You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns Nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
IN MANY CASES THE TRADITIONAL LOVE TRIANGLE—KING, queen, and mistress—was in fact a love quadrangle. Many of the royal mistresses were married, either before their liaisons with the king or during the affair at the behest of the monarch himself. A perfect contradiction in light of our twenty-first-century morality, marriage was thought to pull a veil of respectability over a royal mistress. A husband’s tacit approval gave legitimacy to an illicit relationship. Moreover, a pregnant unmarried woman was automatically a focus of social stigma. Even if the pregnant royal mistress had not slept with her husband in years, she was—after all—married.
Some kings, however, notably Louis XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV, fretted about committing a double adultery and, from the standpoint of mortal sin, would have preferred unmarried mistresses, thereby halving their carnal transgressions. Louis XIV was content with single Louise de La Vallière for seven years—during which time she scandalously provided him with four children. When he fell for the very married Athénaïs de Montespan—who provided him with seven—he grew more worried about the salvation of his soul. So worried, in fact, that after the queen died he secretly married the formidable old virgin Madame de Maintenon to enjoy sex without guilt.
In the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Louis XV, who didn’t seem horribly concerned about betraying his own wife, suffered for the sin of bedding another man’s wife, Madame de Pompadour. His pangs of conscience were especially keen during Lent, the time to weigh one’s trespasses throughout the preceding year.
But Louis had no qualms about marrying off his final mistress, the ravishing prostitute Jeanne Becu, to an impoverished nobleman to raise her status. Louis had the taverns and brothels of France searched for her pimp’s brother, the comte du Barry. At the altar, the man was given a bag of gold, a pension for life, and a horse to ride away on. This respectable married woman, now a countess, could be presented at court despite the sneers behind painted fans.
The phony marriage would come back to haunt the lovers, however. Four years later, in 1773, the ailing and now widowed monarch considered marrying his favorite and so dying in a state of sanctified grace as had his great-grandfather Louis XIV with Madame de Maintenon. For her part, Madame du Barry was ecstatic. After suffering constant humiliation at court, she saw herself as queen of France before whom all her enemies would have to scrape and bow. But then it was remembered that she had a husband of sorts, drinking somewhere, who about that time sent word to the king that he would make an embarrassing appearance at Versailles unless sufficiently reimbursed. He was speedily paid off with several thousand livres and made a knight of the Order of St. Louis—a medal given for outstanding merit, though in this case outstanding blackmail. All thoughts of marriage were dropped.
In the tenth century B.C., King David rid himself of Bathsheba’s inconvenient husband Uriah the Hittite by sending him into the front lines of battle. By the seventeenth century, kings had adopted a slightly more humane solution—exiling the husband to foreign parts under the cover of a diplomatic mission. Such was the case of Roger Palmer, the husband of Charles II’s Barbara, Lady Castlemaine. Roger trudged grudgingly about the courts of Europe on Charles’s orders. He was yanked back whenever Barbara was about to give birth to a royal bastard, and he was expected to hover solicitously until after the birth as if the child were his.
Two centuries later Nicholas von Kiss, the dashing but ineffectual husband of Katharina Schratt, mistress of emperor Franz Josef of Austria, was invited by the emperor to join the diplomatic service—a request he dare not refuse. When Nicholas complained of boredom in one locale, Katharina would ask the emperor to transfer him to another. Nicholas periodically visited his wife in Vienna to stuff his pockets with her money before going abroad once more.
In 1855 the compliant husband of Napoleon III’s mistress Virginie di Castiglione summed up the traditional role of king’s cuckold when he said, “I am a model husband. I never see or hear anything.”1 And indeed, many a man was willing to lay down his wife for the good of his country.
In the 1670s, the princesse de Soubise enjoyed a brief liaison with Louis XIV with the aid of her husband the prince. One evening the king’s valet, Bontemps, knocked on the princess’s apartment door to summon her to her rendezvous with the king. All the while, the prince pretended to snore loudly. Although the affair was brief, the prince found himself the object of uproarious ridicule at court. But the betrayed husband laughed at courtiers’ disdain all the way to the bank. “Never was so prodigious a family fortune founded so speedily,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon.2 The Hôtel de Soubise became the grandest house in Paris and today serves as the home of the French national archives. It is clear why so many courtiers encouraged their wives to sleep with the king—the wages of sin were high.
In the 1820s King George IV flirted with his mistress Lady Conyngham in the presence of her obliging husband. The king held her hand beneath the table and never drank from his glass unless he touched her glass with it first. He had the appalling habit of taking snuff from her generous bosom. During these displays of affection Lord Conyngham often sat next to the happy couple, quite contentedly drinking. He must have relished the riches his family reaped so quickly. The king nominated this compliant gentleman as lord chamberlain of the household, a nomination that was quickly shot down by his morally outraged cabinet.
The fate of Polish count Anastase Walewski—who pushed his wife Maria into the eager arms of Napoleon Bonaparte—was not as happy. The wealthy count had married Maria when she was sixteen and he sixty-eight. It was an excellent bargain for the bride’s family, whose fortunes had recently failed as the result of war and partition. Poland was no longer a sovereign nation, having lost its territory starting in 1786 to Russia, Prussia, and Austria, in a kind of international gang rape.
But Maria’s young heart withered in the old man’s arms. On the altar of self-immolation, Maria plaintively wrote to a friend, “He is kind. He paid all of my mother’s farm debts…. I must be a good wife to him…. Does one ever get all one wants in this life?”3
The count, who had been surprisingly youthful for his years, aged quickly after the wedding. He grew querulous, criticizing his wife’s appearance and behavior and throwing jealous scenes when men spoke to her. Yet her socially ambitious husband dragged Maria to balls and dinner parties, where her beauty constantly attracted admirers. In the social whirl of scheming women, Maria’s genuine modesty was perhaps her greatest asset—greater even than her long blonde hair, her large, innocent blue eyes, and her flawless white complexion.
In December 1806, Napoleon and the French army entered Warsaw and were welcomed with open arms by an adoring populace. The Poles were convinced that Napoleon would liberate them from foreign occupation and re-create Poland as a free and sovereign nation. Tens of thousands of young Poles flocked to join the imperial armies, to advance, with their blood, the debt Napoleon would owe Poland and would undoubtedly repay.
In January 1807, Napoleon gave a brilliant ball for Warsaw society. Count Anastase Walewski and his young wife were invited. Maria was extremely nervous about meeting her hero, the man she was convinced would save Poland. She asked her husband’s permission to stay home. Not only did he refuse, but he instructed her to wear her most beautiful gown and ordered his family’s diamond and sapphire necklace to be brought in from their country estate. The count, though peevishly jealous of the male attention his wife’s beauty aroused, wanted to show her off to the emperor.
Wearing a narrow gown of cornflower blue to match her eyes, a silver cord twisted under the high waist, Maria was presented to Napoleon. He looked at her closely and silently passed on. Afterward, he turned to Minister Talleyrand and uttered those ancient, fateful words which have changed so many women’s lives: “Who is she?”4
Maria went home that evening pleased to have met her hero and thought nothing more of it. Everyone but Maria knew that the Conqueror of Europe was dazzled by her beauty, and that his comment “There are many beautiful women in Warsaw” referred to Maria.5
A few days later at the foreign minister’s ball, Napoleon wasted no time in singling Maria out and dancing with her. He was seen to squeeze her hand after the dance and to watch her closely from across the room. Indeed, it seemed as if Napoleon did nothing else but stare at Maria the entire night.
The poor woman suddenly became the chief object of interest at the ball. Hundreds of pairs of aristocratic lips whispered about her behind fans. Hundreds of pairs of hawklike eyes fastened on her. Maria was humiliated by all the attention, but her husband preened himself like a vain peacock. Finally she had done something to make him proud.
The following day Marshal Duroc, chief of the imperial household, called on Maria with a bouquet of flowers and a letter fastened with the imperial green seals. It said, “I saw no one but you, I admired only you; I want no one but you; I beg you to reply promptly to calm my ardor and my impatience. Napoleon.”6
Stunned, Maria told the marshal there would be no reply. That evening came another bouquet and another letter. This one read, “Did I displease you, Madame? Your interest in me seems to have waned, while mine is growing every moment…. You have destroyed my peace…. I beg you to give a little joy tomy poor heart, so ready to adore you. Is it so difficult to send a reply? You owe me two. Napole.”7 Again, Maria declined to send a reply.
Soon after, a third missive arrived in which Napoleon threw his heart at her feet and cleverly added, “Oh come, come…all your desires will be granted. Your country will be so much dearer to me if you take pity on my poor heart.”8
The last was a cunning ruse, for it spoke to patriotic Maria in a language she heard. Poland. She could use her influence with the Great Man to save Poland. What Maria did not know was Napoleon’s opinion of women meddling in politics. “States are lost as soon as women interfere in public affairs,” he said. “…If a woman were to advocate some political move, that would seem to me sufficient reason for taking the opposite course.”9 In a message to his army he wrote, “How unhappy are those princes who, in political matters, allow themselves to be guided by women.”10
Soon everyone in Warsaw knew of Napoleon’s infatuation with Maria. Many guests dropped by her house to offer advice. Society ladies offered unwanted congratulations on Maria’s conquest, even congratulated her husband. Her oldest brother, Benedict, who had already served ten years with the French army, regarded it as her patriotic duty to have sex with the emperor. The count felt honored that Napoleon wanted to make love to his wife and prodded her to visit him as he requested.
Indeed, it seemed everyone wanted Maria to sleep with Napoleon except Maria. They chided her: What would happen if the emperor, spurned by Maria, turned against Poland as well? It would be Maria’s fault! And so trembling Maria, pushed into the carriage by her insistent husband, visited Napoleon in his suite at Warsaw Castle. The first night he talked with her for four hours and nothing more. The second night she became “the unwilling victim of his passion,” she wrote a decade later in her memoirs, which sounds alarmingly like rape.11 But tenderness must have come afterward, for he awakened a sexuality in Maria that she had never known with a sick and aging husband.
The old count had set in motion a love affair that he could not halt. Maria fell in love with Napoleon, and her gratitude to her husband dried up when he forced her into another man’s arms. They separated and eventually divorced. Maria fell deeply in love with Napoleon and for the three years of their torrid love affair followed him around Europe on campaign. But when she became pregnant with his child, Napoleon—who had always believed he was sterile—realized he could sire a prince and heir. He divorced the barren Josephine, dumped the heartbroken Maria, and married an eighteen-year-old Austrian princess.
Maria’s sacrifice on behalf of her beloved nation was as doomed as her love affair with the emperor had been. Even as Napoleon was promising her he would restore Poland, he had instructed his ambassador to Russia to tell the czar, “His Majesty was prepared to see the words Poland and Polish people disappear from all current political transactions,” and “would agree that the kingdom of Poland would never be restored.”12
Doubly betrayed by Napoleon, Maria did not hesitate to visit him in his disgrace and exile on the island of Elba. Bringing their five-year-old son and all her jewels to help him with his financial difficulties, she arrived prepared to stay as his companion. But Napoleon, fearing that scandal would prevent his wife, Empress Maria Louisa, and their son from joining him, sent Maria packing after only three days. Maria and all of Europe knew that the empress was having an affair with a handsome equerry in Vienna and would never trade in her lavish lifestyle for exile on a rock. Not wishing to disillusion Napoleon, Maria kept her peace and boarded the ship, never to see him again.
Not every husband jumped for joy when the king ogled his wife. In 1716, the new mistress of Philippe d’Orléans, regent of France, bore an inconvenient accessory—a loving and jealous husband. While Marie-Madeleine de Parabère reveled in the expensive jewels the regent gave her and ached to wear them, she needed to come up with an explanation for her husband as to how she had obtained them.
Madame de Parabère told her husband that some friends in financial embarrassment wanted to sell the items at a ridiculously low price. Her generous spouse immediately gave her the money to buy them. When she displayed her glittering gems proudly in public and courtiers asked her where she had obtained them, she replied that her kind husband had bought them for her. No one was fooled except her husband. Basking in his wife’s seeming fidelity, Monsieur de Parabère replied that a husband should be generous to a wife who loved no one but himself. The room erupted into guffaws of laughter. Monsieur de Parabère considerately died afterward, sparing his wife traumatic scenes when he would inevitably discover the truth. Relieved of this burden, Madame de Parabère could flaunt the regent’s gifts more freely.
But most married royal mistresses did not have husbands who thoughtfully provided them with the freedoms of an early widowhood. In the 1740s Madame de Pompadour was forced to unharness herself from an adoring husband when she became the mistress of Louis XV. Born Jeanne Poisson, she had married—rather above her station—a wealthy and handsome bourgeois named Le Normant d’Etioles. Monsieur d’Etioles was the nephew of Le Normant de Tournehem, Jeanne’s mother’s lover, who was also presumed to be Jeanne’s father. Monsieur d’Etioles idolized his bride and gave her a large allowance to beautify herself and their homes, and to secure her social position, which had been dimmed by her mother’s shady past.
Since childhood, Madame d’Etioles’s sole ambition had been to become the king’s mistress. It is likely that her marriage to Monsieur d’Etioles fulfilled a dual purpose—to enjoy the fruits of improved social status, and to use that status as a springboard to meet the king. While the pretty young wife had many admirers, she took no lovers, a rare phenomenon in eighteenth-century Paris. She was known to remark at lively dinner parties that the king alone could make her unfaithful to her husband. The room would always ring with laughter at this remark, her husband laughing loudest of all. Little did he know the cold truth that lurked behind the witticism and the pain it would cause him.
The d’Etioles had been married four years when Jeanne achieved her desire of meeting—and winning—the king. Monsieur de Tournehem occupied the position of farmer-general—a wealthy tax collector—and, showing more loyalty to his presumed daughter Jeanne than to his nephew, quickly packed her husband off on a long tour of the provinces. When Monsieur d’Etioles returned some two months later, his uncle broke the unwelcome news that his pretty wife had become the king’s mistress. Monsieur d’Etioles fainted from the shock.
When he came to, he reacted so violently that his uncle feared he would try to kill himself and had all guns removed from the house. Monsieur d’Etioles threatened to go to Versailles to reclaim his wife. His uncle pointed out the folly of such a venture.
Meanwhile, Madame d’Etioles was using her husband’s violent reaction to urge the king to commit, to make her the official maîtresse-en-titre. Fed up with being smuggled into side doors and up secret stairs at night, she wanted her position recognized; she wanted to taste the power, to enjoy the luxuries of Versailles in all their daylight splendor. Madame d’Etioles told the king that she was in danger of an insanely jealous husband and only he could protect her. She wept copious shimmering tears into a silken handkerchief. Louis, shaken, was won over by her tears and assented to all her demands. As a sign of accepting her as maîtresse-en-titre, he created her the marquise de Pompadour.
Monsieur d’Etioles was sent on a business trip to Provence in the hopes that a change of scene would dispel his grief. In 1747 the king rewarded Monsieur d’Etioles for his grudging acquiescence by giving him his uncle’s newly vacated post of farmer-general, a position that brought him the enormous income of four hundred thousand livres a year. He took as mistress a singer from the opera, Mademoiselle Raime, and lived with her in a marriage-type relationship for many years, bringing several children into the world. When offered the post of French ambassador to Constantinople, he turned it down because he would not be allowed to bring his mistress and their children and, as long as Madame de Pompadour was alive, could not remarry.
In 1756 Madame de Pompadour ached for the respectability of becoming a lady-in-waiting to the queen, but her romance with the king, which had opened up such glorious possibilities, now stood in her way. The queen’s ladies were required to take Holy Communion daily, but the church forbade Madame de Pompadour the sacraments because of her previous adulterous relationship with the king and her continued estrangement from her husband. Although she had not slept with Louis for years, she was still banned from the altar. Madame de Pompadour, who had no wish to reconcile with her husband but now needed to reconcile herself with the church, followed her confessor’s instructions and wrote Monsieur d’Etioles a letter requesting him to take her back. “Already my sin has ceased,” she explained, “and all that is necessary is to end the appearance of it—something which I ardently desire. I am resolved by my future conduct to atone for my past wrongs. Take me back; you will find me anxious to edify the world by the harmony of our life as much as I scandalized it by leaving you.”13 This conscious-stricken missive was accompanied by another message informing Monsieur d’Etioles that the king would be quite irritated if he accepted Madame de Pompadour’s offer.
But Monsieur d’Etioles had no inclination whatsoever to take back the wife who had so publicly shamed him. “I have received, Madame, your letter in which you inform me of your determination to return to me and your desire to surrender yourself to God,” he replied. “I cannot but admire such a resolution. I can well understand that it would be very embarrassing for you to see me, and you must agree that my feelings would be the same. Your presence can only intensify painful memories. Therefore, the best course for us is to live apart. No matter how much dissatisfaction you have caused me, I believe that you are concerned for my honor, and I should regard it as compromised if I received you in my house and lived with you as my wife. You are aware that time cannot alter what honor demands.”14
Breathing a huge sigh of relief, Madame de Pompadour showed her husband’s letter to an obliging priest, and was purified of her carnal sins and allowed to take the holy sacraments. Reconciled with the Church, she was now permitted to fulfill her dream of becoming lady-in-waiting to the queen.
Monsieur d’Etioles’s story had a happy ending. When Madame de Pompadour died at forty-two, her spurned husband married Mademoiselle Raime, legitimizing their children, and they lived happily for many years. He survived the Revolution and died at the age of eighty-three in 1800.
Some husbands who were initially horrified at the loss of their wives to the king became quickly reconciled. Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, had such good fortune with the husbands of several of his mistresses. Tall, handsome, his brute strength only partially tempered by the refinements of the time, Augustus had become elector in 1694 at the age of twenty-four. He dutifully married a princess and sired an heir, but his restless nature compelled him to continue the travels he had enjoyed before he mounted the throne. A crowned king wandering across Europe was a rarity in those days, and the itinerant monarch found throngs of willing noblewomen throwing themselves into his bed when he visited foreign courts.
In Vienna, at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I, Augustus fell in love with Madame d’Esterle, whose resistance was conquered by the gift of a pair of earrings worth 40,000 florins. Thrilled with such valuable proof of royal desire, Madame d’Esterle threw caution to the winds and ended up seducing the king rather than the other way around. Soon after, her husband entered her bedroom one morning to find his wife asleep, with the thick curly head of the king of Saxony resting on her naked breast. The distraught husband cried out, “O thou perfidious wretch!”15 As the shaken king jumped out of bed and grabbed his sword, Monsieur d’Esterle ran away. Dressing hastily, Augustus sent his mistress to the inviolable home of his envoy to Vienna, clutching a case full of her jewels.
Nearly out of his mind, Monsieur d’Esterle raced to the emperor’s antechamber, where courtiers dallied, and poured out his shame and rage to his friends. But the courtiers could not agree that Monsieur d’Esterle had a right to be angry. According to Augustus’s biographer, “His friends afforded him what comfort they were capable of, in telling him that he had no reason to be so highly afflicted at so trifling a matter. They quoted instances from the fiction of the poets and both ancient and modern history.”16
His friends pointed out that according to ancient myth, Amphitryon was furious at discovering his wife was having an affair. But when he learned that his rival was Jupiter, king of the gods, he calmed down instantly. They reminded him that many noble Romans gave their wives for the emperors’ use. When Monsieur d’Esterle replied that his wife had slept with neither a god nor his own sovereign, the Austrian ambassador to Rome advised him, “That you may imitate the examples of those husbands we mentioned to you, enter into the Elector of Saxony’s service; and he may lie with your wife without your being obstructed by any person on that account.”17
The cuckolded husband felt so much better at the thought of lending his wife to Jupiter that he immediately wrote the elector seeking employment. Confused at such a turn of events, Augustus asked Madame d’Esterle her opinion. She was horrified at the idea of her husband returning with the elector to his court, always being in close proximity to them and in position to make trouble. She advised the elector instead to grant her husband a generous pension upon several conditions which would bestow upon her both freedom and respectability. Her husband would renounce all his marital rights, but give his name to any royal bastards his wife might bear. In return for his annual stipend, the cuckold rigorously observed the terms of this contract.
Another husband who did not resist lending his wife to Jupiter was Edward Langtry, whose brilliant wife, Lillie, became the first official mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1877. Edward Langtry trailed in Lillie’s shining wake as she sailed to fame and glory, never able to catch up. When Lillie sparkled at a party, Edward sat sullenly in the corner drinking.
Edward never publicly showed any resentment toward the Prince of Wales, but he did sometimes vent his frustrations in sudden violent rages at his wife. One day, Lillie and Edward were guests along with the prince at the home of Lord Malmesbury. She wrote her royal lover a suggestive letter, which her husband deciphered by holding her blotting paper up to a mirror. Edward was so angry he reduced the normally tough Lillie to a puddle of tears. The whole house heard their argument. Lord Malmesbury, too, was furious—at the servants for not changing the blotting paper every day in all the guest rooms as they had been instructed, to prevent just such an inconvenience.
After three years as royal mistress, Lillie lost her position to actress Sarah Bernhardt, who took London, and the Prince of Wales, by storm. Lillie turned her attentions to the German prince Louis Battenburg and soon became pregnant. The Prince of Wales, still fond of Lillie, arranged for her to give birth in France, away from prying eyes. Even Edward Langtry was unaware that his wife had had a child.
Lillie, separated now from her nearly bankrupt husband, found herself cut off from the prince’s financial largesse. To support herself and her daughter, she decided to emulate her rival Sarah Bernhardt and earn her living on the stage. Her notoriety as the prince’s former mistress ensured good box-office receipts, and the Prince and Princess of Wales pointedly attended her London plays. Traveling coast to coast in her own luxurious ten-room railway car, she performed throughout the United States for six years and met with huge success in the mining towns of the Wild West.
Edward, grasping at some memory of love, refused to divorce Lillie despite her pleas, and without the consent of both parties the British courts refused to grant the divorce. Because American courts were more flexible, Lillie became an American citizen to rid herself of her humiliating husband. Having lost his wife to a prince and a subsequent dazzling career, Edward sank into an irretrievable pit of alcoholism and depression. Lillie, though thrilled to be freed of him, faithfully sent him money four times a year until the day he died.
While some husbands leaped for joy as their monarchs bedded their wives, and others suffered dutifully, a few had the backbone to stand up to such adulterous intrusions. One of the earliest records of such defiance occurred during the reign of England’s King John of Magna Carta fame (1167–1216). One Eustace de Vesci, an aristocrat, was hated by King John “because he had placed a common woman instead of his wife in the royal bed.”18
Thirteenth-century records such as this often offer us more questions than answers. Let us, however, imagine King John rutting joyously in the inutterable darkness of a feudal four-poster with what he presumes is a beautiful virtuous noblewoman. And then, as the first cold fingers of dawn illumine the person in his bed, he finds to his chagrin a scullery maid or washerwoman.
In the 1520s, King François I went to a lady’s bedchamber to find her husband waiting next to the bed, guarding his wife’s honor with a sword. In a royal rage, the king informed the husband that if he harmed his wife he would lose his head. The king then kicked the unfortunate man out of the room and climbed into bed with his wife.
Henri IV of France suffered resistance from not one, but two of his mistresses’ stubborn husbands. When Gabrielle d’Estrées gave him a son, Henri was afraid that her aged husband Nicolas d’Amerval could claim paternity and remove the boy from his mother. Henri decided to press for a divorce. One of the few reasons the Catholic Church would grant a divorce was in the case of the husband’s impotence.
Poor d’Amerval found himself in a highly unenviable position. Admitting impotence—unpleasant for a man even in our own day—was almost a fate worse than death in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, angering the king could jeopardize his property and even his life if Henri wanted to have this inconvenient little man assassinated. D’Amerval testified, “To obey the King and in fear of my life, I am about to consent to the dissolution of my marriage with the Dame d’Estrées…. I declare and protest before God that if the dissolution be ordered and brought to pass, it will be done by force, against my will, and only out of respect for the King, seeing that the assertion, confession, and declaration that I am impotent and incapable is untrue.”19 Indeed, d’Amerval had sired no less than fourteen children with his first wife.
A few days into the proceeding, d’Amerval suddenly reversed his position and admitted he was indeed impotent. The reason behind his reversal is not known. Henri was not known to threaten but may have bribed. D’Amerval’s servants were called as additional witnesses and testified that his sheets were never stained. The divorce was granted.
After Gabrielle’s death in 1599, and his subsequent unhappy marriage to Marie de Medici the following year, Henri had an even tougher time with a cuckolded husband when he fell in love with the beautiful Charlotte de Montmorency in 1609. The ardor of the ever-romantic monarch was not dampened by his fifty-four years, nor by the difference in ages; the object of his desires was fourteen and had recently stopped playing with dolls. Charlotte was engaged to a virile and handsome young buck. The king broke the engagement and instructed her to marry the un-threatening prince de Condé, a weak and skinny soul thought to be a homosexual.
In May Charlotte celebrated her fifteenth birthday and was married to the prince de Condé in a glittering ceremony. The king was conspicuous by his absence but lavished princely gifts on the new bride. Unfortunately for Henri, the insignificant little groom was not as pliable as he had believed. The prince’s pride was pricked by the sharp and public pain of being a royal cuckold. A month after the wedding, he requested the king’s permission to retire with his wife to his estates. The answer was a firm no.
Enraged, Condé confronted the king and called him a tyrant. Henri threatened to stop the prince’s pension if he left court without permission. Uncowed, the prince took his wife and fled. Henri disguised himself as a hunter—complete with a patch over one eye—and spied out the prince’s estate hoping for a glimpse of his beloved. This romantic trick of disguise had been the stuff of legends in his younger years—crossing enemy lines to visit his mistress Gabrielle for a few precious hours—but was now seen as pitiful in an old roué. Charlotte, at any rate, did not appreciate it. While walking in the gardens she saw the king in his hunter’s rags and began to scream at the top of her lungs until he ran away. Upon hearing of the king’s visit, Condé realized he must take Charlotte out of France.
Soon thereafter, Henri received the news that the prince had fled with Charlotte to the safety of the Netherlands. Henri’s adviser the duc de Sully reported, “When I came to the Louvre I found the King in the Queen’s chamber, walking back and forth, with his head reclined and his hands folded behind his back.” The king said, “Well, our man is gone and has carried all with him.” He added, “I am lost.”20 Henri kept to his rooms for several days after this, locked in deep depression, seeing no one.
Meanwhile, Spain’s Philip III, continuing his kingdom’s tradition of stirring up trouble with France, assured the prince de Condé of Spain’s support in his just struggle against the lascivious king. Philip offered Condé a home in Spain or, if he wished, in the sections of Italy under Spanish domination. Meanwhile, the pope—appealed to by Henri, Philip of Spain, and the prince de Condé, and unwilling to anger either Spain or France—attempted to play the peacemaker. For several months, European politics were roiled by Henri’s infatuation with a fifteen-year-old girl and the stubborn refusal of her husband to deliver her up to his king.
As the weeks grew into months Henri’s eagerness to reclaim Charlotte became an obsession. He wrote to his agent in Brussels, “I am so tortured by my anguish that I am only skin and bone. Everything bothers me; I avoid company, and if, in order to do justice to other people, I do let myself be drawn into some gathering, instead of cheering me, it only succeeds in deadening me.”21
The envoy from the court of Spain wrote to his master, “I have been told that the King of France would give the Dauphin and all his other sons for the Princess de Condé which leads me to believe that he will risk everything for his love. His health is altered; he has lost sleep and some people are beginning to believe that he is starting to go mad. He who has so much loved society now remains alone for hours at a time, walking up and down in his melancholy.”22
In March came an about-face. Charlotte’s father sued the prince de Condé for a divorce from his daughter. Her husband agreed to the divorce, and Charlotte decided to return to France and become the king’s mistress. Condé had grown weary of fighting the king of France, and perhaps Charlotte preferred a glittering life at court to a dull exile. But Henri’s enemies were unwilling to permit such a prize as Charlotte to return to France. They refused her permission to travel. Henri declared war on them and raised an army.
But Henri was destined never to see his Charlotte again. On May 14, 1610, while sitting in his carriage with his counselors, Henri was stabbed in the chest by the madman Ravaillac and died moments later. Charlotte quickly returned to her husband with her tail between her legs and through abject self-abasement made amends with Henri’s widow, Queen Marie, the new queen regent and now the most powerful person in France.
Some sixty years later, Henri’s grandson, Louis XIV, also suffered the recriminations of a defiant husband. Athénaïs de Mortemart, who had been angling in vain for the position of Louis XIV’s mistress, gave up the chase and married the marquis de Montespan in 1663. It was not an advantageous match for the bride, who was already the daughter of a marquis far wealthier than her husband. Dark and dashing, the marquis de Montespan’s finer qualities were unaccompanied by good breeding or common sense. Soon after the wedding he spent his small fortune—and his wife’s dowry—and ran headlong into debt.
The marquis was a soldier, enjoying to the full a seventeenth-century soldier’s perquisites—looting, raping, and burning. He was on campaign months at a time, rarely going long periods without getting himself into scrapes. On one occasion he seduced a girl, dressed her in a man’s uniform, and assigned her a position in the cavalry—until her family showed up with the local bailiff. Despite his long absences, his wife gave him two children in rapid succession, a girl in 1664 and a boy the following year. She quickly dumped both children on her husband’s relatives so she could devote herself fully to the pleasures of court.
In 1666 her swashbuckler husband departed on a long campaign in the south of France. By this time, the marquis’s garish charms must have worn thin on his polished wife. By 1667 she had succeeded in becoming the king’s maîtresse-en-titre.
Though the marquis must surely have heard of his wife’s exalted position as king’s mistress, he at first made no noise about it. Perhaps he was eager to see what financial rewards and honors would come his way. When he returned to Versailles in 1668, he found his wife pregnant by the king. Worse, Madame de Montespan had, as one courtier put it, “in acquiring a taste for the King’s caresses, developed a distaste for her husband’s.”23
The marquis reacted like the madman which he was commonly thought to be. He ranted and raved to anyone who would listen about the immorality of the king’s affair with his wife—though many thought this newfound piety odd in a man known to have stormed convents to deflower girls. Some court ladies were so shocked at his language that they took to their beds with the vapors. He once entered his wife’s apartments, soundly boxed her ears, and disappeared. Rumor had it that the marquis was frequenting the vilest whorehouses to catch a disease and pass it on through his wife to the king. If this was true, there was a major flaw in his logic. Madame de Montespan refused to sleep with her embarrassing husband.
One day the marquis drove up to the royal château of Saint-Germain in a carriage draped in black—mourning for his wife, he explained—decorated on the corners with four giant pairs of stags’ horns, the traditional symbol of a cuckolded husband. The king had him imprisoned briefly and then exiled to his estates in the south. But the marquis was not finished. He invited all his friends and relatives to his castle for an elaborate mock funeral for Madame de Montespan, mourning her death “from coquetry and ambition.”24 He stood by the main door with his two small children, all clad in black, somberly accepting condolences on their loss.
Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, noted that the king could have bribed the marquis into complacence. “Monsieur de Montespan is an arrant opportunist,” she wrote. “Had the King been willing to pay off more handsomely, he would have been reconciled.”25
A year after the mock funeral, the crazed marquis attacked a convent to debauch a young girl who was hiding from him. In the scuffle, the girl, her mother, the father superior, and several peasants were hurt. Louis took this opportunity to send the marquis to prison, from which he escaped south into Spain, as the king had hoped. But at the pious Spanish court, the marquis complained so loudly of his wife’s adultery with the king of France that Louis decided he had better pardon him and let him come back to France, where he could not damage his reputation internationally.
This brush with the law effectively subdued the marquis. He remained in the exile prescribed for him in the south of France, managing his estates, farms, and vineyards, hunting, gaming, drinking, and carousing. But Louis had his spies keep a careful eye on him. The king heard rumors that he intended to claim Athénaïs’s numerous royal bastards as his own, born within their marriage, and carry all of them off to Spain, where even Louis’s long reach would not be able to dislodge them. In 1670, when the marquis was permitted to visit Paris, Louis wrote to his minister Colbert, “Monsieur de Montespan is a madman. Keep a close watch on him…in order to deprive him of any pretext for lingering on in Paris…. I know that he has threatened to see his wife…. Get him out of Paris as quickly as possible.”26
That same year, Athénaïs petitioned the courts to grant her a legal separation from her husband so that an abduction, or a claim to her children with the king, would be illegal. The court dragged its feet for four years despite, or perhaps because of, the king’s insistence on a speedy resolution. These moral arbiters were not impressed with the king’s profligate lifestyle. When in 1674 the decree did come through, it read, in part, that Madame de Montespan, “the high and mighty dame…does and shall continue to domicile separately from her husband…. he, furthermore, henceforward…[is] forbidden to frequent or haunt his lady.”27
History must chuckle over the twists and turns of fate. By 1680 Madame de Montespan had lost her position as king’s mistress but stubbornly remained at court. In 1691, at age fifty, she was banished from Versailles and languished at her estates in the country.
Chastened by her long exile, the former royal mistress was persuaded by her confessor to “ask pardon of her husband and submit herself into his hands,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon. “She wrote to him, by her own pen, in terms of total submission, offering to return to his roof if he deigned to receive her; and if not, to betake herself to whatever destination he should prescribe to her.”28
Madame de Montespan was as fortunate with her request as Madame de Pompadour would be a century later. The duc de Saint-Simon reported, “She got credit for the gesture without having to suffer the consequences. Monsieur de Montespan sent back word that he wanted neither to receive her under his roof nor to make any prescription to her; neither to hear from or of her ever again in his life.”29
Surely the most bitter pill that Madame de Montespan had to swallow was her husband’s welcome at court in the late 1690s. While she continued to suffer humiliating exile, the marquis de Montespan, his former recklessness tempered with age, moved to Versailles. The marquis’s son with his wife, born in 1665, was favored by the king, and for the son’s sake the father was welcomed. Court gossips clucked over the amusing spectacle of the marquis, who had created such a ruckus about his wife’s affair, calmly playing cards with her two bastard daughters by the king. As Elizabeth Charlotte wrote, “Even he must have seen the humor of the situation because he would occasionally turn around and give a little smirk.”30