第38章 ALMOST A LADY(3)

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 wasforbidden 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.

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 thelost 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.