The Grimaldis of Monaco, page 6
“. . . The Duc de Châtillon has a title and honors and safe possessions in a family that is one of the highest in the land. I do not see any comparison between the two. I’m telling you just what I think, for your honor is involved; and I know that mine is. Think all this over carefully. I warn you that the blame will be yours alone, and that I shall oppose anything detrimental to the honor of a grand-daughter of a man like myself, to whom you owe some consideration, I think.”
Antoine would not be compromised by his father-in-law and after many months the impasse remained. Marie’s refusal to sign the marriage contract for her daughter to marry the Comte de Roye was strongly supported by her father, who wrote to her from Versailles, “When you have a good case, stick to it,” adding “. . . do not sign anything whatever unless I or one of your brothers writes personally to say so.”
These quarrels continued over the next two years, to the great displeasure of Louis XIV. Finally Comte de Roucy, the father of Antoine’s candidate, with an eye to the King’s disapproval of the standstill, released the Prince de Monaco from his agreement. In the end the Comte d’Armagnac abandoned his support of the Comte de Lux.
For two years, Louise-Hippolyte had been in the care of the nuns at the Convent of the Visitation at Aix-en-Provence, placed there against her will by her father until her marriage was settled. Marie now took matters into her own hands. Leaving Monaco secretly, under cover of night, she joined her father in Paris and between them they decided on the next candidate, a young man of twenty-five, Jacques de Matignon, Comte de Thorigny, the rich scion and only son of the Comte de Matignon, at the time Lieutenant-Governor of Normandy.
Aware that Antoine would reject any name they put forward, Marie and her father enlisted the Duchesse de Lude, widow of the Comte de Guiche (Antoine’s great-uncle), to act as mediator. The Duchesse presented de Matignon’s name to Antoine as her own suggestion. Not suspecting the duplicity involved, and still smarting over Marie’s defection, Antoine secured the Duchesse de Lude’s promise that the young man’s name would be kept secret from his wife and her father. He then insisted that they agree in advance to the “unknown” future son-in-law he had chosen.
On Christmas Eve, 1714, the Comte d’Armagnac (who must have been privately triumphant at his clever deception) wrote to Antoine: “It gives me great pleasure and I greeted your representative as though he were bringing an olive branch from you. Although he did not explain about the choice you have made, I don’t doubt it is a good one.”
Believing he had outwitted his wife, Antoine got de Matignon to agree to sacrifice his name and coat of arms to obtain a duchy of his own if he married Louise-Hippolyte. He then wrote to Marie to tell her that, providing they obtained the King’s consent (necessary for peers of the Court), the selection of a husband for their oldest daughter had been made. She wrote back congratulating him on a brilliant choice and asked if she could now return home:
“Forgive me, Sir, if I have done something wrong, for the sake of my respect and obedience towards you and of my love for my children . . . I ask your pardon, Sir, and to be allowed to come and tell you myself, more strongly than I can ever do by letter, how willingly I shall meet your wishes for the rest of my life.”
He replied condescendingly: “I shall see whether [your apology] is followed up by the obedience you promise me, that I dare to say you owe me, and I am prepared to believe you are ashamed for having cut yourself off from it in such a scandalous manner. I have no desire at all to go over the past, you know there would be far too much for me to say. I draw a curtain over a sad picture, so as to start a peaceful life with you and the children again.”
The time for action had come. The marriage contract had to be negotiated and Louis XIV’s consent obtained. After protracted dealings the wealthy de Matignon agreed to pay Antoine 700,000 livres to cover all of Monaco’s debts and to give an additional 600,000 livres as dowries for his bride’s younger sisters, as well as to pay their uncle François-Honoré 200,000 livres to renounce all his rights.
It remained for the marriage contract to be signed by the King, but in August 1715, Louis XIV was on his deathbed in his magnificent white-and-gold-paneled bedroom in Versailles. Gangrene had blackened one entire leg and he was in excruciating pain. What conscious moments were left to him he used to prepare himself, his Court, his country and his young heir—his great-grandson, four-year-old Louis, Duc d’Anjou—for his impending demise. (Louis XIV had six children with Queen Marie Thérèse. Only one, Louis, Dauphin of France, survived childhood but predeceased his father. The Dauphin’s son had died suspiciously in 1712, as had his wife and their oldest surviving son. This brought the late Dauphin’s youngest grandson, the Due d’Anjou, into the direct line as heir to the throne.)
“Soon,” Louis told the boy when he was brought to his bedside, “you will be King of a great kingdom. I urge you never forget your obligations to God; remember that you owe Him everything. Try to remain at peace with your neighbors. I have loved war too much. Do not copy me in that, or in my overspending. Take advice in everything; try to find out the best course and always follow it. Lighten your people’s burden as soon as possible, and do what I have had the misfortune not to do myself.”
Louis XIV, who had been a very good friend to Antoine and to Monaco, died on September 1, 1715, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday and having reigned for over seventy-two years. The Duc d’Anjou was now Louis XV, and until his majority he would be controlled by the Regent, Philippe, Due d’Orléans, son of the late king’s effeminate brother and his second wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria. Both the child-king and his Regent signed de Matignon and Louise-Hippolyte’s marriage contract on September 5, their first official signatures of the new reign. The wedding took place on October 20. Antoine and Marie, although never reconciled, did establish a modus vivendi. Once Antoine learned that he had been outfoxed in the matter of his son-in-law, relations between them again became unpleasant so much so that the newly married couple (who had lost a child during their first year together) moved to Paris to be away from his oppressive outbreaks of temper and tyrannical control.
Despite being surrounded by acquisitive countries at a time when they were at constant war with each other, the Principality managed to survive, thanks to the protection of France. Without the reinforcement of French troops, Monaco’s small garrison could not have withstood an outside attack.
The simple fact was that what could be gained by capturing Monaco was not worth retaliation from the French. Monaco was ostensibly a poor and backward principality with no lucrative products and little land for expansion. Not until 1730 did Antoine finally have a carriage road constructed between the Rock and Menton. Before then the only link was ten kilometers over precipitous, rock-strewn paths, which deterred commerce even within the Principality.
The odds were against the small country producing a great philosopher, scientist, poet or artist. During Antoine’s long residence on the Rock, he had commissioned several operas, but had brought few other distinctions to Monaco. The Grimaldis were reliant upon their wives’ or daughters’ dowries to keep things running. There were no big landowners to tax, no customs duties to collect from a busy port. The Grimaldis had increased their prestige and rank at the French Court through marriage. None of them had cared much about Monaco or wished to visit it.
Like his father before him, Antoine had looked for his glory in the service of Louis XIV, an absolute monarch, whose power was not shared by any individual or institution. Even a few days before the French King’s death, Council was still held from his bed. There was no deviation from ritual. The Court and the government had to revolve around the King. And Antoine, who greatly admired Louis XIV, preferred to be in the service of such an omnipotent monarch rather than affirming his own power and bringing any improvements to Monaco. The harvest of fruit and fishing were the chief sources of income to the people.
Marie died in 1724, at the age of fifty-seven, and Antoine did not mourn her death any more than his father had grieved for his mother. Marie’s possessions and a sizable inheritance were to pass to her oldest child, a stipulation set forth in her original marriage contract, making Louise-Hippolyte her heir. But Antoine, in difficult financial straits and in view of his son-in-law’s affluence, pressed a claim in the French courts on his own behalf for control of his late wife’s estate. An acrimonious lawsuit ensued which lasted for several years, by the end of which time Antoine had run out of both cash and credit. He then appealed directly to his son-in-law, to whom he had been cold and uncivil throughout the legal battle.
“You mention the state of your affairs,” the Duc de Valentinois wrote back, “as though you wish me to do all I can to ease your situation. I will willingly help . . . on condition, if you please, that you take no steps to prejudice the future interests of your grandson [who stood to inherit from his mother] . . . He is such a [good-natured] boy that nobody could think of playing a dirty trick on him.”
The Duc de Valentinois was, in effect, offering Antoine a loan on condition that he withdraw his lawsuit. Antoine was furious. His brother, François, who was once again in his good graces, wrote to tell him that he had been invited to visit the de Valentinoises in Paris, to which Antoine angrily replied: “What it all amounts to is this—[those two] are following the fine system they adopted right after [Marie’s] death which is to see me die with rage in my heart because, thanks to them, my situation is no brighter . . .
“So I leave you to judge for yourself, my dear brother, whether in all decency you can accept their offer of hospitality, considering how my relations with them are, and are bound to be . . .”
By 1730 the litigation over Marie’s will had not been settled. Antoine’s health, never good, was failing. Louise-Hippolyte, with her younger son, the Comte de Carladez, then eight years old, made the journey to Monaco to see him, and during their six-week visit father and daughter were reconciled. Antoine died on February 20, 1731, leaving an affectionate unsigned letter to his daughter, which was sent on to her by his doctor “with an account of the Prince’s last hours.”
Louise-Hippolyte had always been a retiring woman, and had been much marked in youth by the angry quarrels between her parents and her enforced two-year convent confinement before her marriage. Her marital life had seemed happy. Her husband was rich. She had homes in Normandy and in Paris. And the Due de Valentinois—rare among his class at that time—had been a faithful family man. What happened next was, therefore, a shock to all who knew her.
Returning to Monaco, this time alone, she took the oath of loyalty and was immediately made Princesse de Monaco without any mention of her husband, who—since he had legally changed his name to Grimaldi—should have ruled with her as Jacques I, Prince de Monaco. But Louise-Hippolyte decreed that she would reign alone; all documents were to be in her name only, and her children and husband would remain in France.
Historians are divided as to what could have been behind her unexpected behavior. One view was that Antoine had convinced his daughter with his dying breath to deny her husband his position and title at her side as a last revenge. The English historian Pemberton sets forth a case against Antoine’s auditor-general, a man named Bernardoni, whom he suspects of stepping in to control the new Princesse de Monaco, wishing to supplant her husband’s influence with his own.
Bernardoni did, indeed, speak out against the Duc de Valentinois, but it seems unlikely that Louise-Hippolyte would have rejected the faithful husband and father of her six surviving children, a man with whom she had lived for fifteen years in apparent harmony, either to appease the vengeance of a dead father or to satisfy the avarice of an auditor-general. Another argument against the latter is that she replaced Bernardoni within six months of her accession.
It is far more likely that she was not truly happy in her marriage. When her husband (having been denied the title of Prince of Monaco) joined her with their children on the Rock several weeks after she had taken the oath of loyalty, he remained only a short time before returning alone to Paris.
In October of that year, Madame de Simiane, a granddaughter of Madame de Sévigné, wrote: “It is said that there has been a quarrel between Monsieur and Madame de Monaco, because he wished to be named with his wife in the proclamation of accession, and she did not wish it; and that they have separated . . .”
Louise-Hippolyte’s rush to have herself pronounced Princesse de Monaco could also have been motivated by her fear that the second Marquis de Cagnes, who was six years old at the time and a direct descendant of Gaspard Grimaldi, first Marquis de Cagnes, a great-grandson of Honoré I, might lay claim to the throne. But the young Marquis’s father was dead and no one on his maternal side bothered to put his name forward to contest the Princesse de Monaco’s claim.
Louise-Hippolyte’s new power appears to have given her the personal strength and sense of independence she had lacked during the years of her father’s tyranny and her husband’s loving but strong hand. Having successfully removed the yoke of male domination from around her neck on December 3, in the Throne Room of the palace, she received the investiture alone, standing erect and regal, a handsome, dark-haired woman of thirty-four, her figure still trim despite her years of childbearing. A portrait executed at that time shows a surprisingly winsome young woman, elegantly gowned, far more determined than her biographers have portrayed her. The Rock with its palace and curving stone walls are pictured behind her, and in her graceful hand she holds a full-sized black mask—not the sort that a woman of that time would wear to a masquerade but more suggestive of a means (reminiscent of Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask) of concealing identity. Perhaps the artist, J. B. Van Loo, was suggesting that she had suddenly revealed her true self.
One would like to believe that this one shining act of self-liberation was enough to satisfy Louise-Hippolyte, for a smallpox epidemic swept the entire Mediterranean coast during the weeks before Christmas, 1731, and on December 29, having known sovereignty for only seven months, she died of the dread disease. With her demise the House of Grimaldi became extinguished and that of Matignon (her husband, and thus her son) succeeded. In appearance, the fair-haired eleven-year-old Honoré III, his features touched with arrogance, resembled the Matignons. The fierce strength of face that so identified Antoine and had shown through at the end in his daughter was not evident. Only in his quick temper could Honoré’s Grimaldi heritage be discerned.
The Duc de Valentinois, now his son’s legal guardian, left immediately for the Principality and, after meeting with its jurists (a small body of five men elected by Monaco’s leading citizens and established at the time that Menton and Roquebrune had been acquired), convinced them that he should rule as Prince de Monaco until Honoré reached the age of twenty-five and, further, that his son “should abdicate [at that time] in favor of his father and thus follow the example of those who relinquished to their father the command of their fiefs inherited through the mother.”
The Due’s action validates the theory that Louise-Hippolyte had a good idea of her husband’s true ambitions and had acted as she did in order to protect her own and her son’s interests. However, the Duc de Valentinois’s aspirations were quickly thwarted. Cardinal Fleury—who, with the recent death of the French Regent and his own new position as chief minister to the young King, was the most powerful man in France—sent letters of condemnation which indicated serious sanctions would be imposed if the Due did not withdraw. Under the circumstances the Due accepted his position as legal administrator to his son, who would be rightfully named Honoré III, Prince de Monaco.
On May 20, 1732, the Due signed a document as Jacques I appointing Antoine’s favorite son, the illegitimate Chevalier de Grimaldi, as Governor-General of the Principality with wide powers. The Due then returned to Paris, but it was not until November 7, 1733, that he signed a formal abdication, though retaining the regency until Honoré III had reached his majority. He returned to Monaco with Honoré for him to take his oath of loyalty in May 1734. Then father and son left Monaco, the former never to return; the latter to remain abroad for fifteen years.
For the next half century, even after Honoré III’s return, the Chevalier de Grimaldi governed Monaco. It could be argued that the Chevalier, although he would never be recognized as Antoine II, was more the Prince de Monaco during his lifetime than Honoré III who, when he reached his majority, gave his first priority to France. The Chevalier did well by Monaco in that peace, if not prosperity, reigned.
Though Honoré was a rich man through the inheritances of his grandmother and his mother, none of his wealth was used to improve conditions in his principality. His father placed his education in the hands of Jesuits until he was fifteen, when he became a musketeer in the King’s Guard. The Due’s ambitions for him became concentrated on his army career, which did not advance as fast as the father would wish.
“He [Honoré III] has now been a musketeer for nearly two years, and this seems a long time to me,” he wrote to his late wife’s uncle François, now a retired archbishop. “I’ve spoken and written to Cardinal Fleury about having a cavalry regiment for him, but I’ve only received vague replies. If it were a request on my own account I should not have been at all surprised . . . after the fine services that rascal Bernardoni did me with His Eminence . . . but it concerns my son, who ought not to be made to suffer because of alleged faults of his father. I wrote to tell the cardinal that if he should not be favored among those wishing for a regiment he would be obliged to remain in his natural position, which is that of a sovereign prince who will one day have an income of a hundred thousand écus; to judge by His Eminence’s reply, he is not used to receiving such pressing applications. He ought also to have considered . . . that the one man of France most able to dispense with favors from the Court is Monsieur de Monaco. I’ve decided to say no more to him on the matter, so I have the honor of writing to ask you to try and find out what his intentions are . . .”
