Superwomen Part 13

That such a man should have turned Paris' head was inevitable. Equally natural was it that Paris women should make fools of themselves over him. But why so gross and unintellectual a wooer should have made the very slightest impression on a character like Adrienne Lecouvreur's must be relegated to the "mystery of choice" collection of riddles.

Yet, at sight, she, who for years had scoffed at pa.s.sion, and who had so often declared her heart was dead, felt that she had met the love of her life.

She gave her revivified heart and her whole soul into Maurice de Saxe's keeping, forever and ever. There were no reservations. Hers was a love that could die only with her life. The former affairs were to her as half-forgotten dreams. Saxe, and Saxe alone, held her love; held it as no other man had been able to.

Adrienne at first dazzled Saxe--as a tropic b.u.t.terfly might dazzle a champion bulldog. The dazzle soon wore off; but it left behind a comfortable feeling of affection, of admiration, of gratified vanity that he alone had been chosen by her, out of all the world of suitors.

With the deft hands of a sculptor, Adrienne Lecouvreur molded Saxe's rough nature. She refined him; taught him to replace the ways of the camp by those of civilization; made him less of a beast and more of a man; showed him how to think.

All of which added to the man's popularity with other women; which was the sole reward Adrienne reaped for her educative efforts.

Saxe was notoriously untrue to her. In his rages he berated her as a cabby might have scolded his drunken wife. He used his power over her to raise himself in others' esteem. In short, he was wholly selfish throughout, and he gruffly consented to accept Adrienne's wors.h.i.+p as his just due.

But Adrienne's love merely waxed stronger and brighter under such abominable treatment. She lived for Saxe alone.

The Duchy of Courland lost its duke. His place was to be filled by election. And with the dukedom went the hand of a Russian princess, whose face Saxe unchivalrously compared to a Westphalia ham.

Saxe's ambition awoke. In his veins ran royal blood. He wanted to be a duke and the husband of a princess. He entered as candidate in the contest. Lack of money, for judicious bribes to the free and incorruptible electors, stood in his way. He went, as ever in trouble, to Adrienne. And, as ever, she rose to the occasion.

She knew that, as Duke of Courland, he could not see her again, or be within several hundred miles of her. She knew, too, that, by helping him with the dukedom, she was helping to give him to another woman. A lesser love than hers would have rebelled at either possibility.

But Adrienne's love for Saxe was that which not only casts out fear, but casts out self along with it. She sold every piece of jewelry and every costly dress and stick of furniture in her possession, borrowed money right and left, and mortgaged her salary at the ~Comedie Francaise~.

The net result was fifteen thousand dollars, which she gladly handed over to Saxe for the expenses of his campaign. With these sinews of war, Saxe hastened to Courland. There he remained for a year; working hard for his election; making love to the ham-faced princess; fighting like a Norse berserker in battle after battle.

He was elected duke. But Russia refused to sanction the election. At the head of a handful of fellow adventurers, Saxe went on fighting; performing prodigies of personal valor and strength in conflicts against overwhelming odds. But at last he was hopelessly beaten in battle, and still more hopelessly outpointed in the game of politics.

And back he came to Paris--a failure.

Adrienne used every art and charm to make him forget his misfortunes and find happiness once more in her love. He treated her overtures as a surly schoolboy might treat those of an over-affectionate little sweetheart.

He consented to be petted and comforted by the woman who adored him.

But he wreaked in her the ill-temper bred of his defeat. For example, he professed to believe her untrue to him. He was furiously jealous--or pretended to be. And he accused her of the infidelity he had himself a thousand times practiced.

Poor Adrienne, aghast at such insane charges, vainly protested her innocence and her utter love for him. One of her letters to Saxe, during this dark hour, has been preserved. It begins:

I am worn out with grief. I have wept this livelong night. It is foolish of me; since I have nothing wherewith to reproach myself.

But I cannot endure severity from you. I am suspected, accused by you. Oh, how can I convince you--you who alone can wound my heart?

In the midst of this wretched misunderstanding came a crumb of comfort to the luckless woman--albeit the incident that caused it led also, indirectly, to her death.

Francoise de Lorraine, d.u.c.h.esse de Bouillon, fell violently in love with Saxe, and did not hesitate to tell him so. Saxe laughed in her face, and hinted that he cared too much for Adrienne Lecouvreur just then to be interested in any one else. It was not the truth, for his love for Adrienne had never served as an obstacle to any other of his myriad amours. But it served to rebuff the d.u.c.h.esse, who did not interest him, and to make Adrienne very, very happy when he repeated to her the conversation. As a by-product, it threw the d.u.c.h.esse into a frame of mind described by Congreve in his line about the Gehenna-like fury of a woman scorned.

A few days after this--in July, 1729--Adrienne received an anonymous note asking her to be at a certain corner of the Luxembourg Gardens at eleven o'clock the following morning. Being quite without fear, and not at all without curiosity, she went.

No, she was not set upon by masked a.s.sa.s.sins. She found awaiting her nothing more formidable than a pale and badly scared young man in clerical garb.

The clerical youth introduced himself as the Abbe Bouret, a hanger-on of the Bouillon household. Bouret told Adrienne that the d.u.c.h.esse had bribed him heavily to send her rival a box of poisoned bonbons, with a note saying the candies were the gift of an unknown and humble admirer.

The abbe had seen Adrienne a few nights earlier at the theater. So struck had he been by the gentleness and beauty of her face that he could not carry out his murderous commission. Hence the warning.

Adrienne took the abbe, and the candy, too, straight to the police. A bonbon was fed to a street dog. The animal, screaming and writhing in agony, died within fifteen minutes. This seemed, even to the eighteenth-century Paris police, a fairly good proof of the d.u.c.h.esse's guilt.

Naturally, they did not arrest her grace. But they put certain respectful queries to her. Strangely enough, the d.u.c.h.esse indignantly denied that she had tried to poison Adrienne.

Bouret, cross-examined, stuck determinedly to his story. So, through the Bouillon influence, he was thrown into prison and was kept there in solitary confinement, in a damp and unlighted dungeon, with occasional torture, until he saw the error of his ways, and confessed that his charge had been a lie. Thus was the faultless d.u.c.h.esse de Bouillon triumphantly cleared of an unjust accusation.

The d.u.c.h.esse celebrated her vindication by attending the theater, one night when Adrienne Lecouvreur was playing in "Phedre." The d.u.c.h.esse sat in a stage box and mockingly applauded her rival.

Adrienne paid no overt heed at first to her presence. But when she came to the scene in which ~Phedre~ expresses to ~OEnone~ her contempt for a certain cla.s.s of women, Adrienne turned her back on the wondering ~OEnone~, strode to the footlights, and, her blazing eyes seizing and gripping the d.u.c.h.esse's, declaimed directly to her ~Phedre's~ lines:

"I know my own faults; but I am not one of those brazen women who, calm even in the exposure of their crimes, can face the world without a blush."

The d.u.c.h.esse shrank back as if she had been lashed across the face.

s.h.i.+elding her eyes with her hands, she ran, shuddering, from the theater.

Scribe's play, "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and the opera of the same t.i.tle, make much of this episode. So did eighteenth-century Paris. Folk openly declared that the d.u.c.h.esse de Bouillon would not long rest impotent under so public an insult. And they were right.

Whether the poison was sent in a bouquet, as contemporary writers declared, or in some other form, Adrienne was suddenly stricken by mortal illness.

Less than half a century had pa.s.sed since the dying King Charles had "lived a week in spite of the best physicians in England." And the science of medicine had crept forward but few hesitating steps in the past forty-five years. Poor, stricken Adrienne did not even need the best malpractice in France to help her to her grave.

Doctors great and doctors greater--the quacks of the Rive Gauche and the higher-priced quacks of court and Faubourg--all stood in turn at the dying girl's bedside and consulted gravely in Latin; while Saxe raged at them and cursed them for a parcel of solemn nincomp.o.o.ps--which they were.

After a time they all trooped away, these long-faced men of pill and potion. They confessed they could find no remedy. They could not so much as name the ailment. At least, they did not--aloud. For the memory of the first poison scandal and its revealer's fate was still fresh in men's minds.

And after the doctors came the priest; a priest hastily summoned by the infidel Voltaire, who had been crying outside the death-chamber door.

The priest was among the most bigoted of his kind. In his eyes, the victim was not the reigning beauty of Paris, but a sinning creature who had defied G.o.d's laws by going on the stage.

Theology in those days barred actors and actresses from the blessings of the Church.

Yet, bigoted as was this particular priest, he was not wholly heartless. The weeping little monkey-like man crouched on the stairs outside the door may have touched his heart; for Voltaire could be wondrous eloquent and persuasive. Or the red-eyed, raging giant on his knees at the bedside may have appealed to his pity; almost as much as did the lovely white face lying so still there among the pillows. At all events, the good priest consented to strain a point.

If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of Extreme Unction.

"Do you place your hope in the G.o.d of the Universe?" he intoned.

Slowly the great dark eyes--already wide with the Eternal Mystery--turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her weeping lover, she whispered to the priest:

"~There~ is my Universe, my Hope, my ~G.o.d~!"

The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur sank back upon the pillows, dead--and unabsolved.

That night--acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy--the police carried Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime.

For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at another woman.