She Stands Accused

by She Stands Accused(Lit)

  The Duc, however, was not the only one to whom Sophie looked desirable. Two English peers had an eye on her—the Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke of Kent. This is where the card affair comes in. The Duc either played whist with the two noblemen for sole rights in Sophie or, what is more likely, cut cards with them during a game. The Duc won. Whether his win may be regarded as lucky or not can be reckoned, according to the taste and fancy of the reader, from the sequelae of some twenty years.

  % II

  With the placing of Sophie dans ses meubles by the Duc de Bourbon there began one of the most remarkable turns in her career. In 1811 he took a house for her in Gloucester Street, Queen's Square, with her mother as duenna, and arranged for the completion of her education.

  As a light on her character hardly too much can be made of this stage in her development. It is more than likely that the teaching was begun at Sophie's own demand, and by the use she made of the opportunities given her you may measure the strength of her ambition. Here was no rich man's doxy lazily seeking a veneer of culture, enough to gloss the rough patches of speech and idea betraying humble origin. This fisherman's child, workhouse girl, ancilla of the bordels, with the thin smattering of the three R's she had acquired in the poor institution, set herself, with a wholehearted concentration which a Newnham `swot' might envy, to master modern languages, with Greek, Latin, and music. At the end of three years she was a good linguist, could play and sing well enough to entertain and not bore the most intelligent in the company the Duc kept, and to pass in that company —the French emigre set in London—as a person of equal education. If, as it is said, Sophie, while she could read and write French faultlessly, never could speak it without an English accent, it is to be remembered that the flexibility of tongue and mind needed for native-sounding speech in French (or any other language) is so exceptional as to be practically non-existent among her compatriots to this day. The fault scarcely belittles her achievement. As well blame a one-legged man for hopping when trying to run. Consider the life Sophie had led, the sort of people with whom she had associated, and that temptation towards laissez-faire which conquers all but the rarest woman in the mode of life in which she was existing, and judge of the constancy of purpose that kept that little nose so steadfastly in Plutarch and Xenophon.

  If in the year 1812 the Duc began to allow his little Sophie about L800 a year in francs as pin-money he was no more generous than Sophie deserved. The Duc was very rich, despite the fact that his father, the old Prince de Conde, was still alive, and so, of course, was enjoying the income from the family estates.

  There is no room here to follow more than the barest outline of the Duc de Bourbon's history. Fully stated, it would be the history of France. He was a son of the Prince de Conde who collected that futile army beyond the borders of France in the royalist cause in the Revolution. Louis-Henri was wounded in the left arm while serving there, so badly wounded that the hand was practically useless. He came to England, where he lived until 1814, when he went back to France to make his unsuccessful attempt to raise the Vendee. Then he went to Spain.

  At this time he intended breaking with Sophie, but when he got back to Paris in 1815 he found the lady waiting for him. It took Sophie some eighteen months to bring his Highness up to scratch again. During this time the Duc had another English fancy, a Miss Harris, whose reign in favour, however, did not withstand the manoeuvring of Sophie.

  Sophie as a mistress in England was one thing, but Sophie unattached as a mistress in France was another. One wonders why the Duc should have been squeamish on this point. Perhaps it was that he thought it would look vulgar to take up a former mistress after so long. At all events, he was ready enough to resume the old relationship with Sophie, provided she could change her name by marriage. Sophie was nothing loth. The idea fell in with her plans. She let it get about that she was the natural daughter of the Duc, and soon had in tow one Adrien-Victor de Feucheres. He was an officer of the Royal Guard. Without enlarging on the all-round tawdriness of this contract it will suffice here to say that Sophie and Adrien were married in London in August of 1818, the Duc presenting the bride with a dowry of about L5600 in francs. Next year de Feucheres became a baron, and was made aide-de-camp to the Duc.

  Incredible as it may seem, de Feucheres took four years to realize what was the real relationship between his wife and the Prince de Conde. The aide-de-camp and his wife had a suite of rooms in the Prince's favourite chateau at Chantilly, and the ambition which Sophie had foreseen would be furthered by the marriage was realized. She was received as La Baronne de Feucheres at the Court of Louis XVIII. She was happy—up to a point. Some unpretty traits in her character began to develop: a violent temper, a tendency to hysterics if crossed, and, it is said, a leaning towards avaricious ways. At the end of four years the Baron de Feucheres woke up to the fact that Sophie was deceiving him. It does not appear, however, that he had seen through her main deception, because it was Sophie herself, we are told, who informed him he was a fool—that she was not the Prince's daughter, but his mistress.

  Having waked up thus belatedly, or having been woken up by Sophie in her ungoverned ill-temper, de Feucheres acted with considerable dignity. He begged to resign his position as aide to the Prince, and returned his wife's dowry. The departure of Sophie's hitherto complacent husband rather embarrassed the Prince. He needed Sophie but felt he could not keep her unattached under his roof and he sent her away—but only for a few days. Sophie soon was back again in Chantilly.

  The Prince made some attempt to get de Feucheres to return, but without success. De Feucheres applied for a post in the Army of Spain, an application which was granted at once. It took the poor man seven years to secure a judicial separation from his wife.

  The scandal of this change in the menage of Chantilly —it happened in 1822—reached the ears of the King, and the Baronne de Feucheres was forbidden to appear at Court. All Sophie's energies from then on were concentrated on getting the ban removed. She explored all possible avenues of influence to this end, and, incidentally drove her old lover nearly frantic with her complaints giving him no peace. Even a rebuff from the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the son of that prince who was afterwards Charles X, did not put her off. She turned up one day at the Tuileries, to be informed by an usher that she could not be admitted.

  This desire to be reinstated in royal favour is at the back of all Sophie's subsequent actions—this and her intention of feathering her own nest out of the estate of her protector. It explains why she worked so hard to have the Prince de Conde assume friendly relations with a family whose very name he hated: that of the Duc d'Orleans. It is a clue to the mysterious death, eight years later, of the Prince de Conde, last of the Condes, in circumstances which were made to pass as suicide, but which in unhampered inquiry would almost certainly have been found to indicate murder.

  % III

  Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde, seems to have been rather a simple old man: a useless old sinner, true enough, but relatively harmless in his sinning, relatively venial in his uselessness. It were futile to seek for the morality of a later age in a man of his day and rank and country, just as it were obtuse to look for greatness in one so much at the mercy of circumstance. As far as bravery went he had shown himself a worthy descendant of ``the Great Conde.'' But, surrounded by the vapid jealousies of the most useless people who had ever tried to rule a country, he, no more than his father, had the faintest chance to show the Conde quality in war. Adrift as a comparatively young man, his world about his ears, with no occupation, small wonder that in idleness he fell into the pursuit of satisfactions for his baser appetites. He would have been, there is good reason to believe, a happy man and a busy one in a camp. There is this to be said for him: that alone among the spineless crowd of royalists feebly waiting for the miracle which would restore their privilege he attempted a blow for the lost cause. But where in all that bed of disintegrating chalk was the flint from which he might have evoked
a spark?

  The great grief of the Prince's life was the loss of his son, the young Duc d'Enghien, shamefully destroyed by Bonaparte. It is possible that much of the Prince's inertia was due to this blow. He had married, at the early age of fourteen, Louise-Marie-Therese-Mathilde d'Orleans, daughter of Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans and the Duchesse de Chartres, the bride being six years older than her husband. Such a marriage could not last. It merely sustained the honeymoon and the birth of that only son. The couple were apart in eighteen months, and after ten years they never even saw each other again. About the time when Sophie's husband found her out and departed the Princesse died. The Prince was advised to marry again, on the chance that an heir might be born to the large fortune he possessed. But Sophie by then had become a habit with the Prince—a bad one—and the old man was content to be left to his continual hunting, and not to bother over the fact that he was the last of his ancient line.

  It may be easily believed that the Prince's disinclination to marry again contented Sophie very well. And the fact that he had no direct heir was one in which she saw possibilities advantageous to herself.

  The Prince was then sixty-six years old. In the course of nature he was almost bound to predecease her. His wealth was enormous, and out of it Sophie wanted as much by bequest as she could get. She was much too shrewd, however, to imagine that, even if she did contrive to be made his sole heir, the influential families who had an eye upon the great possessions of the Prince, and who through relationship had some right to expect inheritance, would allow such a will to go uncontested. She therefore looked about among the Prince's connexions for some one who would accept coheirship with herself, and whose family would be strong enough in position to carry through probate on such terms, but at the same time would be grateful enough to her and venal enough to further her aim of being reinstated at Court. Her choice in this matter shows at once her political cunning, which would include knowledge of affairs, and her ability as a judge of character.

  It should be remembered that, in spite of his title of Duc de Bourbon, Sophie's elderly protector was only distantly of that family. He was descended in direct line from the Princes de Conde, whose connexion with the royal house of France dated back to the sixteenth century. The other line of `royal' ducs in the country was that of Orleans, offshoot of the royal house through Philippe, son of Louis XIII, and born in 1640. Sophie's protector, Louis-Henri-Joseph, Prince de Conde, having married Louise-Marie, daughter of the great-grandson of this Philippe, was thus the brother-in-law of that Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, who in the Revolution was known as ``Egalite.'' This was a man whom, for his political opinion and for his failure to stand by the King, Louis XVI, the Prince de Conde utterly detested in memory. As much, moreover, as he had hated the father did the Prince de Conde detest Egalite's son. But it was out of this man's family that Sophie selected, though ultimately, her coheir.

  Before she arrived at this point, however, Sophie had been at pains to do some not very savoury manoeuvring.

  By a dancer at the Opera, called Mimi, the Prince de Conde had an illegitimate daughter, whom he had caused to be educated and whom he had married to the Comte de Rully. The Comtesse de Rully and her husband had a suite at Chantilly. This was an arrangement which Sophie, as reigning Queen of Chantilly, did not like at all. While the Rully woman remained at Chantilly Sophie could not think that her sway over the Prince was quite as absolute as she wished. It took her six years of badgering her protector, from 1819 to 1825, to bring about the eviction.

  But meantime (for Sophie's machinations must be taken as concurrent with events as they transpire) the Baronne de Feucheres had approached the son of Philippe-Egalite, suggesting that the last-born of his six children, the Duc d'Aumale, should have the Prince de Conde for godfather. If she could persuade her protector to this the Duc d'Orleans, in return, was to use his influence for her reinstatement at Court. And persuade the old man to this Sophie did, albeit after a great deal of badgering on her part and a great deal of grumbling on the part of the Prince.

  The influence exerted at Court by the Duc d'Orleans does not seem to have been very effective. The King who had dismissed her the Court, Louis XVIII, died in 1824. His brother, the Comte d'Artois, ascended the throne as Charles X, and continued by politically foolish recourses, comparable in history to those of the English Stuarts, to alienate the people by attempting to regain that anachronistic absolute power which the Revolution had destroyed. He lasted a mere six years as king. The revolution of 1830 sent him into exile. But up to the last month or so of those six years he steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the Baronne de Feucheres—not that Sophie ever gave up manoeuvring and wheedling for a return to Court favour.

  About 1826 Sophie had a secret proposition made to the King that she should try to persuade the Prince de Conde to adopt as his heir one of the brothers of the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the King's second son—or would his Majesty mind if a son of the Duc d'Orleans was adopted? The King did not care at all.

  After that Sophie pinned her faith in the power possessed by the Duc d'Orleans. She was not ready to pursue the course whereby her return to Court might have been secured—namely, to abandon her equivocal position in the Prince de Conde's household, and thus her power over the Prince. She wanted first to make sure of her share of the fortune he would leave. She knew her power over the old man. Already she had persuaded him to buy and make over to her the estates of Saint-Leu and Boissy, as well as to make her legacies to the amount of a million francs. Much as she wanted to be received again at Court, she wanted more just as much as she could grab from the Prince's estate. To make her inheritance secure she needed the help of the Duc d'Orleans.

  The Duc d'Orleans was nothing loth. He had the mind of a French bourgeois, and all the bourgeois itch for money. He knew that the Prince de Conde hated him, hated his politics, hated his very name. But during the seven years it took Sophie to bring the Prince to the point of signing the will she had in mind the son of Philippe-Egalite fawned like a huckster on his elderly and, in more senses than one, distant relative. The scheme was to have the Prince adopt the little Duc d'Aumale, already his godchild, as his heir.

  The ways by which Sophie went about the job of persuading her old lover do not read pleasantly. She was a termagant. The Prince was stubborn. He hated the very idea of making a will—it made him think of death. He was old, ill, friendless. Sophie made his life a hell, but he had become dependent upon her. She ill-used him, subjecting him to physical violence, but yet he was afraid she might, as she often threatened, leave him. Her way of persuading him reached the point, it is on record, of putting a knife to his throat. Not once but several times his servants found him scratched and bruised. But the old man could not summon up the strength of mind to be quit of this succubine virago.

  At last, on the 29th of August, 1829, Sophie's `persuasions' succeeded. The Prince consented to sign the will, and did so the following morning. In its terms the Duc d'Aumale became residuary legatee, and 2,000,000 francs, free of death-duty, were bequeathed to the Prince's ``faithful companion, Mme la baronne de Feucheres,'' together with the chateaux and estates of Saint-Leu-Taverny, Boissy, Enghien, Montmorency, and Mortefontaine, and the pavilion in the Palais-Bourbon, besides all the Prince's furniture, carriages, horses, and so on. Moreover, the estate and chateau of Ecouen was also given her, on condition that she allowed the latter to be used as an orphanage for the descendants of soldiers who had served with the Armies of Conde and La Vendee. The cost of running this establishment, however, was to be borne by the Duc d'Aumale.

  It might be thought that Sophie, having got her way, would have turned to kindness in her treatment of her old lover. But no. All her mind was now concentrated on working, through the Duc d'Orleans, for being received again at Court. She ultimately succeeded in this. On the 7th of February, 1830, she appeared in the presence of the King, the Dauphin and Dauphine. In the business of preparing for this great day Chantilly and the Prince d
e Conde were greatly neglected. The beggar on horseback had to be about Paris.

  But events were shaping in France at that time which were to be important to the royal family, to Sophie and her supporters of the house of Orleans, and fatal in consequence to the old man at Chantilly.

  On the 27th of July revolution broke out in France. Charles X and his family had to seek shelter in England, and Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, became—not King of France, but ``King of the French'' by election. This consummation had not been achieved without intrigue on the part of Egalite's son. It was not an achievement calculated to abate the Prince de Conde's hatred for him. Rather did it inflame that hatred. In the matter of the famous will, moreover, as the King's son the little Duc d'Aumale would be now in no need of the provision made for him by his unwilling godfather, while members of the exiled royal family—notably the grandson of Charles, the Duc de Bordeaux, certainly cut out of the Prince's will by the intrigues of Sophie and family—were in want of assistance. This is a point to be remembered in the light of subsequent events.