Simmering with resentment at the interloper, Henriette bowed to the queen, but not low enough, so Henri shoved her head down farther. She showed great distaste when kissing the hem of Marie’s gown. The Tuscan ambassador, in his report to Marie’s uncle, the grand duke, reported every detail of the historic event. He wrote proudly of Marie’s royal composure, “The Queen received her in the usual manner and treated her thus throughout the evening without showing any displeasure.”53
But the mask of learned dignity covered an anguished heart. Marie’s Italian blood boiled at the insult. Quick where Marie was slow, lithe where Marie was clumsy, Henriette used every trick possible to punish the woman who had usurped what she considered to be her rightful place. One courtier wrote, “The Marquise, believing herself to have all kinds of power over the King, and availing herself as usual of her vivacity and the sharp barbs of her words, so pricked and offended the Queen time after time that at first coldness, then indignation and anger formed between them, and the King was constrained to separate them in order to maintain peace on both sides.”54
Henriette loved to mimic the queen’s Italian accent and clumsy French, as well as her awkward gait. Henri and his courtiers laughed heartily at these performances, which got back to Marie and irked her greatly. Henriette, referring to Marie’s merchant ancestors, called her “the fat Florentine banker.” The queen called Henriette “the King’s whore.”55
As the months passed, Queen Marie, fat and pregnant, watched her husband and his mistress, also fat and pregnant, laugh and flirt with each other. Silent, angry, unable to understand their double entendres, their rapid exchanges of wit, Marie brooded. A little more than nine months after their wedding night, she fulfilled her primary duty and presented Henri, now a tired and aging forty-eight, with an heir. Marie basked in her husband’s praise. For four weeks, her stock was far higher than Henriette’s, and she loved it.
But then Henriette, too, gave birth to a boy, dimming some of the luster of the queen’s accomplishment. Despite the national outpouring of love and respect for Marie’s timely gift of a prince and heir, Marie could clearly see that even the birth of a son could not make her husband love her. His attraction to Henriette was too strong. Marie’s thwarted love twisted into black pain, lashed out in red anger.
Marie was delighted to receive a packet of Henriette’s love letters to a courtier in which she made fun of her lover the king. The queen, hiding a smile of triumph, delivered the letters to her husband. He grew red and trembled with rage as he read them. He then sent a messenger to arrest Henriette for treason and strip her of all her privileges. But cunning Henriette convinced Henri that the letters were a clever forgery, probably manufactured at the instigation of Queen Marie herself. Henriette deigned to forgive him for the whopping sum of six thousand pounds. Now the king was furious at his wife for presenting him with such outrageous forgeries.
After this episode Marie lost her husband’s love entirely. The marriage, which was to produce a total of five children that lived to adulthood, was reduced to violent arguments, and copulation as a political duty. After Henriette’s rehabilitation, the English ambassador reported that the queen “kept herself retired in her chamber, either spending the whole day in bed, in tears and lamentations, or if she did rise, yet would not be persuaded to put on other clothes but those of her bed chamber. She refused to open the door to the King when he knocked.”56
In 1602 Marie gave birth to a princess, and true to form, Henriette gave birth to a daughter shortly thereafter. Upon hearing the news, the queen’s fury knew no bounds. The duc de Sully witnessed the queen scratching the king’s face in an argument. When she raised her arm to strike her husband, the duke grabbed it to prevent the blow.
Henri confessed, “I receive from my wife neither companionship nor gaiety nor consolation, she either cannot or will not show me any kindness or pleasant conversation, neither will she accommodate herself to my moods and disposition. Instead, she shows such a cold and disdainful expression when I come in and go to kiss and embrace her and laugh a little with her, that I am forced to leave her in vexation and go look for my relaxation elsewhere.”57
Henriette finally fell from Henri’s favor in 1608 after traitorous dealings with the Spanish, whom she hoped would topple Henri and place her royal bastard on the throne. Rejected by the king, Henriette waited on the sidelines for an eventual recall. But when Henri was assassinated in 1610, the new regent of France, Queen Marie de Medici, could freely indulge her hatred of Henriette, and exiled her from court. Here the former favorite took out her frustrations in food and grew tremendously fat. Henriette lived twenty-three years after Henri’s death, until 1633, when she died at the age of about fifty-five, alone and unmourned.
4. Cuckold to the King—The Mistress’s Husband
You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns Nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns.
IN MANY CASES THE TRADITIONAL LOVE TRIANGLE—KING, queen, and mistress—was in fact a love quadrangle. Many of the royal mistresses were married, either before their liaisons with the king or during the affair at the behest of the monarch himself. A perfect contradiction in light of our twenty-first-century morality, marriage was thought to pull a veil of respectability over a royal mistress. A husband’s tacit approval gave legitimacy to an illicit relationship. Moreover, a pregnant unmarried woman was automatically a focus of social stigma. Even if the pregnant royal mistress had not slept with her husband in years, she was—after all—married.
Some kings, however, notably Louis XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV, fretted about committing a double adultery and, from the standpoint of mortal sin, would have preferred unmarried mistresses, thereby halving their carnal transgressions. Louis XIV was content with single Louise de La Vallière for seven years—during which time she scandalously provided him with four children. When he fell for the very married Athénaïs de Montespan—who provided him with seven—he grew more worried about the salvation of his soul. So worried, in fact, that after the queen died he secretly married the formidable old virgin Madame de Maintenon to enjoy sex without guilt.
In the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Louis XV, who didn’t seem horribly concerned about betraying his own wife, suffered for the sin of bedding another man’s wife, Madame de Pompadour. His pangs of conscience were especially keen during Lent, the time to weigh one’s trespasses throughout the preceding year.
But Louis had no qualms about marrying off his final mistress, the ravishing prostitute Jeanne Becu, to an impoverished nobleman to raise her status. Louis had the taverns and brothels of France searched for her pimp’s brother, the comte du Barry. At the altar, the man was given a bag of gold, a pension for life, and a horse to ride away on. This respectable married woman, now a countess, could be presented at court despite the sneers behind painted fans.
The phony marriage would come back to haunt the lovers, however. Four years later, in 1773, the ailing and now widowed monarch considered marrying his favorite and so dying in a state of sanctified grace as had his great-grandfather Louis XIV with Madame de Maintenon. For her part, Madame du Barry was ecstatic. After suffering constant humiliation at court, she saw herself as queen of France before whom all her enemies would have to scrape and bow. But then it was remembered that she had a husband of sorts, drinking somewhere, who about that time sent word to the king that he would make an embarrassing appearance at Versailles unless sufficiently reimbursed. He was speedily paid off with several thousand livres and made a knight of the Order of St. Louis—a medal given for outstanding merit, though in this case outstanding blackmail. All thoughts of marriage were dropped.