CHAPTER XXV

THE RIVAL SISTERS

It was an unkind fate that linked the lives of the fifteenth Louis of France and Marie Leczinska, Princess of Lorraine, and daughter of Stanislas, the dethroned King of Poland; for there was probably no Princess in Europe less equipped by nature to hold the fickle allegiance of the young French King, and no Royal husband less likely to bring happiness into the life of such a consort.

When Princess Marie was called to the throne of France, she found herself transported from one of the most penurious and obscure to the most splendid of the Courts of Europe—­“frightened and overwhelmed,” as de Goncourt tells us, “by the grandeur of the King, bringing to her husband nothing but obedience, to marriage only duty; trembling and faltering in her queenly role like some escaped nun lost in Versailles.”  Although by no means devoid of good-looks, as Nattier’s portrait of her at this time proves, her attractions were shy ones, as her virtues were modest, almost ashamed.

She shrank alike from the embraces of her husband and the gaieties of his Court, finding her chief pleasure in music and painting, in long talks with the most serious-minded of her ladies, in Masses and prayers—­spending gloomy hours in her oratory with its death’s head, which she always carried with her on her journeys.  Such was the nun-like wife whom Louis XV. led to the altar shortly after he had entered his sixteenth year, and had already had his initiation into that career of vice which he pursued with few intervals to the end of his life.

Already, at fifteen, the King, who has been mockingly dubbed “le bien aime” was breaking away from the austere hands of his boyhood’s mentor, Cardinal Fleury, and was beginning to snatch a few “fearful joys” in the company of his mignons, such as the Duc de La Tremouille, and the Duc de Gesvres, and a few gay women of whom the sprightly and beautiful Princesse de Charolois was the ringleader.  But he was still nothing more than “a big and gloomy child,” whose ill-balanced nature gravitated between fits of profound gloom and the wild abandonment of debauch; one hour, torn and shaken by religious terrors, fears of hell and of death; the next, the very soul of hysterical gaiety, with words of blasphemy on his lips, the gayest member of a band of Bacchanals in some midnight orgy.

To such a youth, feverishly seeking distraction from his own black moods, the demure, devout Princess, ignorant of the caresses and coquetry of her sex, moving like a spectre among the brilliant, light-hearted ladies of his Court, was the most unsuitable, the most impossible of brides.  He quickly wearied of her company, and fled from her sighs and her homilies to seek forgetfulness of her and of himself in the society of such sirens of the Court as Mademoiselle de Beaujolais, Madame de Lauraguais, and Mademoiselle de Charolois, whose coquetries and high spirits never failed to charm away his gloomy humours.