The duc de Mazarin had always been insanely jealous of Hortense’s inclinations for other men, so much so that he had personally lopped off all the private parts of his collection of ancient Roman statues. His insanity knew no bounds. One day he announced to his shocked servants that he was a tulip; he planted his feet in the ground and ordered them to water him, which they did. It was this gentleman, then, who bought his wife’s corpse from her creditors. He took it to France and carted it around with him from place to place. The jealous duke finally knew where she was and had her in his complete control for the first time since she had escaped from the convent in which he had imprisoned her thirty-three years earlier. He eventually laid her to rest in the tomb, happy in the knowledge that she would never be unfaithful to him again.
The lovely Harriet Howard, mistress of Napoleon III, aged shockingly after her relationship with the emperor ended in 1853. Harriet had fulfilled her part of their separation agreement by going to England and marrying, but she returned unexpectedly eleven years later. She had changed greatly in the intervening years. At forty-one, her once exquisite figure had become so obese she had to have the door of her carriage widened to climb through. She rode in her fashionable carriage with the extra-wide doors up and down the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Elysées as if she were once again the emperor’s mistress. One evening she attended the opera and fixed upon Napoleon with her opera glass, much to the discomfiture of both the emperor and the empress.
Harriet’s sudden appearance caused a great deal of eager gossip. Many thought her reemergence in very poor taste, an effort to humiliate the emperor. Others wondered why the former beauty would show herself fat and ugly, rather than allowing people to remember her as she had been. But the fact was that Harriet knew she was dying of cancer and wanted just a few moments to relive those glory days before she sank into the darkness forever. She died soon after her Paris visit. In her will Harriet left a large bequest to found in England a home for girls who had been seduced away from their families.
Another mistress of Napoleon III did not withstand the ravages of time and illness as stoically as Harriet Howard. Virginie di Castiglione lost her sanity when she lost her looks—mainly because she had never cultivated anything besides her beauty. She had pursued no hobbies, disdained friendship, and sneered at religion. When Virginie was twenty, her youth and beauty insolent in their intensity, her spurned husband had predicted that her kindest friend, the mirror, would one day become her most bitter foe.
With the sizable fortune she had earned from love affairs with rich and powerful men after she had been dismissed by the emperor, Virginie took an apartment in Paris on the venerable Place Vendome. She continued her political machinations, meeting diplomats, writing urgent letters to statesmen, and giving herself far more credit for international influence than she in fact possessed.
But her husband’s prediction came true with deadly accuracy. Virginie’s most relentless enemy was not Austrian emperor Franz Josef, as she thought, but all-conquering time itself. When the son she had borne at sixteen became a gangly teenager, Virginie was afraid he would be living proof of her advancing years; she forced him to dress as a groom and ride with her servants on the back of her coach.
After the fall of the French Empire in 1870, Virginie tried in vain to influence the new government, which remained willfully ignorant of Virginie and her supposed political wisdom. Shortly after this, Virginie broke a tooth. She dropped a heavy rolling pin on her toe, part of which had to be amputated. Her once perfect beauty was now clearly flawed. She began to hate the world and everybody in it.
Virginie had slowly been growing more eccentric over the years. When she turned forty she painted her walls and ceilings black, closed the shutters, and turned all the mirrors toward the wall. Without a host of admirers she stopped taking care of herself. She received very few old friends—all of them men, as she detested her own sex—who were forced to drink tea in the dark with her. Sometimes she would bring out tattered silk and musty velvet ball gowns from her heyday and reminisce about the vital role she had played in European politics. “I created Italy!” she would cry. “I saved the Pope!”49
As her eccentricities grew, her beauty continued to deteriorate. Her rich chestnut hair turned white. Unsupported by a corset, her magnificent bosom dropped. She lived mostly in the company of her dogs, spending hours each day writing rambling letters to her few friends. “The more I see of men,” she grumbled in one, “the more I love dogs.”50 Only after midnight, when no one was about who would recognize her, did she walk her dogs. A nocturnal phantom swaying in long black robes and thick black veils, this former royal mistress must have petrified late-night visitors to the Place Vendome.
As her madness seized control, Virginie refused to allow the servants in to clean and sat alone in her black rooms, filled with rats and trash, contemplating her lost beauty and the vanished days of splendor. Virginie was sixty-two when her servants, after seven days of trying to gain access to her room, forced their way in and found her decomposing body being gnawed by rats.
Her will stipulated that two of her dead dogs, which had been stuffed, should be adorned with jeweled collars and keep a vigil at her coffin during her wake. Before the coffin was closed, the two dogs were to be put inside and serve as cushions for her feet. She wanted to enter eternity in the gown that she had worn when she first slept with the emperor, the gray batiste edged with fine lace, adorned with her famous nine-string black and white pearl necklace and two bracelets.
But Virginie’s wishes were not carried out. Her jewels were sold to pay her debts at a well-attended auction, fetching some two million francs. No one knows what happened to the stuffed dogs. Only one curious visitor attended her funeral.
Unlike Virginie, Edward VII’s mistress Daisy Warwick didn’t mind the loss of her beauty, but she was shocked to find her predecessor in the royal bed, Lillie Langtry, still waging the fruitless fight. During World War I, there was a curious meeting of these two aging mistresses of a dead king—Lillie in her sixties, Daisy in her mid-fifties. “Whatever happens, I do not intend to grow old!” Lillie protested. “Why shouldn’t beauty vanquish time?”51
“I forgot what I answered,” Daisy reported, “for I was busy analyzing what she had said. I stole a glance at her, and certainly Time’s ravages, although perceptible to the discerning eye of one who had known her at the zenith of her beauty, were disguised with consummate artistry, while her figure was still lovely. But it came to me then that there was tragedy in the life of this woman whose beauty had once been world-famous, for she had found no time in the intervals of pursuing pleasure to secure contentment for the evening of her day. Now that she saw the evening approach, Lillie Langtry could only protest that it was not evening at all, but just the prolongation of a day that was, in truth, already dead.”52
Lillie was lonely in her last years, puttering around her garden, playing with her little dogs. The young nobleman she had married ignored her but pocketed her money, and all the lusty kings and regal queens of her youth were sleeping a marbled sleep. After Lillie’s death in 1929 at age seventy-five, a publisher who had known her wrote, “She always appeared to be a lingering leaf on an autumn tree which hangs on and will not die nor perish beneath the blast of Winter, because it has once belonged to a never-to-be-forgotten Summer. She could not let go. She fought in order not to let go.”53