BOOKS.
Llb.bl OF PRINCESS CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH.* THIS volume, which is " compiled, translated, and gathered from various published and unpublished sources," is the work of a translator who shows a lamentable ignorance of the English language. This defect may amuse the reader, and does not detract from the interest of a book which is full of vitality from the first page to the last. As the wife of the Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV., and as mother of the Regent, Charlotte Elizabeth had an important part to play at the French Court, and played it in a highly original and independent style.
The daughter of the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig was born in the Castle of Heidelberg, July 7th, 1652, and although doomed to spend the largest portion of her life in France, remained a German to her heart's core. Her temper was probably inherited from her mother, who on one occasion publicly boxed her husband's ears, a feat which Charlotte Elizabeth is said to have imitated before the French Court, to show her disapproval of her son's approaching marriage. The earliest years of the Princess Palatine were spent under the care of her father's sister, the Electress Sophia, for whom she always retained the warmest affection. At the age of twenty she was married to the Duke of Orleans, a vain and foolish man, whose first wife, Henrietta Maria, daughter of Charles I., died under strong suspicions of poison. " If my father," she wrote long afterwards, "had cared for me as I cared for him, he could never have sent me into such a dan- gerous country. I only came here from obedience to him, and quite against my own desire." Writing to the Princess of Wales, she says that her husband's first wife was poisoned without his knowledge. It would appear, however, that it was not without his approval. " Do not let us tell him," said the Chevalier de Lorraine ; "he will never hold his tongue. If he says nothing the first year, he will hang us ten years later." Madame, who, according to Saint-Simon, "would have made a perfect gentleman," must have despised her heartless, effemi- nate husband, who delighted in jewellery and perfume, and was even said to rouge himself. Hunting and letter-writing were her chief employments at the French Court. Many of her letters to her German relatives never reached their destination, for the lady spared no one, and had a contempt for the reserve practised at Courts. Two objects seem to have been her special detestation. For Madame de Maintenon she never concealed her dislike, and her contempt for the medical profession was pronounced in no measured terms. The aversion of these dis- tinguished women was mutual, but the Princess Palatine showed her dislike the most palpably, and did not attempt to conceal it even from the French monarch. She styles her enemy the King's old wretch, an old toad, an old devil, an old beast, and an incarnate fiend. " Till Louis XIV.'s death,' says the editor of the Letters, " they cordially hated one another, and tried in every way to injure one another's credit near the King. Strangely enough, neither succeeded ; Louis XIV. married Madame de Maintenon, yet never omitted to show his brother's wife the respect and affection which he considered her due, both before and after Monsieur's death."
Madame's jealousy of her rival seems to have increased when her son was Regent, and Madame de Maintenon was said to be plotting in favour of the King's illegitimate son, the Due du Maine. "That old devil," she writes, "has spent her whole existence struggling to get her pupil placed on the throne so as to reign with him. She caused him to be legitimised, and would like to see him at the head of the Government, and my son deprived of life and liberty. All this causes me to pass many a sleepless night. I know only too well the wickedness of the old woman," who, she asserts, learnt the art of poisoning from Brinvilliers herself. Of poison- ing and the suspicion of poison a good deal is said in the Letters, and, according to Madame, if physicians did not poison, their prescriptions killed as surely. When the
• Life and Letters of Charlotte Elizabeth, Princess Palatine, and Mother of Philippe sl'Oridetie4 Regtnt of France, 1601-1792. London: Chapman and Bea 18894
Queen, Marie Therese, died, Charlotte Elizabeth asserted with her usual confidence that her death was entirely due to the ignorance of the doctors, " who killed her as surely as though a sword had been run through her heart." On the death of the Due de Bretagne, she writes :—" I am convinced that the doctors sent the poor little Prince into the next world with their bleedings and remedies." Then she writes of her cousin, the Duc de la Tremouille, who "was bled ten times in so terrible a fashion that on his death it was discovered that he had no longer a drop of blood in his veins. Two years ago the same doctor finished Madame de la Tremouille in the same manner." She relates also how, when the Dauphin had measles, the doctors bled him and administered an emetic ; and how, in the middle of this operation, the poor child died ; while some ladies of the Court, having taken charge of his brother, afterwards Louis XV., who was ill with the same com- plaint, " saved him, to the doctor's great shame." When Madame chose a doctor, as she was sometimes forced to do, she told him he must not look for blind obedience from her. " I tell him that as my health and body belong to me, I mean to manage them myself."
We have said that doctors and Madame de Maintenon were Charlotte Elizabeth's pet aversions. She had a third, which was a dislike to the English people. "The English," she writes, "are so false that I would not trust them with a single hair." Again, she says :—" You must never be surprised at an Englishwoman behaving rudely to you, for, between ourselves, that nation is worth very little." For the exiled King James II. she felt much sympathy, and cherished the warmest affec- tion and admiration for his wife, Mary of Modena. Indeed she never gives the reader a better impression of herself than when praising the saintly charity and " truly moral qualities" of this good woman, who would never hear an unkind word spoken against any one. What with her good-will for the Stuarts and her relationship to King. George, Madame's sympathy during the affair of 1715 was divided. " No one knows how all this will end. I am grieved for both rivals. King George is my dear aunt's son, which endears him to me as though he was my own child. On the other hand, the Pretender is related to me, and is the best man in the world. He and his mother have always behaved towards me in the kindest manner possible. So I cannot wish any harm to come to either of these two Princes."
Madame took a liberal view of religious controversies, and defended the Huguenots possibly because her enemy, " the King's old wretch," allowed them to be persecuted. Louis had, as every one knows, a horror of Jansenists, and on one occasion accused Philippe d'Orleans of taking one into his service. " IP' answered my son. never even thought of such a thing.' But,' said the King, you are going to take So-and- So, whose mother is certainly Jansenist.' As for him,' replied my son, laughing, far from being Jansenist, he does not even believe in God!' ' Oh!' said the King, much relieved; if that is all, take him and welcome."
Piety and gambling, Charlotte Elizabeth says, were both fashionable at Court, and the mixture of superstition and worldliness excited her contempt. Yet in 1711 she writes :— " I hear that it is believed by certain people that Catholics are not yet allowed to read the Bible ; but in Paris the case is quite otherwise. When I first came to France, it was not the fashion ; but now all that is changed ; every one reads it now. I do not know to what is due this sudden change." The piety of the time sometimes took a strange direction, for the story is told of a man who, before beating his wife, prayed that the correction might be salutary to her, "and cause her to be cured of her naughtiness."
Madame had what she called her " Bible days," in which she read several chapters from the oia and New Testament; and as she could not read in the mornings devoted to hunting, a
double quantity was read upon the previous day. I find, she wrote, all religious books " extremely dull, with the excep- tion of the Bible, of which I never tire. I always go to sleep over the others." Her piety, 'which seems to have been subject to changes, was wholly free from hypocrisy. " Believe me," she says, " if we had nothing to grieve over but our sins, we should be very merry."
The etiquette of the Court bored this independent and eccentric woman. She lunched alone all the year round, and got it over as quickly as possible, "for nothing is so annoying as to have twenty footmen round you who look at every mouthful
that you swallow, and stare persistently at you." Equally dull was the daily dinner with the King. " We are five or six at table ; no one speaks a word ; all passes as though we were in a convent,—perhaps two words said in a whisper to one's neighbour." An absurd piece of etiquette raised by her son- in-law prevented Madame on one occasion from visiting her daughter in Lorraine :-
" The Due declared that he had the right to sit in the presence of his mother-in-law in an arm-chair, by permission of the Emperor of Germany. Louis XIV., hearing of the affair, had the Due de Lorraine informed that the Emperor of Germany could do as he liked in his own Court, but that at Versailles things were managed differently. Then Monsieur joined in the discussion, and recalled that the old Due de Lorraine, whose daughter had wedded Gaston d'Orhians, had never sat upon anything higher than a stool before his own son-in-law. Madame all this while was waiting anxiously to know whether or not she was to be allowed to visit her daughter. At last the King decided that the Due de Lorraine might sit down in a high-backed chair before his father or mother-in-law. But to this the Due would not consent, declaring that having been raised to the rank of Elector by the Emperor, he had cer- tainly a right to the arm-chair. Then Monsieur suggested a heroic remedy. Why should any of them ever sit down at all ? Or, again, why should they not all sit down on stools, as was the fashion followed at the English Court ? But the King would have none of this trifling with proper etiquette, and so Madame had to give up her cherished plan."
For marriage-making, no doubt from her own experience, Charlotte Elizabeth expresses a great dislike. Indeed, she has never a good word to say in its favour. " Those who marry," she says, " must expect to have many misfortunes ; the higher the rank the greater the miseries," and she considered the " best of husbands good for nothing." All her life long she regretted being a woman, and no doubt her best qualities were of the masculine order. If she had not married the brother of Louis XIV., she might have been Queen of England, and would have made a better monarch than George I, whom, although her " dear aunt's son," she discovered to be "a bad fellow." With warm affections and keen hatreds, Madame was the frankest and most outspoken person at the French Court. To give unmistakable evidence of independent thought, of a contempt for shams and flattery, and of large toleration of opinion in a Court so formal and ostentatious, so lax and at the same time so intolerant, as that of Louis XIV., is enough to prove that the Princess Palatine was a woman of no ordinary character.
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