Louis XV. wept for Madame de Vintimille in company with Madame de Mailly. But those who thought him inconsolable little knew his character; his schemes of conversion were but passing caprices. He had not force enough to break the long chain of his iniquities. He was not merely not recalled to well-doing by the lamentable death of Madame de Vintimille, but he fell back into the paths of scandal with a promptitude which had not even the excuse of passion.

Madame de Mailly was still the acknowledged favorite, but the King had not loved her for a long time. She spent another year at court after the death of Madame de Vintimille. This was a year of sorrow, humiliations, and afflictions. Louis XV. caused the poor deserted woman to drink the chalice of bitterness to the dregs, and made her so unhappy that even the Queen took pity on her.

What is more lamentable than the last agonies of love? To perceive that one has been mistaken; that the being one has thought good, generous, and grateful is wicked, perfidious, and ungrateful; to find hardness instead of mildness, egotism instead of devotion; what an awakening! what a torture! And one cannot complain. Morality, decorum, religion, all command silence. If you groan, the world scoffs at you. Your afflictions obtain scorn and not compassion. You cannot confess your sorrow before either God or men. The being who persecutes and outrages you, who betrays and kills you, is still beloved, and this love, alas! is only a folly, a weakness. You humble yourself, you crawl, you cringe. And all that avails you nothing. Your cause is lost. Nothing is left you but to suffer and to die.

Such was the destiny of Madame de Mailly. To lose the heart of the King was not enough. It was reserved to her to find not merely a rival but a persecutor in her own sister, Madame de la Tournelle.

Marie Anne de Mailly-Nesle, afterwards so well-known under the title of Duchess de Châteauroux, was the fifth and youngest daughter of the Marquis de Nesle. Born in 1717, she married, in 1734, the Marquis de la Tournelle, an extremely pious young man, who spent the greater part of his modest fortune in alms. Becoming a widow in 1740, at the age of twenty-two, she took refuge with her relative, the Duchess de Mazarin, lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, who died two years later. Madame de Tournelle was again on the point of being without an asylum. But the King had already remarked her beauty. She was appointed lady of the palace to the Queen (September, 1742). M. de Maurepas and Cardinal Fleury, who disliked her and already had a presentiment that she would be their all-powerful enemy, made ruthless war upon her. But she had for adviser the most audacious and wily of all the courtiers of Louis XV., the Duke de Richelieu.

The Marquis d’Argenson draws the following portrait of this personage, so celebrated in the erotic annals of the eighteenth century:—

“He carries too far the opinion one ought to have of the defects of the monarchy and the feebleness of our epoch.... He has made himself talked of ever since he was twelve years old. He has been put into the Bastille three times for three causes capable of making a court hero illustrious: for having made love to the Dauphiness, the King’s mother; for a duel, and for a conspiracy against the State. His love for voluptuous pleasures has ostentation rather than actual enjoyment as its end.... He is very much the mode among women; the pretensions and jealousies of coquettes have procured him many favors. There is never any passion in him but plenty of debauchery. He has betrayed a feeble sex; he has taken the senses for the heart. He is not fortunate enough to possess a friend. He is frank through thoughtlessness, suspicious through subtlety and contempt of mankind, disobliging through insensibility and misanthropy. Such is the sorry model copied by a gay and inconsiderate nation like ours.”

The Duke de Richelieu intended to reign under cover of Madame de la Tournelle, whose guide and inspirer he had become. This affair roused his enthusiasm. Pushing even to lyricism his sorry rôle of intermediary, he exclaimed, in an excess of zeal: “I mean that any one who shall enter Madame de la Tournelle’s ante-chamber shall be more highly considered than one who might have been in private conversation with Madame de Mailly.”[13]

The new favorite made conditions before yielding to the King. Proud and imperious, like most beautiful and flattered women, she required guarantees, and transformed a so-called affair of the heart into a diplomatic negotiation. “Love,” says La Rochefoucauld, “lends its name to an infinite number of relations attributed to it, but with which it has no more to do than the Doge with what goes on at Venice.” Madame de la Tournelle did not love, she calculated. More peremptory than Madame de Vintimille, who had tolerated a partnership with Madame de Mailly, she determined to reign alone. What she bargained for was not simply money and consideration but the banishment of her sister. But this was not easy to be obtained. The idea of quitting Versailles afflicted Madame de Mailly. She made herself so humble, so modest, so resigned, so submissive, that Louis XV. felt unable to dismiss her. From time to time he still felt for her certain returns if not of attachment at least of compassion. He would have liked to keep near him, as a faithful servant, this poor woman, whose gentleness and kindness he could not refuse to acknowledge. But Madame de la Tournelle was inflexible. She had signified her intention not to become the mistress of the King until after Madame de Mailly should have been irrevocably driven from the court.

Weakness makes men cruel. Louis XV., ordinarily affable and kind, was about to be severe beyond measure towards his former mistress. She thought to move him by immolating herself, and resigning her place (November, 1742) as lady of the palace to the Queen in favor of her sister, Madame de Flavacourt, who stood well with Madame de la Tournelle. But this sacrifice did not touch the cold heart of the King, and he took pleasure in reducing to despair the woman whose love had become embarrassing and tiresome.

The Duke de Luynes does not disguise his sympathy for the fallen favorite. “Her condition,” he says, “is all the more worthy of compassion, because she really loves the King, and is as zealous for his glory as she is attached to his person. She has many friends, and deservedly, for she has never done any harm, and, on the contrary, has been anxious to be of service.... They pretend that the King said to her some days ago: ‘I have promised you to speak plainly with you. I am madly in love with Madame de la Tournelle.’ Madame de la Tournelle says she is loved by M. d’Agenois, and that she loves him, and has no desire to have the King; that he would please her by letting her alone, and that she will never consent to his proposals but on sure and advantageous conditions.”

Everybody pitied Madame de Mailly: Cardinal Fleury because she had never meddled with politics; women because she was not beautiful; courtiers because she had been serviceable. The Queen was not one of the least affected. She displayed great good-will toward a mistress who had had as much modesty as tact. “The Queen,” says the Duke de Luynes, “seems to sympathize with Madame de Mailly’s situation, and to desire that she shall be well treated.”

D’Argenson is indignant with the faithless monarch. The previous year he had been unwilling to believe in the double passion of Louis XV. for Madame de Mailly and Madame de Vintimille. He wrote at the time: “They are the two most united sisters that ever were seen.... What likelihood is there that they could remain friends if they were disputing the possession of a heart so illustrious and precious?... But people are never willing to believe anything but evil.” At this period, D’Argenson did not doubt the sincerity of his master’s remorse. “The death of Madame de Vintimille,” said he, “will bring back the King to the practice of religion.... He will come in the end to living with Madame de Mailly as the Duke, they say, lived with Madame d’Egmont, simply as a friend, relapsing, if at all, only by accident, and then going quickly to confession.... He has a heart which makes itself heard. How few of his subjects have such a one at present! He is grateful for the sincere attachment shown towards him. He likes kind hearts; he is, perhaps, destined to be the delight of the world.”

A year later, the Marquis is furious at having been duped. “Great news!” he exclaims. “The King has dismissed Madame de Mailly in order to take her sister, Madame de la Tournelle. This was done with inconceivable harshness on the part of the Most Christian King. It is the sister who drives away the sister; she demands her exile, and the taking of this third sister as a mistress makes many people believe that the second one, Madame de Vintimille, went the same way. I, for my part, have always maintained that the King’s extreme sensibility at the death of Madame de Vintimille was a praiseworthy sentiment toward the sister of his friend, whose marriage he had himself arranged. But farewell to virtuous sensibility! So he deceived his mistress, he bound Madame de Vintimille to ingratitude! He considers the child she left as his son, and often has it brought secretly to his room. It is all cleared up, then. Who has the third sister must have had the second.”

Madame de Mailly made no further attempt at resistance. “My sacrifices are consummated,” she exclaimed; “I shall die of them; but this evening I shall be in Paris.” She actually departed, in tears and despairing, almost frenzied, in November, 1742. The King wrote letter after letter to her to tell her—could one believe it?—about his love for Madame de la Tournelle. This time, he said, he was “fixed forever, Madame de la Tournelle having all the mind necessary to make her charming.” The fickle sovereign congratulated himself in this more than strange correspondence on “the general applause given to his choice.”

The new favorite triumphed with a barbarous joy. The De Goncourt brothers, in their well-written and interesting book on the Mistresses of Louis XV.,[14] have given the curious letter she wrote at this time to the Duke de Richelieu, her confidant:—

“Surely Meuse must have let you know what trouble I have had to oust Madame de Mailly; at last I have managed to have her sent away not to come back again. You fancy perhaps that the affair is ended? Not at all; he is beside himself with grief, and does not write me a letter without speaking of it, and begging me to let her return, and he will never approach her, but only ask me to see her sometimes. I have just received one in which he says that if I refuse I shall soon be rid of both her and him; meaning, apparently, that they will both die of chagrin. As it would by no means suit me to have her here, I mean to be firm.... The King has sent you word that the affair is concluded between us, for he tells me, in this morning’s letter, to undeceive you, because he is unwilling to have you think anything beyond the truth. It is true that, when he wrote you, he counted on its being concluded this evening; but I put some difficulties in the way of that which I do not repent of.”

Before the close of the year, the affair was settled. Madame de Mailly, after many tears and supplications, recognized that she was beaten. The King paid her debts, and granted her a pension of ten thousand livres in addition to the twelve thousand she had already, and furnished a house for her in Paris, rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, where she established herself. Thenceforward, Madame de la Tournelle fulfilled, uncontested and without a rival, the official functions of King’s mistress.