April 1959
This work is written with a kind of graceful affection for her subject which becomes disarming and infectious. La Grande Mademoiselle - first cousin of Louis XIV and the greatest heiress in France - was brought up in circumstances of the utmost luxury and silliness and invites special admiration for the qualities which endured in spite of her environment: her essential honesty, her good heart, her almost noble fidelity and her innocence. Almost everybody betrayed her, her execrable father, Louis, his horrid little brother, Mme de Montespan, Condé, and most disastrously, de Lauzun, but she contrived never to be embittered - although she was possibly partially protected by lack of intellect and an inviolate sense of her position.
In appearance she was far too tall, with an enormous nose and bad teeth, a complexion which improved after smallpox, and ‘beautifully ashen’ hair. She was brought up almost illiterate - any Tudor princess would have regarded her as a savage - and emerged at seventeen as an affectionate hoyden; one cannot help seeing her in the French Court as an extremely well-bred shooting dog perpetually laying her head against some royal knee and knocking over the gambling tables and chocolate cups. Her illiteracy did not stop her writing her memoirs, in which, as Miss Sackville-West remarks, ‘nothing escaped her, except important things’.
She had a violent temper, talked (loudly) and wrote (illegibly) far too much, but her rank and great wealth made her an invaluable marriage bargain, and even Charles II thought twice about marrying her. She had no serious interest in marriage, however, until at the age of forty-three she fell desperately in love with de Lauzun, a Gascon upstart who had worked his way by eccentric bravado into the King’s favour. De Lauzun’s behaviour to her was only equalled by her father’s for sheer treacherous brutality.
After months of anxious enigmatic conversation with de Lauzun, she obtained Louis’ consent to their marriage and spent what she described as the three happiest days of her life, which the boorish and calculating indifference of de Lauzun, the Queen’s sour disapproval and other ominous signs seems not to have clouded; and then Louis retracted his consent, and poor Mademoiselle was plunged into a despairing grief which it is painful even to read about. Most of Paris was laughing at a disappointed old maid weeping day and night, so she was forced back into the Court where her tears violently and unaccountably overcame her, although she clearly struggled incessantly with them, able only to indulge herself in the Queen’s box at the opera, where it was dark, and for four hours she could stare across to de Lauzun’s box and weep in peace.
Her anguish is touching: ‘to understand my state,’ she says, ‘it is necessary to have been in it: this is one of the things one does not know how to describe’. The sequel: de Lauzun’s ten years of imprisonment, her efforts to procure his release, and de Lauzun’s eventual return and their hopeless incompatibility ending in a final parting, is somehow all sadder than a straight tragedy. One does end by saying with the author ‘poor Mademoiselle’ - so rich, so important in her own eyes, playing at soldiers, building houses, dashing to parties, denied perhaps the only thing that she really wanted other than being La Grande Mademoiselle.
This book is admirably written: in spite of Miss Sackville-West’s considerable and intricate knowledge - both of the French language and the period of which she is writing - great care has been taken to be simple and clear for those who know much less of either.