Decay’s effacing fingers have swept the lines where beauty lingers.
—LORD BYRON
PADDING SILENTLY THROUGH GILDED CORRIDORS, SOMETIMES Death slipped past the king’s chamber and glided on to another, where he visited a mistress. The dead royal mistress was scooped up still warm, thrown in a grave, and promptly forgotten by courtiers, who focused immediately on her replacement.
Most mistresses, however, were not fated to die tragically young or suffer dramatic punishment after the death of their royal lovers. Most were destined for a more mundane fate—they lived to despise their mirrors, were dismissed and replaced by younger, prettier faces. In centuries past the cruel hand of time swooped down earlier to wreak its ravages on female beauty. Louis XIV’s beautiful blonde Louise de La Vallière immured her fading looks in a convent at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. Samuel Pepys described one of Charles II’s mistresses, a venerable twenty-three, as beginning to “decay.”1
One day when Lady Castlemaine ran into her enemy the duke of Ormonde at court, she vociferously wished him disfigurement, dismemberment, and a last gasp at the end of the hangman’s rope. The duke looked coolly at the twenty-nine year old and replied, “I am not in so much haste to put an end to your days, Madam, for all I wish is that I may live to see you old.”2
What happened to rejected mistresses as they aged? Many continued active lives away from court, marrying, bearing children, visiting friends, enjoying their ill-gotten gains in lovely country homes filled with fine furnishings.
In their later years, many former royal mistresses found in religion the antidote to their youthful sins. And while most surrendered their beauty wearily to that most puissant enemy, time, a few battled bravely until the last.
It is not surprising that Death took many royal mistresses at the peak of their youth and beauty. Their doleful end was often presaged months earlier in the happy news of a longed-for pregnancy, a tangible tie to the king forever.
Death must have laughed as he looked for Gabrielle d’Estrées, for he timed his visit with exquisite irony—only hours before she was to wed her lover Henri IV, becoming queen of France and clearing the way for her son César to inherit the throne. By March 1599 Gabrielle was five months pregnant. She had sailed through her three previous pregnancies in glowing health. This one was markedly different, however. She was peevish, fretful, depressed. She complained often of feeling unwell, feared some impending disaster. She spent many sleepless nights and suffered horrible nightmares when she did sleep.
Three days before the wedding, which was to take place on Easter Sunday, Gabrielle traveled to Paris by barge to prepare for the ceremony while Henri remained at the palace of Fontainebleau. When Henri bid her farewell on the bank of the river, she burst into tears and clung to him. The king thought Gabrielle was suffering from nerves; but perhaps in some secret part of her soul she knew it was the last time she would ever see Henri, feel his flesh warm and solid against hers.
Landing in Paris, Gabrielle ate at the house of her friend the banker Zamet, where dinner included a lemon. Feeling unwell, Gabrielle canceled her appearance at several gala events. By the next afternoon she was in labor—four months early. Her birth pangs were keener than they had ever been. She twisted in agony as doctors dismembered the dead child inside her and drew it out. Despite the presence of two surgeons, three apothecaries, and a priest, Gabrielle died on Easter Saturday, the day before she was to have become queen of France.
The timing of Gabrielle’s death was so strange that—naturally—rumors swept France that she had been poisoned. The likely culprits were the Vatican or the House of Medici, which had been violently opposed to Henri’s marriage to Gabrielle, hoping he would marry Tuscan duchess Marie de Medici instead. The doctors—baffled despite a careful autopsy—concluded she had been killed by a “corrupt” lemon.3 Modern doctors, reading reports of Gabrielle’s symptoms and suffering, believe she died of a septic pregnancy. Whatever the cause of Gabrielle’s death, many Catholics thought God had struck her down in the nick of time, saving them the indignity of having a whore as queen.
Hearing of her sudden grave illness, Henri raced to see her but was stopped on the way with the news of her death. Devastated, he went into mourning, immediately donning black instead of the traditional white or violet, something which French monarchs had never done before. His love had been deep; initially his grief was extreme. During a long life of philandering, Henri was faithful to only one woman, and that woman was Gabrielle.
The royal mistress who had found such honor in life received strange indignities in death. Household servants stole valuable rings from her dead fingers. Upon hearing the news of her death, Gabrielle’s father harnessed his horses and carted off from storage the royal furniture she had ordered for her queenly apartments. Gabrielle had grimaced so in agony that her mouth twisted around toward the back of her head and, at her death, stuck there as if in concrete; neither the doctor nor her attendants could push it back into its proper place. Her mangled body, exhibiting no traces of her former beauty, was in no condition to view. Nailed in a coffin, it was pushed under the bed in her Paris town house while mourners visited her wax effigy, propped up on the bed, offering it food according to custom. Henri—prevented from holding her funeral at Notre Dame, as Gabrielle had not been royal—was forced to settle for a lesser church.
After the funeral, Gabrielle’s effigy was placed in a small chamber in the king’s private apartments in the Louvre and dressed in a new gown daily. Henri wrote, “The root of my love is dead; it will not spring up again.”4 He visited the figure for many years, even after he had caved in to the pope’s wishes and married Marie de Medici and—perhaps as a protest—taken a nubile young mistress. Despite the king’s genuine sadness at the loss of Gabrielle, the root of his love continued to spring up until his dying day.
The gloriously beautiful Mademoiselle de Fontanges also died as a result of a pregnancy. In 1680 she gave birth to Louis XIV’s child, who died shortly thereafter. While she survived the delivery, her bleeding did not stop. After several weeks the wan, weakened woman left Versailles to recuperate in a convent. The king had little patience with illness, and his mistress hoped to vanquish his heart once again by returning bursting with health and beauty.
Madame de Sévigné described the touching contrast between Mademoiselle de Fontange’s rich emoluments and her deadly illness. “Mademoiselle de Fontanges has left for Chelles,” she wrote. “She had four carriages, drawn by six horses, each, her own carriage drawn by eight, and all her sisters with her, but all so sad that it was pitiful to see—that great beauty losing all her blood, pale, changed, overwhelmed with sorrow, despising the 40,000 ecus annual pension and the tabouret which she has, and wishing for her health and the heart of the King which she has lost.”5
The former favorite bled to death slowly, each day losing a bit more strength, a bit more color, until a year later Mademoiselle de Fontanges was dead at the age of twenty-two. There is a story in which Louis visited in her final hours and sat crying at her bed. “Having seen tears in the eyes of my King,” she is supposed to have said, “I can die happy.”6 But this story was deemed untrue by many at Versailles because the king had, in fact, already forgotten her.
In 1743 Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Ventimille gave him a healthy son and a few days later suffered sudden fatal convulsions. The body of the unpopular “king’s whore” was laid out in a house in the town of Versailles watched over by guards. When they left their posts to drink, an enraged mob broke in and insulted the corpse.
Louis’s next mistress, Madame de Châteauroux, also died young. A few weeks before her sudden demise, the king had nearly died from fever while on campaign and had submitted to his priests’ demands to send Madame de Châteauroux away in disgrace, stripping her of all her titles and privileges. As he recovered, Madame de Châteauroux waited on tenterhooks for her summons to return to court. Finally the summons came. Triumphant, the favorite packed her bags ready to race back to her lavish apartments in the palace and take up where she had left off. She eagerly planned suitable punishments for those who had gloated over her downfall.
But before she could enter her carriage, she was struck with a blinding headache and took to her bed. Impatient at the delay of her victorious return, she waited for the headache to disappear. Then fever set in. She went into convulsions, sending soul-wrenching shrieks through her house. Her burning ambitions, which had enflamed the entire court, dwindled to a tiny spark, then to a cold ash.
The king was devastated. The marquis d’Argenson wrote, “Our poor Master has a look which makes one tremble for his life.”7
Louis had lost two mistresses in two years. He was to lose his next and best-loved mistress to death as well. For nineteen years, Madame de Pompadour had reigned supreme over a king and a nation. But in 1763, her health rapidly deteriorating, she confided her long years of suffering to her old friend Madame de La Ferté-Imbault. “I have never heard a finer sermon on the nemesis of ambition,” the friend wrote. “She seemed so wretched, so proud, so violently shaken and so suffocated by her own enormous power that I came away after an hour’s talk feeling that death was the only refuge left to her.”8
At the age of forty-one, probably suffering from tuberculosis and congestive heart failure, Madame de Pompadour had such difficulty climbing steps that a mechanical chair was installed on the staircase in Versailles. By early 1764 it was clear to all that the royal mistress was a dying woman. In February of that year she suffered a lung hemorrhage, followed by chills and fever. The king visited her every day. By April, the cold wet spring in the drafty palace had exacerbated her illness. In her last days, she rouged her deathly pale cheeks, put on a brocade dressing gown over white taffeta petticoats, and had her hair combed. When the king visited her, she, knowing he hated sickness, refused to talk about her illness and pretended she was actually quite well. Dying, she listened to his boring stories and injected the witty remark at just the right moment.
On April 13, the king, having spoken with Madame de Pompadour’s doctors, broke the news to her that she had days, perhaps hours, left. She asked him if he wished her to see a priest, and he nodded. She was not eager to do so, because she knew that once a priest arrived Louis would have to leave, given the sinful nature of their early relationship, and she would never see him again. Catholic mistresses were doomed to die without their lovers by their side.
As if an ordinary mortal’s death would pollute the ambrosial atmosphere of the gods, it was not permitted for anyone but a member of the royal family to die at Versailles. But Louis insisted that Madame de Pompadour stay there unmolested, in as much comfort as possible.
Slipping from life, she made her will, leaving many bequests to faithful friends and servants. That last night she slept sitting up in a chair because her rotting lungs could inhale a bit of air only in that position. The following afternoon the dauphin wrote, “She is dying with a courage rare in either sex. Every time she draws a breath, she thinks it is her last. It is one of the saddest and most cruel endings one can imagine…. The King has not seen her since yesterday.”9
At the very end, Madame de Pompadour soiled her linen. When her maids wanted to shift her to change it she replied, “I know you are very skillful, but I am so feeble that you could not help hurting me, and it is not worth it for the little time I have left.”10
As her priest rose to go, she gave one last, shining smile and said, “One moment, Monsieur le Curé, and we will go away together.”11 Her lungs—never strong, now utterly defeated—rattled out the last breath of air. And then there was the awful silence.
When the king was informed that his mistress had died, he shut himself up in his apartments with some of her best friends. Meanwhile, the duchesse de Praslin, looking out her window, saw the corpse of a woman, “covered only with a sheet wrapped so tightly that the shape of the head, the breasts, the stomach and legs were distinctly outlined.”12 Moments after Madame de Pompadour’s death, her body had been whisked away.
The day of her funeral, a cold wind howled around Versailles. As the solemn procession passed in front of the palace, the king—who was forbidden by etiquette to attend the ceremony—stood on his balcony in the rain without a hat or coat, tears rolling down his face. “They are the only tribute I can offer her,” he said to his servant.13
When her friend Voltaire heard of her passing, he wrote, “I am greatly afflicted by the death of Madame de Pompadour; I weep when I think of it. It is very absurd that an old scribbler like myself should be still alive, and that a beautiful woman should have been cut off at forty in the midst of the most brilliant career in the world. Perhaps if she had tasted the repose which I enjoy, she would be living now.”14
A few days after the funeral the queen said, “Finally there is no more talk here of her who is no longer than if she had never existed. Such is the way of the world; it is very hard to love it.”15
Not all royal mistresses suffered tragic endings. Most of them aged, were ousted, and went about the business of daily life, pockets stuffed with the wages of sin.
Early in the reign of George I of England, three ancient royal mistresses of dead kings ran into each other at the English court. The duchesses of Portsmouth, Dorchester, and Orkney, mistresses of Charles II, James II, and William III, respectively, had beaten the odds and lived into a healthy old age. Like a trio of barnacled old scows bobbing in the harbor, the elderly dames looked at each other. Suddenly the plucky duchess of Orkney crowed, “Who would have thought that we three old whores would meet here?”16
After the exile of her lover, James II, Catherine Sedley, duchess of Dorchester, was given a pension by William III. She would afterward say that “both the kings were civil to her, but both the queens used her badly.”17 James had granted her a large pension from lands, but after his exile the House of Commons threatened her with the loss of it. Spirited Catherine went before the bar of the house to present her case herself and won it.
When Catherine was forty, a Scottish baronet, Sir David Colyear, made an honest woman of her. Sir David was an officer in William III’s army and highly respected, so much so that many wondered at his choice of a bride. Despite her age Catherine provided her husband with two healthy sons. Her earthy humor is best revealed in her advice to her sons with Colyear: “If anybody call either of you the son of a whore you must bear it, for you are so,” she counseled, “but if they call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man’s sons.”18
Elizabeth Villiers, the duchess of Orkney, never flaunted her position at court as mistress of William III. But in 1694, when Queen Mary died of smallpox at the age of thirty-two, she left William a letter containing a stinging rebuke for his affair with Elizabeth. Admonishments from the dead are the most tormenting of all. And so William, after endowing Elizabeth with ninety thousand acres in Ireland and an annual income of five thousand pounds, dismissed her.
When Elizabeth was cast aside, she was nearing forty and had never married. Despite her advanced age and lack of physical attractions—she was described as squinting “like a dragon”—she soon found a respectable husband, George Hamilton, a younger son of the duke of Hamilton.19 King William promptly created him earl of Orkney, and his wife automatically became a countess. Never one to mince words, Elizabeth had told her husband soon after meeting him that she had been “on very good terms with a certain person, but that she did not wish to hear any reproaches or insinuations on that score.”20
The marriage was not only happy but fruitful. Elizabeth, who had never had any children during her tenure with William, bore her husband three children in her forties. She outlived her royal lover by thirty years. One witness described her at the coronation of George II in 1727: “She exposed behind a mixture of fat and wrinkles, and before a considerable pair of bubbies [breasts] a good deal withered, a great belly that preceded her, add to this the inimitable roll of her eyes and her gray hair which by good fortune stood directly upright, and ’tis impossible to imagine a more delightful spectacle.”21
Another of James II’s mistresses, Arabella Churchill of the ugly face and lovely limbs, married Colonel Charles Godfrey after her liaison with James ended. Having borne James two girls and two boys, she gave her husband two daughters. They lived happily together for forty years.
Napoleon’s discarded mistress Maria Walewska also found happiness in marriage, albeit briefly. After Napoleon’s downfall in 1815, she devoted herself to their son Alexander and to regaining the estate left him by the emperor. After the death of her first husband, whom she had divorced, Maria was pursued by the dashing General Philippe Antoine d’Ornano, who had fallen deeply in love with her. She finally relented, marrying him in 1816. Nine months later she gave birth to a boy. But the pregnancy had taken a serious toll on her weak kidneys. She spent her last weeks dictating her memoirs—making herself out to be a Polish patriot rather than a lascivious mistress—and died in December 1817 at the age of thirty-one.
On his desert exile of St. Helena, no one had the heart to tell Napoleon about her death. He thought she had stopped writing because she was happily married. When he died three years later, he was still wearing the ring she had given him, encasing a strand of her blonde hair, with the inscription, “When you cease to love me, remember, I love you still.”22
Upon parting from Lady Castlemaine after a liaison of twelve years, Charles II said, “All that I ask of you for your own sake is live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.”23 She could not help whom she loved, but she did make a great deal of noise. After countless messy love affairs, at the age of sixty-five she was finally unburdened of her long-suffering husband. Within weeks, the merry widow wed handsome Robert Fielding, a fifty-four-year-old who had married two fortunes and had the good luck to have both brides die.
Fielding had been on the lookout for a third fortune when he happened to find two wealthy widows: Anne Deleau, worth about sixty thousand pounds a year, and Lady Castlemaine, whose vast income was well known throughout the kingdom. Fielding decided he need not limit himself to one—he would marry both women and take their fortunes.
But instead of marrying Mistress Deleau, Fielding married an imposter named Mary Wadsworth, a friend of the heiress’s hairdresser, who pretended to be the wealthy relict, whom Fielding had never seen. At the third meeting, the couple was married by a priest and consummated the marriage. The “heiress,” however, said she needed to return home until she had broken the news to her father. She visited Fielding several times, each time having sex and collecting generous gifts from him.
In the meantime, Fielding also married Lady Castlemaine—though unknown to her, this marriage was bigamous and illegal. Fielding soon discovered that his legal wife was not Mistress Deleau at all, but a penniless adventurer. He beat both her and the hairdresser accomplice black and blue. Meanwhile, he immediately began pocketing Lady Castlemaine’s pensions from Charles II. He began to sell off her valuable furniture and when she protested, he locked her in a room and refused to feed her until she agreed. When Lady Castlemaine told her sons, Fielding broke open her cabinet and took four hundred pounds, then beat her severely until she broke free to the open window and cried, “Murder!” Fielding then shot a blunderbuss into the street. Lady Castlemaine’s sons got a warrant for Fielding, who was taken to Newgate Prison and convicted of bigamy. But Fielding must have worked his magic on Queen Anne as well, for she pardoned him. After two years, Lady Castlemaine’s marriage was declared null.
The experience with Fielding had finally ended Lady Castlemaine’s lifelong cacophony. Shortly thereafter she left London to live with her grandson. In 1709, at the age of sixty-nine, she developed dropsy, which swelled her once incomparable body into a revolting mass of flesh. Three months later she was dead.
“When women cease to be handsome, they study to be good,” said Benjamin Franklin, and he could have been talking about most royal mistresses. Many experienced religious epiphanies—rarely while still holding the title of maîtresse-en-titre, more often after their disgrace and rustication. Most women sinned at leisure, as long as they were buoyed by youth and vitality, and repented in haste, when the hand of age or illness fell heavy upon them. Many a woman hoped to win points in heaven after a sinful life, as Sir Horace Walpole put it, by “bestowing the dregs of her beauty upon Jesus Christ.”24
In 1678, when Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle felt herself dying, she “preached to the King, crucifix in hand, to detach him from women.”25 But her piety lasted just as long as her illness. Just a few days after her deathbed supplication to the king, hearing that Charles was attending the theater with her rival Hortense Mancini, Louise painted her face and dragged herself to the king’s box, where, fangs bared, she hastily reclaimed her position. She did not find God again for another forty years.
We must not assume that royal mistresses neglected church duties while in office, or that religion did not call to them during their adulterous lives. Most attended daily religious services, and many were involved in charitable projects for the poor. In the 1670s Primi Visconti described two of Louis XIV’s mistresses in church, “rosary or prayer book in hand, eyes raised heaven-ward, as ecstatical as a pair of saints!”26
One of these ecstatical saints, Louise de La Vallière, fled the sparkling court of Versailles for the sanctity of a convent at the age of twenty-nine. Louise, who for years had played lady’s maid dressing her replacement Madame de Montespan, told Louis that “after devoting her youth to him, all the rest of her life was not too long to devote to her salvation.”27
Before Louise left court, Madame de Maintenon, herself extremely devout, asked Louise if she had considered the bodily discomforts that awaited her among the Carmelites, the strictest convent of the day: clothing that itched and rubbed, long fasts, backbreaking work, extreme heat and cold. Nuns were forbidden to speak and were forced to sleep in hard beds shaped like coffins. “When I shall be suffering at the convent,” she replied, “I shall only have to remember what they made me suffer here, and all the pain will seem light to me.”28 She gestured across the room to Madame de Montespan, giggling and whispering in the king’s ear.
The day Louise bade farewell to her friends at court, she threw herself at the feet of Queen Marie-Thérèse to beg forgiveness. “My crimes were public,” the penitent explained; “my repentance must be public, too.”29 The queen, who had detested her for many years, must have wished the respectful Louise could regain her former place and oust the nasty Montespan. But Louise, leaving her two surviving children to be raised at Versailles, set off in her ducal carriage to the convent, leaving the world behind her.
“She has drunk the cup of humiliation to the dregs,” reported Madame de Sévigné.30 During the ceremony to become a novice, Louise had her lovely ash-blonde hair sheared off, though Madame de Sévigné noted gleefully that “she spared the two fine curls on her forehead!”31 Perhaps more embarrassing to Louise’s slender vanity was the loss of her specially made heels, one slightly higher than the other to make up for a short leg. Wearing the flat sandals prescribed in the convent would force Louise to walk with a pronounced limp.
A year later the convent was packed with courtiers gathered to watch the unique spectacle of a royal mistress taking her final vows to become a nun, accepting her black veil from none other than the queen, who kissed and blessed her afterward. Invitations to the ceremony were hard to come by, and there was a great deal of jostling, pushing, and shoving to watch the show. One witness wrote, “She never looked more beautiful or more content. She should be happy if only because she no longer has to lace up Madame de Montespan’s stays.”32
The king, who felt flattered by Louise’s years of reproachful glances and silent suffering as he flaunted her successor, had wanted to keep her at court, a reminder of how irresistible he was. He was peeved that she preferred God to her king. For years courtiers, eager to see the novelty of royal mistress turned nun, visited Louise in the convent. After saying a prayer to ward off temptation, she who had given up the world was forced to meet members of it in the convent parlor. But not the king. He never saw her again.
Perhaps the devout queen wished at times to follow Louise into the quiet sanctity of a convent, to leave the vicious Montespan and backbiting courtiers. But queens, unlike mistresses, left court only in coffins. For years, Marie-Thérèse had enjoyed spending brief sojourns at the Carmelite convent for spiritual consolation and repose. One day after Louise had taken her vows, the queen looked out her convent window and saw a little nun in a coarse habit limping across the courtyard, bearing an enormous bundle of laundry. This, then, was her husband’s mistress whom she had treated so cruelly in her jealousy. Shorn of her pearls and silks and the king’s love, the sweet, hopeful girl had come to this. The queen wept.
The world revolved quickly at Versailles. Actors and actresses boasting the most glorious parts were forgotten almost the moment they left the stage; there were throngs of new characters pushing to take their places on the crowded boards. Louise de La Vallière had never quite fit the resplendent part assigned her. She had far more character and conscience than the script required. The scenery about her was too lavish, the costumes too ornate, the music shrill, the plots hollow. Her retirement into a convent was the court’s hottest topic, and then bored courtiers looked elsewhere for fresh gossip. “After all,” yawned Anne-Marie de Montpensier, the king’s cousin, “she is not the first converted sinner.”33
Madame de Montespan, while happy to incarcerate her former rival in a convent, was not without her own kind of piety. She was known to fast during Lent, even to weighing her bread. When one visitor expressed surprise at this, Louis XIV’s mistress replied, “Because I am guilty of one sin, must I commit them all?”34
The duc de Saint-Simon wrote, “Even in her sinful life she had never lost her faith; she would often leave the King suddenly to go and pray in her own room, and nothing would induce her to break a day of abstinence, nor did she ever neglect the demands of Lent. She gave freely to charity, respected good church-goers, and never said anything approaching scepticism or impiety. But,” he added acidly, “she was imperious, haughty, and most sarcastic, and she had the defects of a woman who had climbed to her position through her own beauty.”35
In 1691 fifty-one-year-old Madame de Montespan was instructed by the king to leave court, but she did not go meekly into a quiet retirement. Shrieking, raging, storming, she had one last audience with Louis. Madame de Noyer wrote, “She let herself go in a fury, reproaching him for his ingratitude in the face of the sacrifices she had made for him. The King endured this tantrum because she was a woman, and because it was the last he would have to put up with from her.”36
Madame de Montespan was an extremely wealthy woman, boasting castles, manors, and a fashionable house in Paris. But the beating heart of French society was with the king, usually at his favorite palace of Versailles. Gone for her were the colorful festivities, the need for jewels and satin gowns, the power and honor, the obeisance of the whole world.
Though she was refused permission to attend her children’s Versailles weddings, she was allowed to visit them periodically at court. Madame de Caylus wrote that she “wandered like a lost soul, doomed to return again and again to the scene of a former life in expiation of former sins.”37 During these few visits to Versailles, her haughty arrogance and imperious temper were deflated. Unsure of herself, hoping to be accepted, invited, the formerly imperious royal mistress became a ghost of the marble halls, wandering about ignored where for decades she had reigned. During her brief court visits, she caught glimpses of the king, though always in the company of many others.
Madame de Montespan purchased a château in the forest of Fontainebleau, where the king periodically went hunting. When she heard the royal trumpets blow, she went outside and strained for a glimpse of him galloping in the distance. The restless exile bought another château, Oiron, in her native land of Poitou, turning it into a shrine to the king, portraits and statues of him adorning every room. Portraits of Louis on a white horse, tapestries representing his conquests, a silver bust of Louis with solid gold hair. Her bedchamber alone boasted four images of her former lover.
Madame de Montespan even fitted up a special room designated the King’s Chamber, as if expecting the monarch to visit. It had an impressive canopied bed capped with a crown, hung with black velvet embroidered with gold and silver, set behind the traditional low gilded railing used by royalty. There was indeed some speculation at court that, particularly after Madame de Montespan’s husband died in 1701, Louis would recall her, possibly even marry her. Some hoped that Madame de Maintenon would obligingly clear the way by dying, and then, with Madame de Montespan back at court, they could all have fun again. But Louis never visited his King’s Chamber at Oiron. And Madame de Maintenon would outlive the king by three years.
Gradually, Madame de Montespan accepted that she would never be invited to live at court again. Her last years saw a religious transformation—perhaps all the more heartfelt to expiate her youthful dealings in black magic to win the king. She built a hospital where a hundred aged men and women would be cared for at her expense. Whereas she had always been generous to the poor, she now sewed clothes for them with her own hands every day and gave them most of her possessions. The woman who had feasted herself to fatness at Versailles now fasted routinely. She would often leave her last little pleasure—card games with visitors—to go to her oratory to pray.
In a gesture reminiscent of Louise de La Vallière more than thirty years earlier, she took to mortifying the flesh with rough shirts and sheets. The duc de Saint-Simon wrote, “She always wore a belt and wrist-and ankle-bands of iron with spikes, which frequently chafed her skin into ugly sores.”38
In the greatest irony, Madame de Montespan would periodically visit Louise de La Vallière in her convent. The royal mistress who had found repentance early and had willingly fled the glories of the court was truly happy. The other royal mistress, however, found repentance only when she had been forced from her earthly position biting and kicking. Aging and disgraced, there was no other place for her to go except an altar. She wanted to learn how Louise could accept the loss of earthly position and joyously replace it with the love of God. Forgiving the cruel treachery of the past, Louise gladly counseled her former friend in the mysteries of divine grace. But unlike Louise, whose penance and good works were done behind cloister walls, Madame de Montespan publicized her piety with as much ostentatious fanfare as she had formerly trumpeted her sins.
While Madame de Montespan’s religious epiphany had blunted the qualities of lechery, greed, and gluttony, her pride remained more pointed than ever. The duc de Saint-Simon reported that in her retirement she was as haughty as she had been while reigning over Versailles, still grasping the trappings of royalty she had insisted upon during her glory days. She received visitors sitting in an armchair while they were forced to stand. A few select members of the royal family were brought chairs, but even then she would not rise to welcome them or accompany them to the door. Many of them stopped coming. But court women were eager for their daughters to introduce themselves to the former mistress, to look on the face that had enchanted a king and defined an era.
Terrified of dying alone, Madame de Montespan hired women to read and play cards in her room as she slept at night. She kept her bed curtains open and numerous candles lighting the chamber. Perhaps she felt Death silently padding through her castle, looking for her.
When he found her, she was ready for him. No more fear. On her deathbed, according to the duc de Saint-Simon, “she summoned her entire domestic staff, down to the humblest, and made public confession of her publicly sinned sins, asked pardon for the long and open scandal of her life. The terror of death which had so long obsessed her was suddenly dissipated…. She gave thanks to God that He had permitted her to die far removed from her children, the fruits of her adultery.”39
Madame de Montespan’s body—the one which had delighted a king, propelled her to riches and power, and been daily massaged with oils—now received ghoulish insults. An apprentice surgeon botched the autopsy. Only the lowliest servants said prayers over the corpse, the rest having disappeared. Her body was dumped outside her door while various priests argued about possession of it. The parish church won the argument; the coffin was placed there and seemingly forgotten for some two months. Finally, a funeral procession “remarkable for its shameful parsimony” set out for Poitiers, where her remains were placed in her family crypt, under a black marble stone.40
Meanwhile, according to custom, her entrails were placed in an urn to be buried separately. A porter was hired to take the urn to a convent, but, smelling something rotten, he peered inside the poorly sealed vessel. The man was so revolted by what he saw that he threw the contents into the gutter, where a herd of pigs stumbling by promptly ate them. When this story was told at Versailles to great guffaws of laughter, one noblewoman remarked, “Her entrails? Really? Did she ever have any?”41
Madame de Montespan’s bastard son the duc du Maine “could not conceal his joy” at his mother’s death. Her only legitimate child, the duc d’Antin, rejoiced, “Here I am at last—thawed out!”—perhaps alluding to basking in the Sun King’s rays without his mother’s shadow blocking them.42
Surprisingly, Madame de Maintenon, who had been quite cold to Madame de Montespan in her final years, was so upset to learn of her death that she locked herself in her toilet. Nor was anyone less astonished at the king’s utter indifference to the death of his longtime lover who had borne him seven children. When the king’s beloved granddaughter-in-law found the nerve to ask him why he did not grieve, he replied coldly “that when he parted from Madame de Montespan he never expected to see her again and so far as he was concerned she had been dead from that day.”43
The most surprising penitent of all was the impetuous Lola Montez—whorish, selfish, deceitful Lola who had broken old King Ludwig’s heart and lost him his kingdom. After her 1848 banishment from Bavaria and his abdication, Ludwig prayed that she would one day realize the error of her ways and sincerely repent.
He was not disappointed, though it took Lola several years to comply. Lola had a unique talent for reinventing herself. After her exile from Bavaria she moved to the United States, where crowds rushed to see the former royal mistress dance. In her thirties, when the physical demands of dancing became more difficult, she launched an acting career. She starred in a successful play about herself called Lola Montez in Bavaria, in which she was portrayed as a virtuous proponent of constitutional freedom, a political adviser to the king, and—in the ultimate irony—a great friend of his wife, Queen Therese, who had heartily detested her.
Ever the romantic, Lola remarried twice, though neither marriage was legal, since her first husband was still alive. In 1853 Lola settled down in the California mining town of Grass Valley and seemed well suited for the Wild West. She raised a bear in her backyard, invested in a mine, and was known to tour the mine shafts chomping on a cigar. During her two-year stay in Grass Valley, she had only one major fracas, hunting down a journalist in a saloon and horsewhipping him for bandying her name about unkindly in his newspaper. Otherwise Lola was known for her charitable works and, surprisingly, Bible study.
In 1857, at the age of 37, Lola began to lecture in numerous American cities. In her most popular lecture, “Beautiful Women,” she described the attributes of Europe’s most celebrated beauties, many of whom she had never seen but claimed as good friends. Lola amused her American audiences with lectures on European habits and character, and then went to Europe to lecture on American habits and character. In many cities the lecturer was decried in the press for her immorality, which resulted in even greater attendance. Lectures earned Lola substantial fees and simultaneously whitewashed her reputation. Her audience was surprised at the straitlaced piety of this former fallen woman.
In June 1860, Lola suffered a paralyzing stroke. She was not expected to live, and many European newspapers reported the death of the famous dancer. With characteristic determination, Lola fought hard to regain her health. Looked after by old friends, by December she could walk and talk again. But during an airing in an open carriage Lola caught pneumonia, and she died on January 17, 1861, at the age of forty. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. A European paper ran the headline “Lola Montez Is Dead—Really Dead This Time.”44
Despite her success as a lecturer, Lola left only $1,247 because she had already given much of her earnings to charity. In her will, Lola left $300 to the Magdalen Society for reformed prostitutes.
After Lola’s death, a friend wrote seventy-four-year-old Ludwig in Munich that Lola “often spoke to me of your Majesty and of your kindness and benevolence, which she deeply felt—and wished me to tell you she had changed her life and companions…. She wished me to let you know she retained a sincere regard for your great kindness to the end of her life. She died a true penitent, relying on her Savior for pardon and acceptance, triumphing only in His merit.”45
The former king replied, “With great satisfaction I was hearing the repentance of L.M. of her former behavior…. It is a great consolation to hear her dying as a Christian.”46
In his last years, Ludwig’s increasing deafness isolated him from society. He lived to see many of his children die, including his son and successor, Maximilian II. He saw Bavaria’s defeat against the Prussians in 1866. He saw his insane teenage grandson Ludwig II generate his own political rumblings.
In retirement, Ludwig wrote a poem about his love affair with Lola Montez:
Through you I lost the crown
But I do not rage against you for that
For you were born to be my misfortune,
You were such a blinding, scorching light!
Be happy! So my soul calls after you,
Into the ever-receding distance;
Now at last choose the path of salvation;
Vice brings only ruin and shame.
The best friend you ever had,
You thrust faithlessly away,
The gates of happiness were closed against you,
You simply followed your lascivious longings.
For life we remain divided,
And never again will meet face to face,
Leave me my heart’s so painfully won peace,
Without it life is such a burden.47
The destructive hands of time often deal more kindly with women wrenched mud-ugly into this world than with those who slipped effortlessly from the womb with preternatural beauty. There is less contrast between the glories of youth and the ravages of age.
The sister-in-law of Louis XIV, the hefty German princess Elizabeth Charlotte, often quipped that as she had never been beautiful even when young, she had no vanished beauty to bewail with the passing years. Thrilled to see age leveling the playing field, Elizabeth Charlotte wrote, “I see that those whom I used to see when they were so beautiful are now as ugly as I am. Madame de La Vallière no one in the world would know any more, and Madame de Montespan’s skin looks like paper when children do tricks with it, seeing who can fold it into the smallest piece, for her whole face is closely covered with tiny little wrinkles, quite amazing. Her lovely hair is white as snow and her face is red, so her beauty is quite gone.”48
Charles II’s mistress, the peerless Hortense Mancini of sparkling black eyes and raven curls, was another mistress whose beauty faded rapidly. After the king’s death, Hortense plied herself with alcohol, ravaging her looks and her health. Feeling unwell, she retired to a country house in the hopes that the air would improve her health. It didn’t. She died in 1699 at the age of fifty-three. Having successfully avoided her insane husband for thirty-three years, Hortense fell into his hands again after death.
The duc de Mazarin had always been insanely jealous of Hortense’s inclinations for other men, so much so that he had personally lopped off all the private parts of his collection of ancient Roman statues. His insanity knew no bounds. One day he announced to his shocked servants that he was a tulip; he planted his feet in the ground and ordered them to water him, which they did. It was this gentleman, then, who bought his wife’s corpse from her creditors. He took it to France and carted it around with him from place to place. The jealous duke finally knew where she was and had her in his complete control for the first time since she had escaped from the convent in which he had imprisoned her thirty-three years earlier. He eventually laid her to rest in the tomb, happy in the knowledge that she would never be unfaithful to him again.
The lovely Harriet Howard, mistress of Napoleon III, aged shockingly after her relationship with the emperor ended in 1853. Harriet had fulfilled her part of their separation agreement by going to England and marrying, but she returned unexpectedly eleven years later. She had changed greatly in the intervening years. At forty-one, her once exquisite figure had become so obese she had to have the door of her carriage widened to climb through. She rode in her fashionable carriage with the extra-wide doors up and down the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Elysées as if she were once again the emperor’s mistress. One evening she attended the opera and fixed upon Napoleon with her opera glass, much to the discomfiture of both the emperor and the empress.
Harriet’s sudden appearance caused a great deal of eager gossip. Many thought her reemergence in very poor taste, an effort to humiliate the emperor. Others wondered why the former beauty would show herself fat and ugly, rather than allowing people to remember her as she had been. But the fact was that Harriet knew she was dying of cancer and wanted just a few moments to relive those glory days before she sank into the darkness forever. She died soon after her Paris visit. In her will Harriet left a large bequest to found in England a home for girls who had been seduced away from their families.
Another mistress of Napoleon III did not withstand the ravages of time and illness as stoically as Harriet Howard. Virginie di Castiglione lost her sanity when she lost her looks—mainly because she had never cultivated anything besides her beauty. She had pursued no hobbies, disdained friendship, and sneered at religion. When Virginie was twenty, her youth and beauty insolent in their intensity, her spurned husband had predicted that her kindest friend, the mirror, would one day become her most bitter foe.
With the sizable fortune she had earned from love affairs with rich and powerful men after she had been dismissed by the emperor, Virginie took an apartment in Paris on the venerable Place Vendome. She continued her political machinations, meeting diplomats, writing urgent letters to statesmen, and giving herself far more credit for international influence than she in fact possessed.
But her husband’s prediction came true with deadly accuracy. Virginie’s most relentless enemy was not Austrian emperor Franz Josef, as she thought, but all-conquering time itself. When the son she had borne at sixteen became a gangly teenager, Virginie was afraid he would be living proof of her advancing years; she forced him to dress as a groom and ride with her servants on the back of her coach.
After the fall of the French Empire in 1870, Virginie tried in vain to influence the new government, which remained willfully ignorant of Virginie and her supposed political wisdom. Shortly after this, Virginie broke a tooth. She dropped a heavy rolling pin on her toe, part of which had to be amputated. Her once perfect beauty was now clearly flawed. She began to hate the world and everybody in it.
Virginie had slowly been growing more eccentric over the years. When she turned forty she painted her walls and ceilings black, closed the shutters, and turned all the mirrors toward the wall. Without a host of admirers she stopped taking care of herself. She received very few old friends—all of them men, as she detested her own sex—who were forced to drink tea in the dark with her. Sometimes she would bring out tattered silk and musty velvet ball gowns from her heyday and reminisce about the vital role she had played in European politics. “I created Italy!” she would cry. “I saved the Pope!”49
As her eccentricities grew, her beauty continued to deteriorate. Her rich chestnut hair turned white. Unsupported by a corset, her magnificent bosom dropped. She lived mostly in the company of her dogs, spending hours each day writing rambling letters to her few friends. “The more I see of men,” she grumbled in one, “the more I love dogs.”50 Only after midnight, when no one was about who would recognize her, did she walk her dogs. A nocturnal phantom swaying in long black robes and thick black veils, this former royal mistress must have petrified late-night visitors to the Place Vendome.
As her madness seized control, Virginie refused to allow the servants in to clean and sat alone in her black rooms, filled with rats and trash, contemplating her lost beauty and the vanished days of splendor. Virginie was sixty-two when her servants, after seven days of trying to gain access to her room, forced their way in and found her decomposing body being gnawed by rats.
Her will stipulated that two of her dead dogs, which had been stuffed, should be adorned with jeweled collars and keep a vigil at her coffin during her wake. Before the coffin was closed, the two dogs were to be put inside and serve as cushions for her feet. She wanted to enter eternity in the gown that she had worn when she first slept with the emperor, the gray batiste edged with fine lace, adorned with her famous nine-string black and white pearl necklace and two bracelets.
But Virginie’s wishes were not carried out. Her jewels were sold to pay her debts at a well-attended auction, fetching some two million francs. No one knows what happened to the stuffed dogs. Only one curious visitor attended her funeral.
Unlike Virginie, Edward VII’s mistress Daisy Warwick didn’t mind the loss of her beauty, but she was shocked to find her predecessor in the royal bed, Lillie Langtry, still waging the fruitless fight. During World War I, there was a curious meeting of these two aging mistresses of a dead king—Lillie in her sixties, Daisy in her mid-fifties. “Whatever happens, I do not intend to grow old!” Lillie protested. “Why shouldn’t beauty vanquish time?”51
“I forgot what I answered,” Daisy reported, “for I was busy analyzing what she had said. I stole a glance at her, and certainly Time’s ravages, although perceptible to the discerning eye of one who had known her at the zenith of her beauty, were disguised with consummate artistry, while her figure was still lovely. But it came to me then that there was tragedy in the life of this woman whose beauty had once been world-famous, for she had found no time in the intervals of pursuing pleasure to secure contentment for the evening of her day. Now that she saw the evening approach, Lillie Langtry could only protest that it was not evening at all, but just the prolongation of a day that was, in truth, already dead.”52
Lillie was lonely in her last years, puttering around her garden, playing with her little dogs. The young nobleman she had married ignored her but pocketed her money, and all the lusty kings and regal queens of her youth were sleeping a marbled sleep. After Lillie’s death in 1929 at age seventy-five, a publisher who had known her wrote, “She always appeared to be a lingering leaf on an autumn tree which hangs on and will not die nor perish beneath the blast of Winter, because it has once belonged to a never-to-be-forgotten Summer. She could not let go. She fought in order not to let go.”53
Daisy Warwick, on the other hand, laid down her boxing gloves. Gone was the slender hourglass figure which had so entranced the Prince of Wales in the 1880s. By the 1930s she was too fat to get out of a chair by herself. She collected a large menagerie of birds, donkeys, monkeys, cats, and dogs, and would stagger about her gardens trailing a feather boa, feeding them. One visitor was shocked to see the famous royal mistress in such a condition. But Lady Warwick stated, truthfully, “I am a very happy woman.”54