The Ardent Rake

For the court of Louis XIV, the king's last years were gloomy—he was old, and had become both insufferably religious and personally unpleasant. The court was bored and desperate for novelty. So in 1710, the arrival of a fifteen-year-old lad who was both devilishly handsome and charming had a particularly strong effect on the ladies. His name was Fronsac, the future Duke de Richelieu (his granduncle being the infamous Cardinal Richelieu). He was impudent and witty.

The ladies would play with him like a toy, but he would kiss them on the lips in return, his hands wandering far for an inexperienced boy. When those hands strayed up the skirts of a duchess who was not so indulgent, the king was furious, and sent the youth to the Bastille to teach him a lesson. But the ladies who had found him so amusing could not endure his absence.

Compared to the stiffs in court, here was someone incredibly bold, his eyes boring into you, his hands quicker than was safe. Nothing could stop him, his novelty was irresistible. The court ladies pleaded and his stay in the Bastille was cut short.

Several years later, the young Mademoiselle de Valois was walking in a Paris park with her chaperone, an older woman who never left her side. De Valois's father, the Duke d'Orléans, was determined to protect her, his youngest daughter, from all the court seducers until she could be married off, so he had attached to her this chaperone, a woman of impeccable virtue and sourness.

In the park, however, de Valois saw a young man who gave her a look that set her heart on fire. He walked on by, but the look was intense and clear. It was her chaperone who told her his name: the now in- famous Duke de Richelieu, blasphemer, seducer, heartbreaker. Someone to avoid at all cost.

A few days later, the chaperone took de Valois to a different park, and lo and behold, Richelieu crossed their path again. This time he was in dis- guise, dressed as a beggar, but the look in his eye was unforgettable. Made- moiselle de Valois returned his gaze: at last something exciting in her drab life. Given her father's sternness, no man had dared approach her. And now this notorious courtier was pursuing her, instead of all the other ladies at court—what a thrill! Soon he was smuggling beautifully written notes to her expressing his uncontrollable desire for her.

She responded timidly, but soon the notes were all she was living for. In one of them he promised to arrange everything if she would spend the night with him; imagining it was impossible to bring such a thing to pass, she did not mind playing along and agreeing to his bold proposal.

Mademoiselle de Valois had a chambermaid named Angelique, who dressed her for bed and slept in an adjoining room. One night as the chap- erone was knitting, de Valois looked up from the book she was reading to see Angelique carrying her mistress's nightclothes to her room, but for some strange reason Angelique looked back at her and smiled—it was Richelieu, expertly dressed as the maid! De Valois nearly gasped from fright, but caught herself, realizing the danger she was in: if she said anything her family would find out about the notes, and about her part in the whole affair.

What could she do? She decided to go to her room and talk the young duke out of his ridiculously dangerous maneuver. She said good night to her chaperone, but once she was in her bedroom, the words she had planned were useless.

When she tried to reason with Richelieu, he responded with that look in his eye, and then with his arms around her. She could not yell, but now she was unsure what to do. His impetuous words, his caresses, the danger of it all—her head was whirling, she was lost. What was virtue and her prior boredom compared to an evening with the court's most notorious rake? So while the chaperone knitted away, the duke initiated her into the rituals of libertinage.

Months later, de Valois's father had reason to suspect that Richelieu had broken through his lines of defense. The chaperone was fired, the precau- tions were doubled. D'Orléans did not realize that to Richelieu such mea- sures were a challenge, and he lived for challenges.

He bought the house next door under an assumed name and secretly tunneled a trapdoor through the wall adjoining the duke's kitchen cupboard. In this cupboard, over the next few months—until the novelty wore off—de Valois and Richelieu en- joyed endless trysts.

Everyone in Paris knew of Richelieu's exploits, for he made it a point to publicize them as loudly as possible. Every week a new story would cir- culate through the court. A husband had locked his wife in an upstairs room at night, worried the duke was after her; to reach her the duke had crawled in darkness along a thin wooden plank suspended between two upper-floor windows.

Two women who lived in the same house, one a widow, the other married and quite religious, had discovered to their mutual horror that the duke was having an affair with both of them at the same time, leaving one in the middle of the night to be with the other. When they confronted him, the duke, always on the prowl for something novel, and a devilish talker, had neither apologized nor backed down, but proceeded to talk them into a menage a trois, playing on the wounded vanity of each woman, who could not stand the thought of him preferring the other.

Year after year, the stories of his remarkable seductions spread. One woman admired his audacity and bravery, another his gallantry in thwarting a husband. Women competed for his attention: if he did not want to seduce you, there had to be something wrong with you. To be the target of his attentions became a great fantasy.

At one point two ladies fought a pistol duel over the duke, and one of them was seriously wounded. The Duchess d'Orléans, Richelieu's most bitter enemy, once wrote, "If I believed in sorcery I should think that the Duke possessed some supernatural secret, for I have never known a woman to oppose the very least resistance to him."