Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [163]
Many aristocratic ladies who lived on the square and around the Marais were known as précieuses: women who adopted an overrefined, highly conceited form of speech that, despite their cultivated delicacy in attitude and taste, by no means entailed an equally cultivated sense of morality. They frequently had several lovers, and the Princesse de Guéméné was no exception. She loved the unruly Count of Montmorency-Boutteville, who had also been the lover of Madame de Sablé (at no. 5) and who, following a terrible duel à six in 1627 in front of no. 21, the home of Cardinal Richelieu (who had made dueling a capital offense in France), was subsequently captured and beheaded. Such would be the fate of two of the Princesse’s other lovers.
Nothing better illustrates these crisscrossed, overlapping, and at times simultaneous passions than the loves of another précieuse, Marguerite de Béthune (at no. 18). She was the daughter of the Duc de Sully, King Henry IV’s superintendent of finances, who was instrumental in planning the Place des Vosges (his Hôtel de Sully still feeds into the Place through a tiny, near-inconspicuous door at no. 7). Marguerite had been the mistress of both the Duc de Candale (at no. 12) and the Marquis d’Aumont (at no. 13). Since the even numbers on the Place des Vosges are located to the east of the Pavillon du Roi, and the odd to the west, it is possible to suppose that when she was with one she could easily manage to think of, if not spy on, the other.
Throughout its history, the very thought of the Place des Vosges has instantly conjured images of grand passion and grand intrigue. The importance that the Place des Vosges has in the French imagination, like that of Versailles, may explain why French literature, from the seventeenth century on, has never quite been able to disentangle love from its surrogate, double-dealing, or courtship from diplomacy, underscored as they all are by the cruelest and crudest form of self-interest. Such irony escaped no one, and certainly not the disabused courtiers of précieux society.
Few of them had anything kind to say about love or about the women they loved. Cardinal de Retz’s racy and tempestuous Mémoires were most exquisitely vicious in this regard. (Of his ex-mistress Madame de Montbazon, he wrote, “I have never known anyone who, in her vices, managed to have so little regard for virtue.”) And yet his Mémoires are dedicated to one of the précieux world’s busiest writers, his good friend Madame de Sévigné, born at 1 bis place des Vosges. Sévigné was herself a very close friend of the Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de La Fayette, the author of Europe’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Clèves. To show how intricately interwoven this world was, one has only to recall that La Rochefoucauld may have had a platonic relationship with La Fayette but he most certainly did not with the Duchesse de Longueville, with whom he had a son and for whom the disillusioned and embittered La Rochefoucauld probably continued to ache until the very end of his days. Known as one of the most beautiful women of the period, the fair-haired Duchesse led as blustery a life as Cardinal de Retz—first as a lover, then as a warrior, and finally as a religious woman. It was because of her bitter feud with her rival, Madame de Montbazon, that another duel took place on the square, between descendants of the Guise and the Coligny families. Each man may have gallantly taken the side of one of the two women, but after about a century of feuding between the Catholic Guises and the Protestant Colignys there was enough gall for another duel. It took Coligny almost five months to die of his