the Court of France a protest against what he called the usurpation by the family of the Comtes de Matignon of his father’s right to the succession of the Principality of Monaco. A petition was entered claiming the title of Prince de Monaco. It appears to have been tabled and ignored, but Honoré would never again be easy about the matter.1
Marie-Catherine remained in Paris with Honoré for two years, and then, finding herself pregnant, decided to return to Monaco and the son she had not seen since her departure. “Our son . . . did not know me,” she wrote in a letter to her husband. “He’s got amazing strength and vigour, he’s big and a lovely child, with the eyes, forehead and nose of his papa, and the mouth and chin of his mama. I found my mama has got fat and Papa is still as thin as ever. Goodbye dear love, with my fondest kisses . . .”
She suffered a miscarriage in her fifth month and Honoré returned to Monaco, remaining just long enough to collect her and bring her back to Paris with him. There he left her to recuperate in the care of his brother and sister-in-law while he went off to Fontainebleau. It was at this time that the first signs of disharmony in their marriage can be detected.
“You are forgetting about me, dear love,” she wrote in May 1763. “The pleasures of Fontainebleau take up all your time. This is the third letter I’ve written to you and I’ve only had one from you. That’s not very nice, make up for your mistake promptly by sending me your news . . .”
She was pregnant once again, but her request sent Honoré even farther away, to Normandy, where he spent his time exercising his yearlings on the grounds of his family’s estate. He ignored all her entreaties for him to return to Paris, and was still in Normandy on September 10, when she gave birth to another son, Joseph-Marie-Jérôme. This good news did not bring Honoré rushing back to her side. Over the next two years he was to visit her only three or four times in Paris, and his stays there were brief. Each time he left, his attitude toward her grew more distant.
Honoré’s younger brother, Charles-Maurice, the Comte de Valentinois, and his wife, Marie-Christine, Comtesse de Val-entinois, shared the Matignon Paris mansion with Marie-Catherine, and the sisters-in-law did not get on well. The Comtesse was a Saint-Simon, a descendant of the famous chronicler of Louis XIV’s reign and a member of a family long associated with the Kings of France. She was envious of her younger, richer sister-in-law, although she was contemptuous of her provincial manners and style.
Versailles remained the center of noble society. Pompadour had died in 1764, and the following year, the King took as his maîtresse en titre Madame Du Barry, a striking beauty, although a pale reflection of her predecessor. Born Jeanne Bécu to an impoverished mother and an unknown father, she had been a prostitute in Paris, eventually becoming the mistress of a dissolute nobleman, the Comte Du Barry, who was a well-known procurer in the Court. The office of maîtresse en titre could go only to a nobleman’s wife. Therefore, when Jeanne won the King’s favor, she was swiftly married to Du Barry’s obliging brother. She lacked Pompadour’s political power but was responsible for the dismissal and eclipse of most of the King’s former close advisers. His prestige was diminished and the royal treasury became more depleted.
Du Barry was, to say the least, unpopular. “What do you see in her?” the Duc de Richelieu asked the King. “Only this,” Louis replied. “She makes me forget I will soon be sixty.” (Richelieu had been one of Pompadour’s favored courtiers. A procurer for the Court himself, he was much given to the grand luxuries of milk baths and wearing silver heels on his shoes.)
Du Barry was even more excessively extravagant than Pompadour. She redesigned fifty rooms at Versailles for the King’s private apartments and filled her own with the finest porcelain, ebony-encrusted furniture, costly ivory and leather-bound volumes of erotica. She rode in the most sumptuous carriage yet seen by the Court; painted by Vallée with cupids, hearts and beds of roses, it was decorated with the arms and motto of the Barrymores of Ireland, to whom she claimed the Du Barrys of Gascony were related. To pique the King’s jaded appetite she dressed as a curly-haired boy and played the guitar.
While taxes for the people skyrocketed ever higher, the Court at Versailles continued its grand balls, operas, hunts and receptions. On ball nights the great château blazed with light, the hundreds of flaming candles in the massive crystal chandeliers reflecting in the towering mirrors that lined the walls. Men wore powdered wigs, heavily embroidered satin and brocade suits, silk stockings and shoes with jeweled buckles that sparkled as they moved to the music, their jeweled swords lashed at the hip. Diamonds blazed as the ladies, their décolleté silk or brocade ball gowns stretched wide over panniers, tried to gracefully navigate the dance floor with their trains, the lengths varying according to their rank. Also required was a perfectly round patch of bright rouge, worn on each cheek, precisely three inches in diameter.
Marie-Catherine would have none of this. She used no color on her face and refused to wear a train. She sat out most dances with the older women. Her sister-in-law, a robust woman who had to be laced tightly into her clothes, was constantly critical of her. In contrast, according to the highly romantic Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of England’s Duke of Richmond, who visited Paris in June 1765, the Princesse de Monaco had “a round face with a sweet and charming expression. Her complexion is lovely and she’s got the best figure of any woman I know. She is the only one here not to paint her face, all the others dab rouge on in a horrible manner.”
Lady Sarah was not the only one that summer to take particular notice of Marie-Catherine. The youthful, extremely attractive widowed Prince de Condé (descendant of Athénaïs Montespan and Louis XIV and owner of the magnificent Château de Chantilly) began to pay her considerable attention. She appears to have regarded him as a kind friend; being something of a recluse, she had few others. He often stopped by in the afternoon to see her and frequently sat with her at a ball. The Comtesse de Valentinois wrote to Honoré of the Prince de Condé’s attentions to his wife, commenting in a spiteful tone that Marie-Catherine “enjoys these ‘overtures’ and does nothing to discourage the Prince’s admiration.”
Honoré left his mistress in Normandy and descended on his wife in Paris in a jealous rage; after shocking her with his accusations, he departed in a fury. Two months later, her letters reveal the coolness that now existed between them. “As you say nothing about your return,” she wrote, “I don’t know when you will be back here . . . [but] I am most grateful for the kindness you showed in enquiring about my health.”
A year passed without his return to Paris. The Prince de Condé continued his attentions and Marie-Catherine did not turn him away.
The twenty-eight-year-old Duke of York, brother of George III of England, was traveling through France in August 1767. He was on his way from Paris to Genoa to see a young woman with whom he was passionately in love. When the Duke and his entourage reached Toulon, the governor of Provence, the Due de Villars, gave a ball in his honor. “H.R.H. had danced rather too much,” the London Gazette later recorded, “and this not only fatigued him but occasioned a very strong perspiration; as soon as the ball was finished the Duke of York gave orders for his carriages to be got ready. . . . The gentleman of the train, Colonel de Morison, represented to H.R.H. the necessity of remaining where he was [and confining himself to bed]. . . .
“The Duke of York declared there was no actual occasion for such caution, that he would wrap himself up in his cloak, and that would be sufficient. He did so and stepped into his carriage. This was on the 29th of August.
“Imprudently H.R.H. attended theatre the next evening in Toulon and had to return to his apartments with a terrible chill. The members of his suite tried to convince him that he should remain in Toulon until he was fully recovered. But he would not be delayed.” His original plan to continue by sea to Genoa seemed unwise in view of his ill-health. Thus it was decided that he should continue the rest of the way by land and that he would stop in Monaco en route. Such high-ranking guests were infrequent on the Rock and so, although Honoré was in Normandy when he received word of the royal visit, he hurried back to Monaco to prepare a proper welcome.
“He arrived at Monaco in good spirits,” the London Gazette continues, “a handsome figure in his rear admiral’s uniform. The weather was uncommonly hot and as he stood in the sun taking the salute from Monaco’s small, gleaming honor guard, he grew quite feverish.”
Honoré had been placed in a difficult situation. His royal guest “took to his bed entirely.” Great diplomacy was now required. Monaco did not have the medical resources of London or Paris, and the Duke of York’s condition worsened rapidly. The local physicians and those brought from Nice were unable to reverse the downward slide. Honoré wanted to notify King George, but the Duke of York refused to allow him to send the message.
After taking affectionate leave of all those who had traveled with him and thanking Honoré for his kindness, the Duke died on September 17, a fortnight after his arrival in Monaco. Honoré ordered a cannon to be fired every half hour and had the Duke of York placed upon his own bed for the lying in state. In accordance with the custom of England for royal deaths, the walls of the room were hung with black, and a huge canopy of black and silver with a representation of a coffin upon its dome was placed in the middle of the room. The bed had been raised onto a platform reached by six steps covered in black and rimmed with lighted tapers in large gold and silver candlesticks.
A gun salute sounded as the procession made its way to the frigate which was to carry the Duke of York’s body back to England. Honoré waited by the landing until the coffin and all the royal suite were aboard the Montreal and the royal standard was lowered to half-mast. He then gave the command for two rounds of cannon to be fired, to be followed by his regiment shooting two additional rounds.
It was, perhaps, Honoré’s greatest moment. He made sure that every rule of protocol that covered the death of a King of England’s brother was followed to the letter. For his efforts, George III sent Honoré two of the Duke of York’s finest race horses and invited him to London as his guest, an invitation that was too prestigious for Honoré to refuse.
He returned to Paris and outfitted himself grandly. Although Marie-Catherine begged to join him, he left for London without her on March 26, 1768. The King received him with suitable ceremony, and he was entertained by many members of the royal family. He went on a tour of Cambridge, visited the races at Newmarket (“accompanied by a gentleman and two servants”) and was the guest of honor at a ball attended by the Dukes of Northumberland, Grafton, Gloucester and Cumberland but—to his tremendous disappointment—not the King.
If Honoré thought that his visit would create stronger ties with England, or that the accident of the Duke of York’s having died in his Principality would bring him special recognition from George III, he had misjudged. The royal brothers, who were only one year apart, had been exceedingly close as children. But by the time they were young men, the Duke of York’s foppish ways, his love of dancing and his extravagant tastes had alienated his more sober, domesticated brother. At York’s death, Horace Walpole was moved to write, “Thus ended his silly, good-humoured, troublesome career in a pitious manner.” The King made no public comment on his feelings, but to Honoré, in whose care his brother had died, he was politely appreciative and little more.
On the bright morning of June 4, eight weeks after his arrival in England, Honoré embarked at Dover for Calais, his royal journey having amounted to rather less than he had hoped for. Back in Paris, he was confronted by his sister-in-law with malicious gossip about Marie-Catherine and the Prince de Condé. Husband and wife became quickly estranged. In behavior that contrasted sharply with his usual reserve, Honoré flaunted his various mistresses, and in July 1769 Marie-Catherine left their Paris home for a retreat in a nearby convent before going on to the Convent of the Visitation at Le Mans, where the Bishop was a Grimaldi relative. The Marquise de Brignole-Sale now intervened, hoping to arrange a reconciliation.
“My daughter is by no means fickle, and she loves you steadfastly,” she wrote to her son-in-law. “Open your heart to me; if you think there is something about her conduct that can be improved, let me know. But have you nothing to reproach yourself for? What you write to tell me pierces me to the heart . . . Don’t embitter the little time I still have to live!”
Honoré and Marie-Catherine publicly reconciled but the animosity between them remained. Her father, the Marquis, had recently died and left her a sizable inheritance with the stipulation that Honoré have no rights in it and no power of attorney. Furious over this slight, Honoré petitioned the Genoese Senate to give him control of his wife’s assets. He was outraged when this claim was rejected, and he threatened to send her back to Monaco alone while he stayed in Paris. She had by this time returned to the Matignon town house, but Honoré’s action compelled her to once again take refuge in the convent.
The Prince de Condé, still very much in love with Marie-Catherine, exerted his influence and on January 9, 1771, she was granted a legal separation and total control of her inheritance. A few days later she moved into the Prince’s magnificent Château de Chantilly. Honoré, much disconcerted by this, wrote to the Marquise de Brignole-Sale: “My legal advisors wanted me to pass an act at Monaco recalling her to her duties. I do not flatter myself that would turn her from the bad path she has taken.”
To his beleaguered wife’s relief he did not do this and she bought the elegant Château de Betz, close to Chantilly, where Honoré, relenting, allowed her sons to visit. Her love for the Prince de Condé deepened and in time Honoré came to accept it.2
Honoré’s life in Paris had become difficult. Everywhere there were signs of discord. On April 27, 1774, the King took mortally ill. Asked to pray for their monarch, Parisians quipped: “Our father who art in Versailles, hallowed be thy name; thy will is done neither on earth nor in heaven . . .” On May 9, “. . . motionless, his mouth open, his face neither deformed nor showing any sign of agitation, but towards the end swollen and copper-coloured,” he received extreme unction.
It had been arranged that a candle would be extinguished in the window of the sick room when the elderly King drew his last breath. His grandson and heir, the twenty-year-old Duc de Berry, and his nineteen-year-old wife, Marie Antoinette of Austria, sat vigil watching the flickering flame, which was blown out at 3:15 in the morning of May 10. The Duc de Berry was now Louis XVI, King of France.
The last years of Louis XV’s reign had left Honoré with great bitterness, disgust and a certain amount of fear. Monaco was dependent for its protection upon France, which was still the biggest state in Europe, with a population of twenty-five million people, but it was now a divided land. Honoré’s behavior shows that he was concerned about what this meant to his little Principality. He decided that Monaco must prosper if it was to prevail. His course of action was to set about to marry his elder son, who would succeed him, to a wife with a vast fortune and a marriage contract that would guarantee her husband, and ultimately himself, control over it.
6
IN THE SUMMER of 1785, Louis XVI was returning to Versailles after a visit to the port of Cherbourg, when a peasant approached his carriage and sang a song in his praise.
“I like your song,” said Louis. “Who wrote it?”
“I did, my lord.”
“You did! Bis, bis!”
“Bis?”
“That means sing it again.”
The man complied and when he had finished was rewarded with some gold coins.
“Bis, Sire, bis,” he said and thrust his other hand forward.
The King laughed and ordered more louis d’ors be given the man.
Such personal generosity might appease a single peasant, but France’s basic problems—the slow growth of national wealth and the misery of the poor—would not be solved so easily.
The French Revolution was moving into its first phase. The storming of the Bastille was still four years away, but already Monaco was feeling the effects of the brewing revolution, the growing unrest in Nice spilling over the border. The Chevalier de Grimaldi who had maintained peace and a sense of continuity for the Monégasques throughout his long control of the government, had died the previous year. Honoré returned from France, but he brought with him his French aristocratic attitudes and was concerned more with the safety of his properties in France than with the signs of discontent in his Principality. A group had organized in Menton and were demanding lower taxation and the right to elect representatives to the government.
With Marie-Catherine’s fortune no longer in his command and his French revenues threatened, Honoré ill-advisedly raised taxes, promising only future roadworks to enable farmers to market their produce and export them abroad. Clearly, he underestimated the great dissatisfaction that pervaded the Principality. Of its three towns—Monaco, Menton and Roquebrune—only Monaco felt a strong allegiance to the Grimaldis.
The people of Menton and Roquebrune had not been liberated from an oppressive country. Nor did they have a history of monarchy. They had been bought and sold along with their lands from one feudal lord to another, and their heritage and geographical situation gave them closer ties to Genoa, Sardinia and Naples than to France. They grew olive trees and grapes on their rugged, rocky terrain and ate bountifully from the nearby sea. They were poor but not starving, and the combined population (about 1,280 at this time) was made up of small individual landowners rather than feudal lords and serfs. Therefore, they keenly felt Honoré’s heavy taxation which took nearly 70 percent of their earned income, it being a true yoke about their necks.
The French were leading the way for them, and they presented a petition that demanded of Honoré reforms, representation, lower taxes, and roads to allow them better access over the mountains and to the ports in Monaco and Nice. The list made evident the Monégasques’ discontent, and the tone of the petition—a demand really—presented the possibility that they might well be moved to do something about it.
Honoré, sensing the danger but not the immensity of it, made his own compromise by permitting each town to form its own council while he ignored all their other demands. This, following the dramatic move of the French people in storming the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was not enough to appease the growing dissent.
Honoré’s world was shifting beneath his feet. Along with his troubles in Monaco, the new French National Assembly which had been formed in hopes of breaking the deadlock that was preventing emergency action to relieve the suffering of a hungry populace, had abolished all feudal rights and revenues. On September 4, 1790, Honoré protested to the Assembly that the taxes received from the duchy of Valentinois “were in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Péronne [forced on Louis XI in 1468 when he was defeated in that city in a war with Charles of Burgundy], compensation for the loss of the states in the Kingdom of Naples.” The issue was tabled while the Revolution moved inexorably on. The momentum and the seriousness of the growing rebellion eluded Honoré, although the rest of Europe’s monarchs and aristocrats had been stunned out of their apathy by the formation of the French National Assembly and the overthrow of the Bastille.
Money was Honoré’s solution to the increasing restiveness of the Monégasques, money in sufficient quantities to enable him to put their demands into effect and to hire troops to protect his threatened interests. How he could raise it was another matter. With Monaco’s long association with France, he could not expect to be helped by another nation. To solicit help from Austria because of Marie Antoinette’s connections would be considered traitorous by the French Assembly and would make it impossible for him to return to France, at least until the rebellion had been suppressed, which was what he expected to happen in the end.
He had arranged what he had believed to be a brilliant match for his older son, Honoré, by marrying him in 1777 at the age of nineteen to Louise-Félicité d’Aumont, heiress through her mother to the considerable fortune of Cardinal Mazarin and, ironically, the great-granddaughter of the infamous Hortense Mancini, erstwhile mistress of England’s Charles II and of Prince Louis of Monaco. Expecting a huge dowry from the bride’s family, Honoré had transferred the dukedom and peerage of Valentinois to his son and heir in order to seal the contract, thus severing his own links with the French Court. An even greater inducement than the money in the bride’s dowry had been the vast lands and possessions of the Mazarin-d’Aumonts which were to pass into his hands in 1781, upon the bride’s coming of age, as part of the wedding contract.
Confident that he had engineered a splendid marriage for his son while filling his own coffers, Honoré had lived ever more extravagantly, only to be faced in 1788 with the shocking knowledge that the Mazarin-d’Aumont “fortune” was uncollectable since it was encumbered by huge mortgages and numerous lawsuits. The debts had increased as the young Grimaldis lived high on borrowed money, Louise-Félicité running up vast bills with gambling losses, jewels and clothes. By May 1789, the liens against the bride’s dowry amounted to 1,390,000 livres—exceeding its actual worth. Not only was there no money to help Monaco’s woes, Honoré had to look elsewhere if he was to save his own estates.
In April 1790, he left Monaco in the hands of his self-appointed officials, none of them up to the task before them, and went to Paris where, after his petition had been rejected, he battled the Assembly for over a year for recognition of his claim to the revenues of his estates. Finally, in September 1791, it issued a decree allowing him an indemnity and charging the King’s government to pay over to him the amount of 273,766 francs. This was a farce, for three months earlier the Assembly had suspended the King from his royal functions. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children were prisoners in the Tuileries while outside the gates of their palace-prison crowds shouted, “Austrian-whore [the Queen]!” Honoré stood no chance of collecting from the government of an imprisoned monarch.
There remained some hope that the struggle of the conservatives, led by Mirabeau, to make France a constitutional monarchy would succeed. The left wing demanded the abolition of the monarchy, but a majority in the Assembly prevailed. Despite this, nothing had changed for the royal family: they remained virtual prisoners.
The Paris to which Honoré had returned was in turmoil. Of the 650,000 people crowded into the city, over half were unemployed, roaming aimlessly through the narrow, winding, muddy streets of the still largely medieval city, their anger rising as their stomachs growled with increasing hunger. Even for those with a few sous in their pockets, bread was short, for there had been severe storms that winter and the wheat harvest had been nearly ruined. To add to the discontent of the French workers who, after the storming of the Bastille, had believed revolutions in other countries would help their cause, Europe did not follow their lead.
The frustration and inconclusiveness of their situation—the King unable to act and the Assembly playing a waiting game—enraged them further. During the harsh winter of 1792 when crops once again were sparse and the price of a loaf of bread exorbitant, calls for bloodshed “rose like a mad man’s shriek.” In April 1792, against the King’s judgment, the French Assembly declared war against Austria, which had announced itself ready to restore the King “to a situation in which he would be free to strengthen the foundations of monarchical government . . .”
The effect of this devastating war was not only that the Queen, Marie Antoinette, became an enemy alien (she was Austrian by birth), but that the country was now forced to feed, clothe, equip and shelter an army of 400,000 men.
Honoré remained in Paris, not knowing where to turn, for on January 13, 1793, the People’s Councils of Monaco, Menton and Roquebrune formed a Conventional Assembly, declared the end of Honoré’s reign and voted to ask for union with France, the first foreign land to do so. General Brunet, the commander of the French troops who were at the time engaged in hostilities in Sardinia, conveyed this request to the Assembly in Paris. It arrived and was acted upon only hours after a French tribunal of 749 members voted by a majority of 53 that the King, now a prisoner at Temple Prison, be condemned to death on the guillotine.1
The dangers on the streets of Paris were always present. However, having given his horses and carriages to the military and donated to the populist cause, Honoré III remained miraculously unharmed. His son, Honoré, in poor health and now separated from his wife, had come to live with him. His younger son, Joseph, who had married the beautiful Françoise-Thérèse de Choiseul-Stainville in 1782, traveled abroad trying to raise funds to extricate his family from their problems. This brought him under suspicion as a suspected enemy of the people and so he was forced to remain with his wife out of France, having left their two daughters in the care of a governess.
The King was executed on January 21, 1793, and on March 4, 1793, Monaco officially became part of the French Alpes-Maritimes département, which included Nice. Lazare Carnot, considered to be the military genius of the Revolution, stated that since “it appears that the ex-prince did not declare himself an enemy of France during the Revolution, and since he has always claimed her protection as a friend and ally, the committee is of the opinion that in abolishing his honorific and feudal revenues you ought to accord him protection and safeguard for what he may possess as an ordinary citizen.” This seemed to indicate that if Honoré did return to Monaco his life would not be in jeopardy. Jean-Michel Alexandre de Millo, seventy-three years of age and a former associate and friend of Honoré’s, was elected mayor on March 24. Only days later he was removed from office.
A revolutionary group called the Société Populaire came into control, and anyone unsympathetic to the cause was either banished or imprisoned. (Although deaths occurred, there is no official record of executions having been carried out.) There was a move to “dechristianization.” The sounding of church chimes was forbidden, as were any religious ceremonies not held in churches, which were closed at night, and priests were forbidden to celebrate midnight mass or hear confessions. Nonetheless, the Revolution in Monaco was at best a small replica of that in France. Since the Principality had never had an aristocratic or affluent society other than the Grimaldis, life simply became bleaker than before, and the people suffered deprivation but not the hunger (for farming continued) nor the fear that consumed France.
Severe storms sent massive waves crashing against the sides of the Rock on March 3, 1793, forcing a French ship with two commissars of the French Republic to wait until a day later to make the decree public. There are no reports existing that any great cheering was heard as the Grimaldi standard was taken down from the Palace. There was, however, tremendous pillaging of the art, silver and other treasures inside, perhaps by the French before they sailed. A meticulous inventory was then done of every room in the Palace; and it appears that after that day, nothing further was ever removed.
In September the ex-Prince, his ailing older son and his estranged wife, Louise-Félicité, and their younger son, eight-year-old Florestan, were imprisoned in the barracks of the rue de Sèvres as enemies of the people. The child and his mother were rescued by the Grimaldis’ friend and family doctor, a man named Desormeaux, who forged a release order and then hid them in his home until the end of the Reign of Terror.2 Françoise-Thérèse, the wife of Honoré’s younger son, Joseph, was not so fortunate. Unable to bear being apart from her daughters during this horrifying time, she had returned to Paris in November 1792, and was immediately arrested. Despite his imprisonment Honoré managed to secure funds on her behalf, and she was released against surety.
Honoré was very fond of Françoise-Thérèse, who, with Joseph, had spent several months at Carnolès with him when they were first married. She was a delicate girl, fair-skinned, with pale hair set off by violet eyes, and had a charming manner. When she was arrested again in September 1793, Honoré was also incarcerated and could not help her. Since Joseph was under high suspicion of being an enemy of the people (the reason for Honoré’s arrest), she feared the worst. Claiming to be ill, she was allowed to go into an anteroom to lie down while the charges against her were put before the magistrate. Somehow she managed to slip past a guard and onto the street. Eventually, she made her way to a convent in the rue de Bellechasse. The few remaining nuns took her in. Three months later, the convent was raided and Françoise-Thérèse was arrested for the third time.
In prison, Honoré appealed through every channel open to him for the safety of his family. A delegate from the People’s Union in Thorigny (the governing body where Honoré’s estate was located) reported to the Convention on December 1, 1793: “Citizen Grimaldi . . . very different from other seigneurs of the old order . . . has always shown himself kind, just, and understanding . . . always affable, sympathetic and generous [to the people]; mindful of the farms, he never went hunting or shooting over them except when no harm could be caused. He had fines imposed under the game laws refunded, he allowed poor people to gather wood from his park, had 900 loaves sent every week to families in want, and gave a number of other doles, pensions and help in kind.” In the end, the local council and People’s Union of Thorigny asked for his release and that he should receive safe passage to Thorigny (which was far more peaceful than Paris), where they would be responsible for him.
The plea was rejected and Honoré, his two sons and his daughter-in-law remained in prison. On July 25, 1794, Fran-çoise-Thérèse received an order to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal at ten o’clock the next morning. “She showed not the slightest sign of emotion,” one of her fellow inmates recorded. “She . . . kissed her maid, and took leave of us just as though parting from fellow travellers whose company had been pleasant and agreeable during a long journey.”
The sound of the guillotine was an ever-present daily terror at this time. Françoise-Thérèse, wife of Grimaldi-Monaco, aged twenty-six, was to be victim number 28 on July 26, condemned to die as an enemy of the people. Although frail even before her harsh imprisonment, Françoise-Thérèse stood erect when the verdict was delivered. She was then led to the records office, only a few steps from the place of execution. She had been advised by other prisoners to claim to be pregnant, which would give her time at least to try for an appeal, since pregnant women could claim exemption from execution until after the birth of their child, or proof that they had miscarried or lied. It meant confessing to have conceived adulterously as she and Honoré had not lived together for two years. There and then—the numbers 18 and 19 having been called—she announced she was pregnant, naming a dead prisoner as the father, and was promptly returned to a cell where she was left alone.
With her shoe she carefully broke a pane of glass in a narrow slit of a window and cut off two locks of her long fair hair. She then enclosed them in letters, one addressed to her daughters, the other to their governess, Madame Chevenoy. This accomplished, she wrote a note in a firm hand to the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville: “I should be obliged if Citizen Fouquier-Tinville would come and see me here for a moment. I earnestly ask him not to refuse this request.” She covered her head with her shawl, gave the note to the guard on duty and waited.
When no one had appeared by the following morning, she wrote a second note: “I give you notice, Citizen, that I am not with child. I wanted to tell you [in person] and now, having no hope of you coming, I inform you in writing. I did not soil my lips with this lie for fear of death nor to avoid it, but to give myself one more day so that I could cut my hair myself instead of having it cut by the executioner. This is all I could leave to my children; it had at least to be clean.”
With rouge on her cheeks so as not to appear frightened, she waited once more in the records office. Forty-two heads were to fall that day. Françoise-Thérèse was the last to mount the guillotine. It was five in the afternoon and the sun had lowered beyond the wall of the prison when she died. The following day, Robespierre, whose key words had been “punish,” “terror,” “victim” and “blood,” had been overthrown by the Convention and the Reign of Terror had ended.3 He was to follow Françoise-Thérèse to the guillotine, preceded by the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville a short time later. Had she waited twenty-four hours to send her note, Françoise-Thérèse need not have died.
Although he was released from prison in October 1794 and was living once again in his Paris town house—stripped of all its former furnishings and art and silver—the strain had been too much for Honoré. He was never to regain his strength. He died at the age of seventy-five on May 12, 1795. His elder son was now officially Honoré IV, but he did not have the right to be called Prince de Monaco. His health broken, he nonetheless succeeded in regaining control of his father’s estates. As he was not well enough to conduct his own affairs, he placed them in the capable hands of his brother Joseph, who returned to France at the end of 1795 exonerated from all charges, a few months after the death of Louis XVI’s ten-year-old son, and heir.
Monaco’s former ruling family did at least have a direct male heir, and he had two sons, Honore-Gabriel and Florestan. But Monaco was no longer a principality. It had even been renamed L’Hercule. So it seemed just as unlikely that the Grimaldis would occupy their Palace again as that a Bourbon king would sit on the throne of France.
Footnotes
1Françoise Scarron, born d’Aubigne and created Marquise de Maintenon by Louis XIV.
1Louis was married to Marie Leczinska, daughter of Stanislas, a Polish nobleman elected King of Poland in 1704 and subsequently deposed. She was older, unattractive and dressed “in queer-looking furs and peacock plumes,” which did not help to win her husband’s love. The night the Duchesse de Châteauroux died, the Queen lay awake thinking each sound was her ghost. Finally, her maid said, “Even if she did come back, would it be your room she’d come to?”
1Thirteen years later, in 1774, Marquis Sauveur Gaspard renewed this protest before the Vienna High Council. By all evidence in this hearing, the fiefs of Monaco, Menton and Roquebrune constituted imperial fiefs. The French Revolution, fifteen years later, prevented any further attention being given to this matter. But on January 21, 1841, the Marquis Charles Philippe Auguste de Cagnes, a retired general, revived the pretensions which had never been renounced and demanded suspension of the enfeoffment. The petition was ignored by the French Court.
2Marie-Catherine and the Prince de Condé went into exile in England at the time of the Revolution. She gave over her vast fortune to assist the royalist forces. She married the Prince some years after Honoré’s death in 1795. She herself died in England on March 8, 1813, at the age of seventy-four, her money entirely gone. The English royal family paid for her burial in England.
1There was only one English-speaking member of the Convention, Thomas Paine of Pennsylvania, then a deputy for the Pas de Calais, who voted aginst the death penalty. “Paine stood silent on the rostrum, while a secretary read a French translation of his speech. After the first few sentences Marat [Jean Paul, revolutionary leader] broke in: ‘Thomas Paine mayn’t vote on this. He’s a Quaker; his religious principles are opposed to the death sentence.’ . . . Paine continued through his interpreter: ‘The man you have condemned to death is regarded by the people of the United States as their best friend, the founder of their freedom. [Louis XVI had sent money and men to the aid of American revolutionaries in their war against England, placing his own country in financial jeopardy at the time.] That people is today your only ally ; well, then, it comes in my person to ask you to suspend the sentence you have decreed. Do not give the despot of England [George III] the pleasure of seeing on the scaffold the man who delivered our brothers in America from tyranny.” [Cronin, Louis and Antoinette, page 369]
2The Reign of Terror was the period between 1793 and 1794 when the Committee of Public Safety, operating as a war dictatorship, was instituted to rule the country. Maximilien Robespierre was the dominant member. Their aim was to eliminate all counterrevolutionaries, to raise new armies and to regulate the national economy. During this time thousands of victims were guillotined or arrested. Many more were the victims of mass drownings called noyades. Robespierre was overthrown on July 27, 1794, and executed.
3Thomas Paine had also been imprisoned and was marked for execution, but a feverish illness kept him semiconscious for a month. Then, the end of the Reign of Terror having come, his life was saved. Madame Du Barry had not been that fortunate.