III. 1764–1779. MANTUA-MAKER’S APPRENTICE.—PENSIONER UNDER THE CROWN.—BOARDER IN A CONVENT.

The Boulainvilliers’ lacquey, satisfied with the inquiries he had made, directed the children to take leave of those kind neighbours who had so constantly befriended them, and afterwards to come on to Passy, where they were to inquire for the château, which stood, by-the-way, on the precise spot where the pleasant “Hameau de Boulainvilliers” now stands. But few preparations being necessary for their departure, they were soon on their road, and reached the château in the course of the afternoon. Their arrival being announced, they were conducted “into a grand hall, in the centre of which rose a magnificent staircase richly ornamented with gold, where a large company of ladies and gentlemen were waiting to view them.”⁠[3] The marchioness descending to the middle of the staircase, asked young Jeanne whether she remembered her again, an inquiry which it is almost needless to say the child promptly answered in the affirmative.

The company having gratified their curiosity at a distance, for no one dared venture into too close proximity with these wretched outcasts, covered as they were with rags and dirt, the marchioness gave orders for them to be cleansed, and for other clothes to be supplied them. A good scrubbing having brought to light indications of various diseases, the usual concomitants of poverty, steps were taken for their speedy eradication; and in the course of a few weeks, thanks to the attention the children received, and to the generous food provided them, all traces of their former wretched condition were effaced.

The marchioness’s next care was the education of the young orphans, and Jeanne and her sister were sent to a boarding-school in the neighbourhood, where they made rapid progress. In less than two years, however, the youngest girl died of the small-pox, at that time a disease not only very prevalent, but commonly fatal. Jeanne remained at school for several years longer; but during the latter period of her stay, her governess, she tells us, unknown to the marchioness (whom the young Saint-Remi saw but rarely), compelled her to perform the common offices of a domestic servant. “This employment,” she observes, “against which it was useless to remonstrate, was but ill adapted to those elevated notions which reflections on my birth had inspired me with. Was it not,” she asks, “painful to feel that, descended as I was from the first family in France, I was yet reduced to be a servant to people of the very lowest rank, nay, even to servants themselves?”⁠[4]⁠

At length, at her own request, Jeanne was removed from school, but the marquis, who was half a Jew—his mother being a daughter of Samuel Bernard, the rich Hebrew banker, whom even the “Grand Monarque” would condescend to take by the arm when he was hard up and wanted to coax a loan out of him, and whom the court ladies used to cheat at the queen’s card-table—objected to her continuing a pensioner on the Boulainvilliers’ establishment. With the view therefore of placing her in a position to provide for herself, Jeanne was articled to a Parisian mantua-maker for a term of three years. Ill-health, however, compelled her to leave before completing the engagement, and she filled one situation after another, subject to constant attacks of illness, until at length a change in the fortunes of the family made it no longer necessary for her to labour for her daily bread.

The young Jacques de Saint-Remi had received his education under the care of M. Leclerc, the husband of his sister Jeanne’s governess, and on its completion had been sent to sea. About this time he returned home from his first voyage, and the marchioness, having got together various documents in support of the claim of the family to the honours of the house of Valois, consulted with the Marquis de Chabert (the admiral under whom the young Saint-Remi had recently served, and who had interested himself a good deal in the young sailor’s history) as to the best course to be adopted to get this claim recognised at court. The marquis at once caused a genealogical tree of the family to be drawn up, which he transmitted with the necessary confirmatory documents to his cousin, M. d’Hozier de Sérigny, grand genealogist and judge-at-arms of the nobility of France, that the same might receive the sanction of his authority.⁠[5]⁠

When this was returned to M. de Chabert, accompanied by a certificate of M. d’Hozier’s attesting its accuracy, the marquis forwarded the various documents to the proper quarter, and in due course obtained the appointment of a day for the reception of young Saint-Remi by Louis XVI., who had only recently ascended the throne. The youth was introduced to the king as the Baron de Valois by the Marquis de Boulainvilliers, the Marquis de Chabert, the Count de Maurepas, and M. Necker. The king was pleased to recognise the title which the friends of the young Jacques de Saint-Remi had persuaded him to assume, but desirous, it was believed, that this should become extinct in the person of its present possessor, recommended the newly-acknowledged Baron de Valois to devote himself to the service of the church.⁠[6] Jacques respectfully ventured to suggest that his predilections were in favour of the army or the navy. The king thanked the young Saint-Remi for his inclination to serve him, but recommended him again, still more strongly, to dedicate his days to the service of his Maker. “Sire,” replied the young man, with a sprinkling of blasphemy which only a Frenchman would have ventured on, “I am serving God when I am serving my king.”⁠[7]⁠

The members of the Saint-Remi family had now their several titles awarded them. Jacques, as we have already seen, was henceforth to be styled Baron de Valois; his sister Jeanne was to be known as Mademoiselle de Valois; and Marianne, the poor child who had been left exposed outside Farmer Durand’s window-sill, and who was now sent for to Paris, was for the future to be called Mademoiselle de Saint-Remi. But as “fine words butter no parsneps,” so empty honours will not suffice to keep the pot boiling. It was therefore imperative that the necessary steps should be taken to procure some sort of provision for these destitute off-shoots of the blood-royal of France. It is true the national finances were in a most lamentable condition, still everybody agreed that something must be done, which something finally resolved itself into a pension to each member of the family of Valois of eight hundred livres (francs) equivalent to thirty-two pounds sterling per annum, commencing from December, 1775. In addition to this, through the intervention of M. Necker, the young Baron de Valois had a commission in the navy given him, with a grant of four thousand livres for his outfit, and shortly afterwards received orders to join his ship at Brest.

We have already mentioned that Jeanne, or, as we must now style her, Mademoiselle de Valois, during the period she was toiling as a mantua-maker’s apprentice, was subject to frequent attacks of illness. On these occasions it seems an apartment was set apart for her at the Hôtel de Boulainvilliers⁠[8] where every care was bestowed upon her until she was completely restored to health. During the period of her convalescence she was constantly persecuted by the marquis with attentions the object of which it was impossible to mistake. These advances, moreover, were subsequently renewed on every occasion that presented itself; in fact, whenever mademoiselle found herself under the Boulainvilliers’ roof; and if we can credit her own statement, more than one daring assault was made by the old reprobate upon her virtue. To rid herself of the marquis’s importunities she was forced, she tells us, to complain to his wife, who decided upon taking the necessary steps to remove mademoiselle beyond the sphere of her husband’s dangerous influence. She and her sister Marianne were accordingly sent as boarders to the Abbey of Yères, in the neighbourhood of Montgeron, some dozen miles or so from Paris, on the road to Lyons. Here she asserts that for a time she contemplated taking the veil, a resolution, however, which, if ever seriously entertained, was very soon abandoned.

About this time the Marquis de Boulainvilliers was detected defrauding the excise by means of an extensive secret distillery which he carried on in some vaults beneath his Paris hôtel. The discovery of this fraud caused, as might be supposed, considerable sensation among the haute noblesse, and neither the marquis nor the marchioness dared show themselves at court, and hardly even in the vicinity of the capital. They decided, therefore, to retire for a time to their château at Montgeron, no great distance from the Abbey of Yères, and, as a matter of course, the sisters Valois were invited to spend the holidays with them. At the château they would probably have continued to remain had not the marquis renewed his system of persecution. It is, however, tolerably certain that something very like encouragement was given to him by Mademoiselle de Valois, for the pair were surprised one day in a somewhat equivocal situation by the Marquis de Brancas and the Abbé Tacher, and although the lady in her “Memoirs” has the effrontery to speak of “the blush of conscious innocence which coloured her cheek” on this occasion, the result was that she was packed off by the marchioness to the well-known Abbey of Longchamp near Paris—of course, as she says, at her own earnest entreaty. Of this once handsome pile of conventual buildings, all that has survived the fury of the revolutionists of 1793, is a round ivy-mantled tower and an adjacent windmill, both familiar objects at the present time in this favourite locality. In the days of St. Vincent de Paul, the disorders which reigned in the Abbey of Longchamp were such as to call forth severe animadversions from this earnest and conscientious priest,⁠[9] and even when the sisters Valois entered it as boarders, the discipline was inclined to be lax; nevertheless the marquis made so many morning calls that the other boarders were scandalised at his constant visits, and the abbess was constrained to give orders that no gentleman should be allowed to visit Mademoiselle de Valois on any pretence whatever. At this abbey the sisters remained for about a year, only quitting it, say they, on the death of the abbess. Other accounts state that they left the convent surreptitiously early one morning, carrying with them a very light bundle, and with thirty-six francs jingling in their pockets, their departure being due to the pertinacity of the abbess in pressing them to embrace a religious life, a course to which the young ladies, who were by this time sufficiently partial to worldly vanities, were by no means inclined.⁠[10] The abbess is supposed to have received her instructions from high quarters, and it is further suggested that the object of them was the gradual extinction of the race of the Valois, together with all their troublesome claims.