The Last Libertines

The Last Libertines

BENEDETTA CRAVERI

Translated from the Italian by Aaron Kerner

New York Review Books

New York

This is a New York Review Book

published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

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Copyright © 2016 by Adelphi Edizioni, S.p.A, Milan

Translation copyright © 2020 by Aaron Kerner

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Anton Raphael Mengs, Maria Carolina of Augsburg-Lorena, Queen of Naples (detail), ca. 1768; © Photographic Archive Prado Museum

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Craveri, Benedetta, 1942– author. | Kerner, Aaron, translator.

Title: The last libertines / Benedetta Craveri ; translated by Aaron Kerner. Other titles: Gli ultimi libertini. English

Description: New York City : New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review books | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044362 (print) | LCCN 2019044363 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373409 ; (hardcover) | ISBN 9781681373416 ; (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nobility—France—Biography. | France—History—Louis XVI, 1774–1793—Biography. | France—History—Louis XV, 1715–1774—Biography. Classification: LCC DC137.5.A1 C7313 2020 (print) | LCC DC137.5.A1 (ebook) | DDC 944/.0340922—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044362

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044363

ISBN 978-1-68137-341-6

v1.0

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Contents

Preface

The Duc de Lauzun

The Vicomte Joseph-Alexandre de Ségur

The Duc de Brissac

The Comte de Narbonne

The Chevalier de Boufflers

The Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur

The Comte de Vaudreuil

1789

Turning the Page

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustration Credits

Preface

THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY of seven aristocrats whose youth coincided with the French monarchy’s final moment of grace—a moment when it seemed to the nation’s elite that a style of life based on privilege and the spirit of caste might acknowledge the widespread demand for change, and in doing so reconcile itself with Enlightenment ideals of justice, tolerance, and citizenship.

It is always a beautiful thing to be twenty years old, Sainte-Beuve wrote of that generation of nobles. But never was it more so than in 1774, when Louis XVI’s ascension to the throne seemed to herald the beginning of a new age, one that would allow these princes of youth (as Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes described them) to advance step by step with their era, in perfect harmony with the world around them.¹ We mocked the old customs, the feudal pride of our fathers and the solemnity of their ways, so as to continue to enjoy all of our privileges, the Comte de Ségur would write many years later.² Freedom, royalty, aristocracy, democracy, prejudice, reason, novelty, philosophy—all combined to make our days delightful; and never was so terrible an awakening preceded by so sweet a sleep and by dreams so seductive.³

But could matters really have been so simple? Could the liberal nobility (which welcomed the summoning of the Estates General as an opportunity to put in place those institutional reforms that the country sorely needed, and to establish a constitutional monarchy along English lines) truly have lacked a sense of reality? Did they realize only belatedly, after toying with philosophical theories whose consequences they wholly failed to grasp,⁴ just how much they had contributed to their own ruin?

This is not the impression one has when retracing the lives and political choices of the Duc de Lauzun, the Comte and Vicomte de Ségur, the Duc de Brissac, the Comte de Narbonne, the Comte de Vaudreuil, and the Chevalier de Boufflers, the protagonists of this book. In making my selection of precisely these seven from among the many brilliant and representative figures of the era, I was driven, of course, by the romantic character of their exploits and amours—but also by the keenness with which they experienced this crisis in the civilization of the ancien régime, of which they themselves were the emblem, all while keeping their gaze fixed on the new world that was in the process of being born. Each of them belonged to the ancient feudal nobility and possessed those prerogatives that their class took the most pride in: dignity, courage, refinement of manners, culture, wit, and the art of pleasing. Aware of their advantages and determined to make themselves felt in the world, they responded with all they had to the demands of a profoundly theatrical society, in which one was obliged to know how to hold one’s place at center stage. They were also past masters of the art of seduction, and their many successes with the dames du grand monde did not prevent them from practicing libertinism in its broadest sense. This is why I have called them the last libertines—even if each of them eventually met the woman capable of binding him to her for the rest of their days.

They were all tied to one another by long friendships or social acquaintance. They frequented the same milieus, shared the same interests, pursued the same ambitions, and often the same women, as well. Not only do their stories share numerous similarities, shedding light on one another, but they gesture toward the stories of many others. Their behavior and their choices were influenced by family ties, matrimonial alliances, love affairs, and social relations but also by rivalries, resentments, and the desire for revenge. And in these pages the reader will cross paths with Marie-Antoinette, Catherine II of Russia, the Duc de Choiseul and Talleyrand, the Baron de Besenval and the Polignac clan, the Duc d’Orléans and Laclos, Chamfort and Mirabeau, Princesse Izabela Czartoryska and Lady Sarah Lennox, the Prince de Ligne (an inexhaustible chronicler of this cosmopolitan elite), the painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (who captured that era’s sweetness of life on canvas), and various other illustrious personalities essential to the understanding of our seven gentlemen. After all, if we know a good deal about them today, it is not only because they poured forth their impressions of themselves and their world in memoirs, letters, and poems but also because they figured powerfully in the diaries and correspondence of their contemporaries.

And yet though they emerged from the same mold, products of that same perfected civilization⁵ that produced a seemingly endless amount of commentary upon itself, the seven protagonists of this book were irreducible individualists. Each of them sought to forge a destiny true to his image of himself. Sons of the Enlightenment, endowed with a surprising capacity for work, they possessed an unlimited faith in their own abilities to range at will through politics and economics, literature and art, all while maintaining military careers. Curious about everything, at ease wherever they happened to find themselves, Lauzun, Boufflers, the elder of the Ségurs, Narbonne, and Vaudreuil were great travelers as well, and we will find their traces in Africa, America, England, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia. Still, convinced as they were of their worth, many were forced to acknowledge that personal merit gave no assurance of serving their sovereign in posts of command. Subjects of an absolute monarchy, they may have bowed their heads before the arbitrariness of royal favor, but they were unwilling to simply let court intrigue or the excessive power of the King’s ministers decide their fates. The reasons that led them to keep their distance from the politics of Versailles, however, were more than merely personal. A regiment, an ambassadorship, a military commission, everything nowadays depends on royal favor or the whims of society, as the Duc de Lauzun wrote indignantly to a friend.⁶ Their experiences of military service, government administration, and diplomacy, as well as their encounters with the systems prevailing in other lands, had convinced them that the French monarchy needed to change its methods of governance and provide itself with new institutions in order to be able to respond to the political, economic, and social crises then devastating the country. England served as a model: in London, where they mixed with fashionable society and took a keen interest in horse racing, they envied the positions held in public life by a nobility engaged in both politics and business. The American War of Independence proved no less decisive for the Duc de Lauzun and the Comte de Ségur, showing them that a democratic country governed by free citizens was not merely a utopia to be found in books.

With the exception of the Comte de Vaudreuil—the only one who, having staked everything on royal favor, was forced to flee after the fall of the Bastille—all of our protagonists hailed with enthusiasm the summoning of the Estates General, and only during the course of the revolution that followed did their respective paths diverge.

Elected as a deputy to the National Constituent Assembly, the Chevalier de Boufflers would yield to the entreaties of his beloved, an intransigent royalist, and side with the monarchy. A mediocre orator, and fully aware that he was fighting for a lost cause, the Chevalier was far from brilliant when it came to institutional debate, but in his passion for nature and love of beauty he strove to protect confiscated forests and Church properties from speculators and to defend the work of artists and artisans newly deprived of support. Once the assembly had fulfilled its duty, he opted to emigrate, repelled by the violence of political struggle.

The first of our seven to die, a victim of popular fury, was the Duc de Brissac, the faithful and chivalrous lover of Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s last favorite. Obedient to the imperatives of honor—I merely pay what I owe to the ancestors of the King, and to my own⁷—the Duc accepted the command of the sovereign’s personal guard, knowing full well that in doing so he was resigning himself to certain death.

A convinced constitutionalist, the Comte de Narbonne was the last minister of war appointed by Louis XVI, thanks to the campaign waged in his favor by Mme de Staël, who was madly in love with him. But his scheme to restore the King’s prestige by way of a brief war against the electorate of Trèves, the headquarters of the emigration, fell apart at the seams. On August 10, after the storming of the Tuileries and the fall of the monarchy, he was accused of high treason by the Jacobins, but made an extraordinary escape to England.

A constitutionalist like Narbonne, the Comte de Ségur chose to remain in France with his family, including his brother, who had long since shed his illusions about the possibility of reform. During the Terror, they would attempt to keep a low profile, but both the Maréchal de Ségur and the Vicomte wound up in prison, and only the fall of Robespierre saved them from the guillotine.

For all seven, the trial and execution of the King represented an irremediable trauma and sanctioned their definitive alienation from the Revolution.

The only one of them to swear loyalty to the Republic was the Duc de Lauzun, who would become a general under the old family name of Biron. But in spite of his deep resentment toward the royal family, he too came to detest the violence of the Jacobins, and was well aware that his aristocratic origins had never been forgiven. A professional soldier in a nation at war, he felt duty-bound to defend his homeland against foreign invasion. In contrast to Lafayette and General Dumouriez, he remained at his post and commanded successively the Army of the Rhine, the Army of Italy, and the troops charged with putting down the uprising in the Vendée. This final commission was a question of civil war, Frenchman against Frenchman, and Lauzun was un-prepared to see it through. He did his best to avoid direct confrontations and worked toward compromise until, having become suspect in the eyes of the Committee of Public Safety, he resigned, thereby signing his own death warrant.

With the Revolution behind them, Boufflers, Narbonne, the Ségur brothers, and Vaudreuil found themselves facing new choices: some opted for Napoleon, and only one of them returned to France in the wake of Louis XVIII. Each carried grief in his heart for parents, friends, and acquaintances killed on the scaffold, the consciousness of having fallen short of his proper destiny, and a sense of guilt for having survived the disappearance of a world that he had loved intensely and whose end his own actions had helped precipitate. But all—no matter their convictions, responsibilities, or weaknesses—confronted danger, poverty, and exile with heads held high, maintaining their caste’s tradition of courage and stoicism. And now, resuming their lives in a new society, they turned their minds to finding new places for themselves, making it a point of honor to demonstrate by way of their exquisite courtesy, the elegance of their manners, and their unremitting geniality their fidelity to an aristocratic civilization of which they themselves were the last representatives.

The Duc de Lauzun

It was there, passing by me, in hussar’s garb, going full gallop on a Barbary steed, that I saw one of those men in whom a whole world came to an end: the Duc de Lauzun.

—CHATEAUBRIAND¹

IN 1811, RESPONDING TO WIDESPREAD CONCERN, Napoleon ordered the police to seize and destroy the manuscript of the memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun.² Evidence of a past at odds with the exigencies of the moment, the recollections of the last famous libertine of France’s ancien régime had begun to circulate surreptitiously,³ alarming Paris’s beau monde. Luckily, however, Queen Hortense, eager to read the manuscript, had a copy of it made in secret for herself,⁴ and it is thanks to this transcription that ten years later, in the midst of the Restoration, the memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun were finally published, triggering a genuine scandal.

But why, exactly, would the youthful recollections of one of the innumerable victims of the guillotine kindle so much outrage? And why had a similar uproar been caused only a few years earlier by the publication of the memoirs of the Baron de Besenval, who, for his part, had had the good fortune to die in his bed shortly before the fall of the Bastille? The Baron’s memoirs had also appeared posthumously in 1805, thanks to the efforts of a good friend of the Duc, the Vicomte Joseph-Alexandre de Ségur.

Evoking the customs and traditions of the French aristocracy by following the thread of one’s own personal experience was, of course, nothing new. For at least three centuries numerous nobles had left written traces of their own affairs and decisions, both in the public sphere and on the battlefield. Moreover, beginning in the early years of the nineteenth century, the desire to bear witness would spread among those who, having survived the Revolution, had been intimate with the society of the ancien régime, and felt the need to fix their recollections in print. Many of these memoirists—the Prince de Ligne, the Comte de Ségur, the Marquise de La Tour du Pin, Mme de Genlis, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, to name only a few—had been friends or acquaintances of Besenval and Lauzun, and would also describe, with the same milieu and cast of characters, the aristocratic way of life at its apogee.

What made the testimonies of Lauzun and Besenval so different, dangerous, and, for we modern readers, particularly interesting, was the moment at which they were written. Both men had set down their memories before the coming of the Terror—that is, while still oblivious to the tragic end awaiting the society whose glorious recklessness they so delighted in describing. Both had been part of Marie-Antoinette’s circle of favorites, and their portraits of the beautiful, frivolous Queen and her entourage were difficult to reconcile with the image of the Christian martyr that had been established in the wake of the Revolution. Moreover, when their memoirs were published, a significant number of the gentlewomen whose amorous pasts they recounted were still among the living and had long since adopted the role of respectable matrons.⁵ Nor were the families of those who had perished—often quite violently—pleased to learn that the conduct of their noble grandmothers clashed so violently with the bourgeois morality of the new century. Besenval and Lauzun, killed during the Revolution, lacked the opportunity to revise their writings, to temper the irreverent license of their memories, which now risked appearing as an implicit denunciation of the moral failings that had weakened the court from within—a denunciation particularly embarrassing since both men had played leading roles there.

Faced with a pair of witnesses whose testimony was difficult to confute, the eulogists of the old regime’s best available strategy was to deny the authenticity of their work. This was Mme de Genlis’s approach to the memoirs of Besenval;⁶ and in 1818, when copies of Lauzun’s manuscript began to circulate, Talleyrand declared in Le Moniteur⁷ that it was a vulgar fraud.⁸ This was a brazen lie—Talleyrand had known Lauzun too well to be able to deny the veracity of his youthful friend’s love affairs.⁹ However, having passed into the service of the Restoration, the former Bishop of Autun now presented himself (for political reasons) as a white knight defending the respectability of the survivors of the ancien régime, that world whose destruction he himself had helped hasten. All those who knew the Duc de Lauzun know that to lend his tales charm he needed nothing but those graces native to his intellect; that he was eminently a man of good form and fine taste, and that never was anyone less capable of voluntarily doing harm than he, Talleyrand wrote. "And yet it is to this man that they dare attribute the most odious satires of women both French and foreign, and the grossest calumnies against an august figure [the Queen] who displayed as much kindness as she did greatness of soul amid the excesses of her misfortune. Such are the most prominent features of the so-called Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun which have been circulating for some time in manuscript, and of which I have a copy in my hands."¹⁰

Thirty years later, addressing the persistence of the controversy, Sainte-Beuve would finally make clear the political significance of Lauzun’s Memoirs, which, he affirmed, though they strike one as frivolous at first glance, have a serious side far more enduring . . . history records them as evidence for the prosecution in the great trial of the eighteenth century.¹¹ This certainly was not the spirit in which Lauzun had first taken up his pen in the autumn of 1782. The idea of retracing the first thirty-five years of his life occurred to him at the end of his second military expedition to the United States, while waiting to embark on the ship that would return him to France. Leaving behind him the successes of his American adventure, uncertain as to the prospects that awaited him in his homeland, suspended between two worlds, the Duc amused himself by reviewing those experiences and encounters that had meant the most to him.¹² "You shall see me successively take on the roles of galant, gambler, politician, soldier, hunter, philosopher, and occasionally more than one of these at the same time," he announces at the beginning of his memoirs.¹³ And since the narrative was addressed to his paramour of the moment, the beautiful and free-spirited Marquise de Coigny, it was inevitable that his love life would constitute a central theme.

There was nothing so odd about any of this. Hadn’t the Comte de Bussy-Rabutin written, more than a century earlier, during the lulls of a military campaign, his Amorous History of the Gauls for the amusement of a distant lover? In that case, too, it had been a question of a private divertissement, a work intended for a handful of friends, which only by chance wound up in the hands of unscrupulous publishers. But unlike Bussy-Rabutin’s amorous tales of life in the court of the Sun King, there was not a trace of satire to be found in Lauzun’s memoirs, wherein even the loosest of women were described with respect. By the Duc’s era, sexual freedom had become customary among the nobility, both male and female. Stendhal likened Lauzun’s memoirs to the best of the libertine novels,¹⁴ but for the Duc, the nature of libertinism was altogether different: Lauzun, unlike the heroes of Crébillon fils, was no systematic seducer, driven by a blind will to dominate—in him the pursuit of pleasure was always circumscribed by sentiment. Modern readers might liken his memoirs to a bildungsroman rather than a libertine novel—the story of an individual struggling since birth against a future dictated to him by others, striving to choose freely what form to give his own life.

•

On April 13, 1747, it was as though the fairies had gathered around the cradle of Armand-Louis de Gontaut de Biron to shower him with blessings. Aside from having an illustrious name and a grand inheritance, the future Duc de Lauzun would be handsome, daring, generous, and brilliant.¹⁵ First and foremost, however, he was the scion of a singular family.

His father, Charles-Antoine-Armand, Marquis (and later Duc) de Gontaut, had been a courageous soldier until, gravely wounded in 1743 at the Battle of Dettingen, he was obliged to abandon the army. The following year, notwithstanding a cruel nickname—the White Eunuch—with which he was saddled in the wake of his injury, the Marquis married Antoinette-Eustachie Crozat du Châtel, a wealthy heiress, aged sixteen. It was whispered that he had "most probably"¹⁶ delegated to his wife’s lover, and his own best friend, the Duc de Choiseul, the task of making her a mother—but the means were justified by the ends, since what truly mattered to him was securing the continuation of his line. Yet the family’s joy at the birth of an heir was dampened by the sudden demise of the Marquise, carried away in a matter of days by a puerperal fever. The young woman’s final thoughts were not about the child that had cost her her life but rather for the man she loved: Choiseul lacked the means to make a successful career for himself, and so, in order to secure his future, on her deathbed Antoinette-Eustachie extorted from her ten-year-old sister a promise that she would become his wife. The immense inheritance brought to Choiseul by the young Louise-Honorine’s dowry, as well as the support of Gontaut, an intimate friend of Louis XV and the Marquise de Pompadour, would guarantee Choiseul a splendid future: after serving as an ambassador to Rome and to Vienna, he would govern France as de facto prime minister for nearly twenty years.

Having become brothers-in-law, and quite attached to each other, Gontaut and Choiseul decided to share the same house, the elegant Hôtel du Châtel in the rue de Richelieu,¹⁷ where the two men displayed an equal indifference when it came to little Armand-Louis. The only one to take any interest in the orphan was his aunt, the sweet and charitable Mme de Choiseul, who would never know the joys of motherhood herself. However, the predominant passion of the young Duchesse was her unrequited love for her husband, and it induced her to relegate all other ties of affection to second place, and to subject her will in every respect to that of her lord and master. And this would not always prove favorable to the young Armand-Louis.

Choiseul did not limit himself to being an impenitent Don Juan and squandering his spouse’s fortune (destined to pass by inheritance to his nephew) on a princely lifestyle; he also saddled the Duchesse with the presence of his favorite sister, Mme de Gramont. Until she was nearly forty, Béatrix de Choiseul-Stainville had been forced to content herself with the position of canoness at Remiremont Abbey, but as soon as he became minister, Choiseul wanted her by his side. Introduced into the innermost circle surrounding Mme de Pompadour, elevated to the rank of Duchesse thanks to a marriage of convenience, Mme de Gramont wasn’t particularly concerned about disguising the influence she exerted on her brother—with whom she maintained a rapport so symbiotic that it led the malicious to speak of incest. Soon enough relations between the two sisters-in-law erupted into open conflict, one in which it was not the wife but rather the sister who had the upper hand.

Armand-Louis would soon be forced to reckon with this domestic strife, but his earliest household was the royal court. During the period in which Choiseul represented the King of France in Rome and then in Vienna, the Duc de Gontaut brought the boy along with him to Versailles, where he maintained a residence. And Lauzun himself recalls that the earliest years of his childhood were passed, so to speak, in the lap of the King’s lover,¹⁸ who kept him perpetually at her side, teaching him to read aloud to her and to serve as her private secretary. The proximity of Mme de Pompadour, the most seductive of the royal favorites, could not have failed to leave its mark on Lauzun’s erotic imagination. This precocious initiation into the life of the court, under conditions of exceptional privilege, was determinant in anchoring in him the conviction that he was destined for an immense fortune, and to occupy the most splendid position in the kingdom¹⁹ without being obliged to do anything in particular to deserve it. Indeed, when at the age of twelve he was enlisted in the regiment of the Gardes Françaises, the King promised that someday he would become a colonel, like his grandfather and uncle before him. Yet with the passage of time this self-confidence would begin to weaken.

A child of his era, Lauzun was determined above all to be serenely himself, without taking into account the fact that under the French monarchy, favor and merit did not necessarily go hand in hand, and that membership in the ranks of the privileged imposed a set of strictures that were difficult to flout. The first time he was obliged to acknowledge this reality was when, at age fifteen, he deluded himself into thinking he could propose to his youthful paramour, Mlle de Beauvau. But the Duc de Gontaut had other plans for the young man, and following that logic by which marriage was meant to reinforce the prestige of the line, had already made his choice on Lauzun’s behalf: Amélie de Boufflers belonged to an illustrious family, possessed a huge dowry, and was the pedagogical masterpiece of her grandmother, the celebrated Maréchale de Luxembourg, who, having put her libertine youth behind her, had won general acclaim as the supreme arbiter of aristocratic decorum. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had known Mlle de Boufflers as an adolescent, has left us a spellbound description of her: There was nothing more amiable and more interesting than her face, nothing more tender and chaste than the sentiments that she inspired.²⁰

Even though the Duc de Gontaut was, by Lauzun’s own admission, a perfectly honest man, with a compassionate and charitable soul,²¹ he remained unmoved by his son’s entreaties, and limited himself to allowing the boy two years of freedom in advance of the arranged marriage. So that when, on February 4, 1766, filled with rage at the obligation forced upon him, Armand-Louis led the not yet fifteen-year-old Amélie de Boufflers to the altar,²² he made it a point of pride not to nurture any sentimental expectations with regard to his wife. This didn’t prevent him from initially granting her those attentions demanded by the circumstances—attentions that his young spouse received, whether from timidity or inexperience or pride, with a coldness that drove him to observe, going forward, relations characterized above all by a polite indifference.²³ The enchanting Mme de Lauzun would be, as it turned out, the sole woman destined not to exercise on him even the least attraction.

At the time of his marriage, Lauzun was seventeen years old and his education sentimentale had been completed, as was customary, by a skilled professional who had spent some fifteen days (as she had with numerous other young men at court) leading him through a series of "délicieuses leçons."²⁴ Indeed, the pupil showed himself so talented that his instructor refused compensation for her labors. Once he had acquired fluency in the conduct appropriate to the bedroom, Armand-Louis hastened to test its efficacy on the women of high society. But notwithstanding the varied succession of experiences that followed—with married women and girls of marriageable age, with aristocrats and bourgeois women of sundry nationalities, all ready to risk their reputations for his sake—he never forgot his first erotic education, and continued to frequent the filles of the gambling dens and bordellos. And it would be one of these who clung to him during the final, tragic months preceding his death, remaining by his side almost to the foot of the guillotine.

•

But what truly marked Lauzun’s entry into adulthood—revealing at a blow the violence that lurked behind the elegance of worldly conventions, the hypocrisy of social comportment, the cruelty of the institution of marriage, and above all the dark side of his own family—was the story of his first true love.

In 1761, having been made the minister of war and determined to forge for himself a clan equal to the height of his ambitions, the Duc de Choiseul summoned to Paris, in addition to his sister the Duchesse de Gramont, his brother, the Comte de Stainville, an impecunious soldier in the service of the Duc de Lorraine, securing him a prestigious post in the French army and arranging a brilliant marriage for him. His intended, Mlle de Clermont-Reynel, was exceptionally beautiful, a mere fifteen years old, and enormously wealthy, while Stainville had reached the age of forty and was by no means a pleasant character. Lauzun saw Mlle de Clermont-Reynel for the first time on the day of her wedding and immediately fell passionately in love.²⁵ He was still a boy of fourteen, and even if his naive adoration momentarily touched the young Comtesse, he was forced to resign himself to being treated like a handsome little cherub, and to turning his curiosity about the fair sex elsewhere.

The first member of the family circle to realize that Lauzun had become a terrifically attractive young man was Mme de Gramont, who did not hesitate to let him know it. Herself less than beautiful, with a masculine voice, the Duchesse was daring, arrogant, unscrupulous—a ferocious Amazon²⁶—but also extremely intelligent and the most congenial company.²⁷ With youthful ingratitude, Armand-Louis made no secret of taking her side in the conflict with Mme de Choiseul and prided himself on his conquest of the Duchesse de Gramont, who had the whole court at her feet.²⁸ It was the most glorious of worldly debuts.²⁹

But Mme de Gramont’s intentions did not escape her sister-in-law, who, having overcome the shock of finding herself tied for life to a brutal and revolting husband, was making the best of the situation by adopting the ways of high society and taking a fashionable lover. And since nothing was more fashionable than a lover stolen from a highly visible lady, the young Comtesse looked with new eyes at her little admirer of two years earlier and decided to snatch him away from her sister-in-law. After all, there was no love lost between the two women: the Duchesse, jealous of the beauty and success of Mme de Stainville and worried that she might gain influence over the Duc de Choiseul, kept her at a distance; and for her part, the Comtesse was afraid of her, but not to the point of renouncing the temptation of spiting her.

Called on to choose between the two sisters-in-law, Armand-Louis listened to his heart and sacrificed Mme de Gramont.³⁰ Thrilled by her victory, the young Stainville was quick to respond to the sentiment she had inspired. Both were little more than adolescents—beautiful, famished for life, impatient with the responsibilities that had been imposed upon them—and too utterly in love with each other to realize how obvious their affair was to others.³¹ Naturally none of this escaped the perceptive Duchesse de Gramont, who took care not to reveal her disappointment, while at the same time giving Lauzun the cold shoulder and leveling at her sister-in-law an implacable hate.³² But the Comte de Stainville could not conceal his own jealousy, and ordered his wife not to fraternize with Lauzun, forcing the two lovers to resort to all the canonical expedients of infidelity (the complicity of servants, a secret loge at the theater, fantastic nocturnal rendezvous) in order to continue their relations.

In the meantime, the Duc de Choiseul had taken a fancy to Mme de Stainville as well—and, being aware of her extramarital affairs, felt confident of obtaining a hearing for himself. After all, he was the one who had engineered her marriage, and he was also the head of the family. Alarmed at the Duc’s overtures, and determined to resist him to the bitter end, the Comtesse wanted Lauzun to witness her refusal: like a character in a farce, Armand-Louis eavesdropped on the encounter between the two while concealed in an armoire in Mme de Stainville’s chamber. Faced with the failure of his advances, Choiseul quickly moved on to threats, demanding that Mme de Stainville quit playing at virtue, and warning her that he would no longer stand for her games; otherwise, she and her young lover would regret it. Don’t transform a man who loves you to the point of madness, he concluded, into an implacable enemy . . . for whom nothing would be easier than destroying a rival unworthy of you.³³

His tone was too outrageous, and Mme de Stainville too indignant, to sustain the sort of self-control the situation called for. In any case prudence was not her strong suit and, exhilarated by the thought of addressing her lover by proxy, she did not bother to deny the charge, claiming the right to be the mistress of her own emotions. You are certainly powerful, monsieur, I’m not ignorant of that; but I do not, and cannot, love you. M. de Biron is my lover, I admit, since you force me to it; he is dearer to me than anything; and neither your tyrannical power, nor any ill you can do us, will make us renounce each other.³⁴

Choiseul retreated, commanding his sister-in-law not to breathe a word of their conversation, but the tale was too beautiful to remain a secret, and the Duc, apprised that Lauzun had overheard it all, was in a rage which, though he dissembled it, had terrible repercussions.³⁵

In his memoirs, Lauzun reports the scene to us while passing over in silence the emotions it must have roused in him. He could not have been ignorant of the fact that Choiseul had been his mother’s lover, and Lauzun had good reason to suppose that he himself was the fruit of their liaison. But his case was far from unusual among the aristocracy: at least two of Armand-Louis’s friends—the Comte de Narbonne, nicknamed Demi-Louis for his notable resemblance to the image of Louis XV engraved on the eponymous coin, and the Vicomte Joseph-Alexandre de Ségur, who bore an indecent³⁶ resemblance to Baron de Besenval—were not the sons of the men whose names they bore. But in contrast with Joseph-Alexandre, who joked with pleasure about the fact that the Maréchal de Ségur wasn’t his father,³⁷ Lauzun (like Narbonne) treated the subject with the greatest reserve.

Whether natural father or close kin, the image of Choiseul that we find in Armand-Louis’s narrative is a dark one. In these pages the consummate minister, the great seducer with all of high society at his beck, the very incarnation of the French aristocracy’s art of living, drops his mask to reveal the hideous face of a hypocritical libertine³⁸ determined to flout every rule and work his will by force as well as guile. Here we find the very archetype of the castrating father—a paterfamilias ready to engage in incest with his sister, seduce the wife of his son, and violently rid himself of a son-nephew, so as to replace him in the bed of the woman he loved.

Soon enough, his threats gave way to action. Lauzun narrowly escaped a nocturnal ambush, but Mme de Stainville was so shaken by the incident that she broke off a relationship that had seemed to have become impossible. Still, she was by no means subdued by the experience. She threw herself back into social life and pursued fresh romances, reassured by the indulgence shown by her husband, who seemed mollified by having obtained satisfaction in the case of Lauzun. But she made an irreparable mistake. She completely lost her head for Clairval, a successful actor, and was incapable of hiding her passion. To take a domestic servant or an actor as a lover was to violate the last sexual taboo still imposed by the morality of the era on women. Lauzun, who had remained quite close to her, tried in vain to divert her from so unreasonable an inclination,³⁹ and spoke to Clairval himself, painting for him all of the risks you run, and all those that threaten Mme de Stainville.⁴⁰ The sole precaution that the young woman took was to entrust Lauzun with the letters she’d received from the actor.

For the Duc de Choiseul and Mme de Gramont, it was the chance they’d dreamed of to put their sister-in-law at their mercy. One night, alerted by a servant, Lauzun surprised a man attempting to force the lock of his desk. But taking advantage of the darkness, the thief fled by means of the passage connecting Lauzun’s residence with Choiseul’s mansion, pulling the doors shut behind him one after another, until at last he slammed that of the apartment of the Duc de Gontaut. Only then did Armand-Louis—who had pursued the fugitive with pistol in hand—realize how close he had come to killing his own father.

In the end, it was the clumsy attempt of Clairval to protect Mme de Stainville from the slander that led to her downfall. Frightened by the turn events had taken, the actor attempted to cover his tracks by wooing one of his young colleagues in the opera, Mlle Beaumesnil.⁴¹ Like most actresses, she led a rather free life and, as a professional courtesan, enjoyed the generosity of a rich lover. But by a thoroughly unfortunate coincidence, that lover was none other than M. de Stainville, who, duly notified of the fact by the Duchesse de Gramont, could not bear the affront of finding himself in competition with Clairval for a second time. Though it had been a while since he had lavished any attention on his wife, he could not tolerate being deceived by her young protégé. And since he could boast no direct authority over the latter, he decided to revenge himself on Clairval by means of the power he still held over his wife.

He seized the opportunity of a grand Chinese costume ball given by the Maréchal de Mirepoix at the Hôtel de Brancas in January 1767. As Mme du Deffand later reported to Walpole, the guilty and unfortunate Mme de Stainville was along with the Prince d’Hénin⁴² among the most accomplished dancers and always took part in the rehearsals, but two nights before the ball all those present noticed that she was unable to conceal her tears. That same evening her husband, supplied with an order signed by the King, which he had obtained thanks to the intercession of the Duc de Choiseul, forced her into a coach and had the cruelty⁴³ of accompanying her in person to Nancy in order to confine her to a convent without a penny, forbidding her to communicate even with her two daughters. If she’d only taken a man of her own rank, Choiseul commented, I would have been ready to lend them my own room.⁴⁴

Perfectly legitimate from a legal point of view, the Comte’s action contravened aristocratic decorum in a spectacular fashion, and revealed just how precarious a woman’s position, balancing between law and custom, really was. In the face of general indignation, Mlle Beaumesnil broke off all contact with the Comte, fearing that it would be suspected that she herself had played some part in such an iniquity.⁴⁵

Nobody could have been more touched than Lauzun by the plight of this woman whom he now loved like a sister,⁴⁶ and for whose sake he had clashed with his family. But the sorrow now stamped on the features of the young Duc drew the attention of Lady Sarah Bunbury, and formed the point of departure for another great love affair.

Deaf to the jealousy of his mistress of the moment (the imperious Mme de Cambis), Armand-Louis had been courting Lady Sarah since her arrival in the French capitol, accompanied by her husband, Sir Charles Bunbury, in December 1766. This was the young woman’s second sojourn in Paris, and to Armand-Louis she seemed the incarnation of English charm. In an era of rampant Anglomania, attempting to win her heart was the sort of challenge that a fashionable young libertine like Lauzun simply had to pursue. He was twenty years old, and she was twenty-two.

•

Since 1763, when France and England had signed the treaty that put an end to the Seven Years’ War, a continuous flood of visitors had crossed the English Channel in both directions. In Paris in 1762, Horace Walpole had borne witness to this reciprocal fascination: Our passion for everything French is nothing to theirs for everything English.⁴⁷ Some thirty years earlier Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques had celebrated that nation’s respect for individual liberty and its form of government, and now the French elite made pilgrimages to London to observe at close range a parliamentary monarchy that many considered a possible model for the future of France. And while the novels of Samuel Richardson, adapted in French by the Abbé Prévost, revealed the charms of a puritan and bourgeois sentimentalism that would find a formidable echo in La Nouvelle Héloïse, English horses, carriages, dogs, and fabrics conquered the French market as tokens of a simpler and more spontaneous way of life.

Baron Friedrich Melchior de Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, addressed to the crowned heads of northern Europe, took note of this phenomenon, not without irony: "Nothing, it seems to me, is more amusing than that peculiar and ridiculous trade established for some time now between France and England. . . . Today we have as many specimens of English postilions as they do of our poor Huguenots; we have the same taste for their horses, their punch, and their philosophers, as they do for our wines, our liqueurs, and our filles de théâtre. . . . In sum, it seems that we have taken up the task of mutually copying each other, so as to eliminate the least trace of our ancient enmity. If the cost to the two kingdoms was no more than a bit of absurdity, it would be a fine price to pay for eternal peace."⁴⁸

But what fascinated the English above all was the way that etiquette dominated French private life, and the natural skill with which the nobility negotiated hierarchies of rank and privilege. It was a lively and sophisticated theatrical performance in a setting rich with silks, gold, and mirrors, one in which both sexes participated, which demanded self-discipline, consummate theatrical skill, limberness, familiarity with customs, playfulness, wit—in other words, that whole ensemble of typically French attributes that Lord Chesterfield had dubbed the Graces.⁴⁹ And if this way of being in the world entailed certain sacrifices, the result of that collective effort seemed fully to justify them: never had the art of sociability attained to such perfection, and the pleasure it conferred was so intense that it moved Mme de Staël to remark that, in Paris, one could even dispense with being happy.⁵⁰

Rivals in hospitality and courtesy, the two nations were now prepared to explore each other—and they were aided by the fact that, even if English was little used on the other side of the Channel, French had long since been compulsory as the international language of elites.

A fluent speaker of French, capable of quoting Mme de Sévigné and La Rochefoucauld from memory, Lady Sarah possessed all the qualities needed to open the doors of the most prestigious Parisian hôtels particuliers. She belonged to one of English high society’s most distinguished families: her grandfather, Charles Lennox, First Duke of Richmond, had been an illegitimate son of Charles II and Louise de Kéroualle, a spy in the service of Louis XIV. Though her parents had died before she was five years old, her two elder sisters, who took great care of her, were the wives of very influential men. Caroline had married Henry Fox, the First Baron Holland; and Emily had married the Duke of Leinster, a senior peer of Ireland. What’s more, upon her arrival in Paris, Emily could count on the numerous acquaintances she had made two years earlier during her first sojourn in the company of Holland, beginning with the Prince de Conti and his mistress, the Comtesse de Boufflers. But above all it was the unfortunate affection that she had inspired, while still quite young, in the Prince of Wales—soon to become King George III—that stirred general curiosity about her in France. And in the letters from Mme du Deffand to her close friends in England, describing the social exploits of their young compatriot, we find an echo of the welcome that Paris had in store for her.

No question, Mme du Deffand’s initial assessment is glowing: Your Milady Sarah has had a prodigious success; all of our lovely young men have had their heads turned,⁵¹ she wrote to her friend Crawford. Still, that didn’t prevent her from expressing, in strictly confidential letters addressed to her constant correspondent, Walpole, a number of reservations regarding the reasons for such infatuation—reservations which make clear that, in spite of the elderly Marquise’s professed Anglophilia (a mark of respect to the lord of Strawberry Hill), the standards of the "parfaitement bonne compagnie" in Paris did not altogether coincide with those of London’s high society.

Having received the Bunburys at home on numerous occasions, Mme du Deffand had had the opportunity to submit the two of them to attentive examination. Her blindness did not allow her to judge Sarah’s much-vaunted beauty—No Magdalen by Correggio is so charming and expressive,⁵² Walpole had declared—but, in the French capital, no one thought her particularly pretty. For her part, hadn’t Sarah herself said that Paris had very few beautiful women, and that those considered so in England would have been described there, at best, as graceful?⁵³ Mme du Deffand found the young lady amicable, sweet, vivacious, and courteous, but clarified that, by French standards, she indubitably behaved like a coquette.⁵⁴

What especially worried the Marquise was the attitude of that poor Sir Charles when it came to his spouse. Was it affection or naivety that led him to allow the presence at Lady Sarah’s side of suitors as assiduous as they were troublesome, like Lord Carlisle—who had followed her from London—and Lauzun? It was only shortly before the couple’s departure that the old woman discovered the answer: "I’ll be very much surprised if this Sir Charles takes after M. de Stainville, even if Milady should take up with the whole Opéra-Comique."⁵⁵ A month had been long enough for the unfortunate Mme de Stainville to cease to inspire any pity in her, but with her characteristic psychological acuity, Mme du Deffand had divined the grounds of the drama that would soon put an end to the Bunburys’ marriage.

It was Sarah Lennox who had chosen Sir Charles as a husband, after the prospect of marriage to the Prince of Wales had dissolved for political reasons. And yet the young Lennox certainly could have aimed for a much more prestigious match. Unlike her, Bunbury did not belong to the highest ranks of the nobility, nor did he possess a great fortune—but he was handsome, cultivated, elegant, courteous, and, above all, she was in love with him. As was customary among the English nobility, Sarah adored domestic privacy, the countryside, horses—those belonging to Sir Charles were famous—and dogs, and her ambitions were limited to being a good wife, provided that she knew her husband returned her love. But Bunbury, by temperament phlegmatic and sexually indifferent, was unable to measure up to her sentimental expectations and, after two years of vain attempts, Sarah had to acknowledge the failure of her marriage. As fate would have it, this was the moment her path crossed Lauzun’s.

It was less the Duc’s insistent flirtation with her than the sorrow bred in him by the drama with Mme de Stainville that stirred Sarah’s affection. The tale he told her about that disastrous affair⁵⁶ so affected her that she was moved to arrange a rendezvous with him the very same day, on the occasion of a supper given by Mme du Deffand. It was probably January 25,⁵⁷ and, in the course of the evening, Lady Sarah slipped a note into Lauzun’s hand that said: I love you.⁵⁸

Yet this declaration of love left no room for hopes of future happiness. As Lady Sarah informed Lauzun the following day, she couldn’t possibly imagine deceiving her husband—in their country, adultery was beyond the pale. A lover, she explained to him, is in the common run of things barely an event in the life of a Frenchwoman; for an Englishwoman, it is greater than anything; from that moment on everything changes for her, and the loss of her existence and her peace is generally the issue of a sentiment which, in France, has only pleasant and harmless results. . . . Since we are free to choose our husbands for ourselves, we’re not allowed to dislike them, and the crime of betraying them is never forgiven.⁵⁹ If, some twenty-five years later, Mme de Staël would learn to her own cost the exactitude of that analysis, Lauzun now found the perfect phrase with which to persist: I want you to be happy, he responded, but no power on earth could prevent me from adoring you.⁶⁰ His tenacity would be rewarded, but would ultimately render his humiliation the more profound.

Written on February 6, from Calais, when Sarah was on the point of returning to England, the letter that figures in Lauzun’s memoirs clearly shows her increasing involvement: You have entirely changed my heart, my friend; it is sad and broken; and though you cause me so much pain, I can think of nothing but my love.⁶¹ Fifteen days later Lauzun arrived in London, and, from there, followed the Bunburys to their country house in Suffolk, where he spent what remained for him the happiest [time] of [his] life.⁶² It was during the course of this long, amorous tête-à-tête—the imperturbable Sir Charles quickly made himself scarce—that Sarah gave herself to him, assuming complete responsibility for her act. Its full significance would become clear to Lauzun the following day, when Sarah proposed that he start a new life with her in Jamaica, giving him a week to think it over. Lauzun didn’t have the courage to accept, and Sarah decided that the affair was over. In failing to consider her necessary for his happiness, he had destroyed the sentiment that bound her to him,⁶³ and she had ceased to love him. Lauzun’s despair—he wept, fainted, spat blood—was futile. Far stronger than he, Sarah was prepared to face the future, regardless of her new situation. [My] morals are not spoilt by the French, she wrote seven months later from Barton to her best friend: they are so totally different from my caracter & from what I was brought up to think right, that it would be having a very mean oppinion of me indeed if you thought 3 months [among them] could undo all that nature & custom had taught me.⁶⁴ These weren’t just empty phrases. Sarah was destined to lead the life of a romantic heroine, and she lost no time in proving she possessed all the moral qualities—courage, sincerity, consistency—necessary. A year later, unable to imagine a life without love, Lady Bunbury took up with a penniless cousin and, after having given birth to a little girl and declined Sir Charles’s offer to keep up appearances, ran away with her lover. Their flight was of short duration but the scandal was enormous, and Sarah, who had requested a divorce, spent the next twelve years alone with her daughter, completely isolated at Goodwood House, the country estate of her brother, the Duke of Richmond. Then, at age thirty-six, still dazzlingly beautiful, she finally found that emotional fulfillment she had always sought by marrying Colonel George Napier, a charming and courageous soldier, and bringing no less than eight of his children into the world. Thereafter, even in puritanical England, there were many who would testify to their admiration of her.

•

For Lauzun, the return to France was bitter: he had met an extraordinary woman, and her loss was nobody’s fault but his own. His old life struck him as charmless: its whole character has altered.⁶⁵

It took the prospect of leaving to fight in Corsica to restore his joie de vivre. In May 1768, Genoa had yielded the island to France, and Choiseul, the architect of the agreement, had decided to quell the separatists, led by Pascal Paoli, with a by-the-books military intervention. The Duc joined the expedition as aide-de-camp to its commander, the Marquis de Chauvelin. It was Lauzun’s first opportunity to see combat after seven years of service in the Gardes Françaises. For three centuries, his ancestors had been honored on the battlefield, and now his own moment had arrived. At first blush, an irregular army of separatists might not have seemed such a glorious foe, but in fact the Corsican conflict would prove to be as tough as it was perilous and, moreover, highly instructive. Lauzun’s first experience in the field taught him that no adversary should be underestimated. The will to fight, combined with knowledge of the terrain, could hold in check trained troops equipped with better arms. It was a lesson he would recall years later when he faced the uprising in the Vendée.⁶⁶ The campaign also provided him his first acquaintance with Mirabeau—the beginning of a friendship that would ultimately prove fatal.⁶⁷

Without by any means moderating his erotic exploits—he promptly seduced the wife of the Intendant of Corsica, Mme Chardon, who took it into her head to follow him on horseback as he went into battle—Lauzun was able to win the affection of his soldiers and the respect of his superiors, as much by his brashness as by his ingenuity, his sense of duty, and the tactical intelligence that he deployed in the course of the war. It was with a sincere regret that he left the island and its boulders in order to bring news of a definitive victory over the insurgents to the King. In Corsica he had experienced a successful year, one which had gone some way toward reconciling him with himself.

•

Lauzun arrived at Versailles on June 24, 1769, then joined Louis XV at his hunting lodge, Saint-Hubert; he was immediately admitted in to the presence of the sovereign, who was in consultation with Choiseul. The King received him with every graciousness, awarded him the Croix de Saint-Louis, and invited him to stay. Choiseul, too, wished to patch things up with [him] and greeted him with such good grace that the young Duc was quite sensible of it.⁶⁸ In short, everything seemed to invite optimism. Louis XV confirmed the favor that he had already shown and Lauzun enthusiastically returned to service with the Gardes Françaises, more confident than ever in his vocation as a soldier. Parisian life had regained its attractiveness for him; what’s more, Amélie de Boufflers, his wife, did not appear chagrined by his indifference. Confined to a simple respect for form, their conjugal life left him completely at liberty, and he immediately put this freedom to use, enriching his palette of experiences both in the realm of the friendship—the Vicomtesse de Laval, the Comtesse de Dillon, and the Princesse de Guéménée would come to be his particularly tender confidants—and in that of classical libertinism. But his chosen family, and his most stable emotional touchstones, were his two longtime friends, the Duc de Chartres (born the same year as he) and the Prince de Guéménée. Soon enough, the Marquis Marc-René de Voyer would be added to their number.

But Lauzun realized that harder times were on the way. Two months before his return from Corsica, on April 22, 1769, the Comtesse du Barry had been presented at court as the King’s favorite, assuming a role left vacant by the death of Mme de Pompadour. Shedding the last of his scruples as his virility waned, the King considered this twenty-five-year-old beauty indispensable to his well-being, and wanted her by his side in spite of her notorious past as a courtesan. The scandal was immense and, urged on by Mme de Choiseul and the Princesse de Beauvau who had made it a point of honor, the Duc de Choiseul openly took sides against the favorite. Drawn into the conflict despite his best efforts, even the Duc de Gontaut, who had always had a talent for staying on good terms with the mistresses of Louis the Well-Beloved, saw the doors of the petits appartements closed to him. Lauzun had made the acquaintance of the newly minted Comtesse du Barry back when l’Ange, as she’d been known, had still exercised her old métier—and even though he had maintained more or less friendly relations with her since then, he was forced by decorum to forbid his wife from associating with her. After that slight, Louis XV refused to address another word to him. It was the end of Lauzun’s period of royal favor, upon which his military career depended, and the beginning of a struggle for influence between those on the side of the favorite, led by the Duc d’Aiguillon, and those following the Duc de Choiseul—a struggle that ended with the defeat of the latter.

Did the overconfident Choiseul believe that Louis XV, incapable of doing without his extended ministerial experience, would sacrifice the Comtesse du Barry for his sake? And the King, for his part—was he unable to support the challenge to his authority? Lauzun was too discerning not to realize that the clash between the sovereign and his minister had deeper sources and major implications for the political future of France. Contemporary historians tend to point back to the disastrous outcome of the Seven Years’ War (which had cost France its first colonial empire) as the beginning of the downward spiral that would eventually take hold of the state’s finances and trigger a crisis of confidence on the part of the French in their system of government, becoming one of the precipitating causes of the Revolution.⁶⁹ The first to take full cognizance of the seriousness of the defeat was Louis XV himself, who was determined not to run the risk of a new war: his policies abroad were aimed at maintaining peace in Europe, and on the domestic front at reinforcing royal authority, stabilizing the state’s deficit, and boosting the economy. Yet Choiseul’s plans were utterly opposed to those of his sovereign: his foreign policy planned for France’s military revenge—not only the reconquest of colonial power but preeminence over Europe as well, which meant the inevitable reprise of a war with England. It was for this reason that the Duc pursued an ambitious program of reorganization of the army and reinforcement of the navy, which cut deeply into the royal treasury. In reality, he was little concerned with economic problems, and his domestic policy was secretly in service to a project of modernization of the monarchical system, modeled on the one in place on the other side of the Channel. Far