The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  Visitors were astonished at the magnificence of these paintings. Such was the quality of the Old Masters that it is scarcely surprising that Joachim Nemeitz, in his guidebook published in 1727, should have contrasted ‘the new gallery, with various rooms embellished by rare paintings’, with the Louvre, the main place of the Bourbon royal family in Paris, which he thought all but inaccessible, the paintings being ‘today in very poor condition’. Nemeitz was probably referring to the Grand Salon, giving on to the Rue de Rivoli, which was decorated by Oppenord with the finest furniture, Gobelins tapestries and the prize sculpture from the collection of Cardinal Richelieu. Philippe was less interested in contemporary art apart from Coypel’s Gods of Olympus in the Gallery of Aeneas, though he collected a few works by Watteau, who often frequented the palace, and his followers Pater and Lancret, who specialized in light-hearted scenes of sexual dalliance and intrigue.

  It was at this period that the Palais-Royal acquired its reputation for scenes of debauchery. The regent was a true sybarite, who was notoriously unfaithful to his wife Francoise-Marie de Bourbon (she was a Princess of the Blood in her own right), whom he nicknamed Madame Lucifer, and enjoyed a succession of mistresses. He resembled his cousin Charles II of England in his mixture of charm, natural grace and intelligence combined with a veneer of idleness and world-weary cynicism. Indifferent to religious orthodoxy and conventional morality, and endowed with a keen sense of humour, the sybaritic lifestyle of the pleasure-loving Philippe gave rise to lurid rumours. People suspected him of using his laboratory to indulge in black magic, holding séances and attempting to communicate with the devil. When a large number of Louis XIV’s descendants: the dauphin, two of his three sons, his daughter-in-law and the little Duke of Brittany, all died within a few years, Orléans was rumoured to have poisoned them all to enhance his claim to the French throne.

  Once he had been appointed regent, Philippe was able to indulge to the full his dissolute habits. During the day-time he dealt with affairs of state, receiving ministers and ambassadors and visiting the king, but the evenings were devoted to debauchery. Philippe’s friend the Duke of Saint-Simon, whose Historical Memoires give such an insight into life at court during the Regency, was shocked by the regent’s behaviour. He was scandalized by how the duke spent the evening ‘in shocking bad company, with his mistresses or girls from the Opera, often with Mme la Duchesse de Berry [his dissolute daughter] and some dozen young men, not always the same, whom he invariably spoke of as his roués … the wine flowed, the company became heated; they talked filth and out-rivalled one another in blasphemy; and when they had made sufficient noise and were all dead drunk, they were put to bed, and on the following day began all over again.’

  Gossips at Court provided even more lurid descriptions of scenes of gross depravity. Supper parties were held in the palace in a room known as the Cabinet Bleu, where erotic paintings such as the Judgement of Paris by the Dutch genre painter Adrian van der Werff were hung on walls covered in blue silk damask. No servant was allowed entry into the regent’s private apartments, to spare their blushes. Each guest was given a nom de guerre and served with a plentiful supply of champagne, three bottles per person being the normal consumption. Supper was eaten on a Sevres service specially designed for the duke, decorated with obscene motifs. After supper there was often an indecent magic lantern show, before the party set off for a masked ball in the palace theatre. For those unable to contain their amorous intentions, there was ample opportunity to indulge their needs in the bedroom strategically sited off the regent’s box.

  On returning to the Palais-Royal, accompanied by a group of chorus girls, an impromptu ballet might be staged, the dancers performing stark naked. A leading participant in these activities was the regent’s favourite daughter, Marie Louise Elisabeth, Duchess of Berry, with whom Philippe was supposed to have had illicit relations, alternating in the contrasting roles of a prostitute and a nun. Parties normally broke up when the guests were incapable of understanding one another, and footmen removed those incapable of walking out of the palace. Even Peter the Great, notorious for his drunken and lecherous behaviour, visiting Paris in 1717, refused a second invitation to supper with the regent.

  The scandalous behaviour of Philippe was part of a general reaction to the austerity of the last years of Louis XIV. There was a feeling of liberality that characterized Regency society, epitomized by the light-hearted exuberance of the new Rococo style. It stands in marked contrast with the excessive formality of the Alcázar in Madrid where every aspect of Philip IV’s life was rigidly controlled and the Rape of Europa was hidden behind a curtain when Philip was visited by the queen.

  However this liberality could, at times, lead to excess. The most spectacular example of this prodigality was the career of the Scotsman John Law, a convicted murderer, speculator and gambler who organized the most successful financial swindle of the eighteenth century. France was heavily in debt on Louis XIV’s death in 1715 and the regent was desperate to raise revenue. He was completely taken in by Law who devised a scheme whereby the newly-created Banque Generale would issue interest-paying bank notes, thereby reducing government debt. These bank notes could then be used to buy shares in a joint stock trading company, called the Compagnie des Indes, controlled by Law, which consolidated the trading companies of Louisiana, the large French colony on the banks of the Mississippi, into a single monopoly, later extended to include all France’s colonial trade. Law was now an incredibly powerful figure and was appointed Controller General of Finances, with the right to collect taxes. Profits from the venture were issued in shares which rocketed from an initial price of 500 livres to the astronomical price of 18,000 livres per share.

  It seemed that everyone would profit from this windfall but when the Prince de Conti, one of the leading French nobles, in March 1720 decided to send three wagons to the bank, demanding that he redeem his 14 million shares in gold, it started a run on the banks and it rapidly became apparent that the shares were worthless. The subsequent collapse of the company not only bankrupted large numbers of Frenchmen, but also led to the collapse of the Banque de France itself. Although the regent, as head of the government, was heavily implicated in what became known as the ‘Mississippi Bubble’, ironically it was at exactly this moment, when his reputation was so low, that the city of New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi, was named after him.

  Philippe’s involvement in Law’s recklessness tainted his reputation and seems to mirror the debauched lifestyle that he enjoyed in the Palais-Royal. His son Louis, however, who succeeded in 1723, was a very different character. Despite his proximity to the throne, he was heir to Louis XV until he produced a son in 1729, and stood proxy for the king at the marriage ceremony with the Polish princess Marie Leszczynska in Strasbourg in 1725, the new duke showed little interest in politics. Instead, he devoted himself to performing works of charity. Louis’s custom of distributing bread to the poor outside the door of the Palais-Royal ensured that the House of Orléans retained widespread popularity among Parisians, something that eluded the royal family (once Louis XV had attained his majority he had followed his predecessor and moved back to Versailles).

  Orléans was of a strong religious disposition. He was devastated when his young wife Johanna of Baden-Baden died in 1726 at the Palais-Royal after just three years of marriage, and turned for solace to religion, devoting himself to the translation of the Psalms and the Epistles of St Paul. His neurotic religious sensibility meant that he strongly disapproved of the erotic paintings collected by his father. Louis’s wrath was directed in particular at the works of Correggio: his Jupiter and Io and its companion Leda and the Swan, two of the greatest paintings in the entire collection, descending from the Duke of Mantua to Charles V, the Emperor Rudolph II and Queen Christina of Sweden.

  Louis violently objected to their lascivious subjects and cut out Io’s head with a knife. The mutilated painting was then given to the painter Charles-Antoine Coypel, curator of the Orl
éans collection, to restore it, which he did with great skill. Leda and the Swan suffered an even more ignominious fate, being cut into four pieces by the incensed duke, and Leda’s head destroyed. After the duke’s death, the two Correggios were sold to Frederick the Great of Prussia, and installed in his gallery in Sanssouci, his pleasure palace in Potsdam. As a measure of their importance, they were brought back briefly to Paris after Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806, before returning to Berlin following the emperor’s fall in 1814. Considering Orléans’s violent reaction to these mythological scenes, depicting the lusts of the Gods, it is a miracle that Titian’s paintings of their amours, also based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were spared.

  Louis’s distaste for the erotic paintings in his collection reflected his antipathy to the Rococo style, epitomized by luscious nudes by Francois Boucher (his version of the Rape of Europa, painted in 1749, was a typically suggestive work, with the princess’ half-naked maidens tenderly stroking the bull). By this date, however, taste had changed and Boucher was no longer the most fashionable artist in Paris. The author of an anonymous pamphlet attacked the artist for his irrelevant themes: ‘The Rape of Europa, isn’t that a bit worn out?’ Among the paintings in the Orléans Collection there was increasing praise for Poussin’s Seven Sacraments, with their high-minded and moralizing classicism, harking back to ancient Rome. Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin’s simple, naturalistic subjects, showing the influence of Dutch and Flemish genre painting, were also immensely popular.

  Despite Louis’ neglect, however, the Orléans Collection continued to attract visitors. Every knowledgeable Grand Tourist from Britain wanted to make a visit. Robert Taylor, in 1728, shared the general view that it was ‘a cabinet of the finest pictures I ever yet saw’. Two years later, William Mildmay echoed his sentiments: ‘Strangers commonly pay a visit to the … Palais Royal. This last is enriched with the greatest collection in Europe of the most famous Italian and Flemish masters.’ Bishop Douglas, who had been enlisted by the Marquis of Bath to accompany his son Lord Pulteney on the Grand Tour, visited the palace in 1748 and counted 30 paintings by Titian, more than any other artist. He lamented the religious devotion of the Duke of Orléans which had led him to destroy works he owned by that master as ‘indecent’.

  A year after the bishop’s visit, the writer of the Voyage Pictoresque de Paris gave a very complete account of the collection. The pictures were hung in the palace much as they had been in the regent’s day. Although the Flemish and Dutch paintings were kept separately in the Cabinets Flamands, there was no particular logic in the way that the Italian and French paintings were displayed, and Titian’s set of poesie was not hung together as a group. The Rape of Europa was still displayed in the Grand Salon, together with a number of other works by the artist, while Diana and Callisto was in the Salle du Billard, and Diana and Actaeon in a room referred to as the Quatrieme Piece.

  There was no systematic attempt by collectors at this date to hang paintings, either in individual schools or chronologically (this was only to occur at the end of the eighteenth century). Spectators liked variety, with a painting by a major artist from the Bolognese School (the school of disegno) placed next to one by a Venetian painter (the school of colore) so that viewers could make a comparison between the merits of the two schools.

  The Orléans paintings in the Palais-Royal were much better displayed than the royal collection, either at Versailles or in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris where they were open to the public by appointment on Wednesdays and Saturdays. La Font de Saint-Yenne’s Reflexions sur quelques causes de l’état présent de la peinture en France, published in 1747, advocating the creation of a royal gallery, preferably in the Louvre, criticized the way that the royal collection in Versailles was ‘hidden away in small, darkly lighted rooms … ignored by foreigners owing to their inaccessibility’. He lamented that, even if the royal paintings ‘surpass in number and quality those [of the Duke of Orléans] … what a loss their imprisonment is for the talented artists of our nation’.

  The hanging of the paintings at the Palais-Royal was probably not the decision of the duke, since he was so rarely seen in the palace. Orléans had become increasingly obsessed by religion, and eventually retired to the Abbaye Sainte-Genevieve outside Paris, near the family seat of Saint-Cloud, where he devoted himself to the study of natural science and ancient philosophy, mastering the archaic languages of Aramaic, Hebrew and Syriac. The duke adopted some very strange beliefs, and became convinced that death was just an illusion. In addition, he was convinced that his son was incapable of fathering an heir and therefore refused to acknowledge his grandson Louis Philippe Joseph, whom he regarded as an imposter. Nevertheless, Louis was not without artistic sensibility, remodelling the gardens of the Palais-Royal and the Chateau de Saint-Cloud.

  The highly religious Louis, who died in 1752, was succeeded by his lazy and unprincipled son Louis Philippe, another member of the Orléans family prone to debauchery. Known as ‘Philippe the Fat’, he was rarely to be seen in the Palais-Royal, preferring to indulge his passion for hunting by day and gambling and enjoying his mistresses by night. Nevertheless, despite the duke’s foibles, the House of Orléans continued to be held in high regard among the people of Paris. Louis Philippe served in the French army in the Seven Years’ War (a conflict waged by France and Austria against England, Prussia and Russia) and when he led his troops to victory at the battle of Hastenbeck in 1757, the news was announced by his wife, Louise Henriette de Bourbon, another Princess of the Blood, from the balcony of the Palais-Royal, to cheering crowds gathered in the courtyard beneath.

  The Orléans’ marriage, however, soon collapsed on his return from the war (the duchess had taken full advantage of her husband’s absence to entertain a series of lovers in the Palais-Royal). In 1769 Louis Philippe made a morganatic marriage to the attractive and witty Charlotte Jeanne Béraud de la Haye, Madame de Montesson, with whom he had been having an affair for a number of years. His new wife exerted a strong influence on her husband and, in contrast to his earlier debauched lifestyle, the couple held salons attended by leading playwrights, scientists and intellectuals. Notable among the guests were the mathematician and philosopher Jean le Rond d’Alembert, the German writer and philologist Melchior Grimm, the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, the composer Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny and the comic playwright and landscape gardener Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle. Perhaps conscious of the Palais-Royal’s colourful recent history, Louis Philippe and his wife preferred to entertain their distinguished guests at the Château de Saint-Cloud and seldom stayed at their Parisian residence.

  It was in the Palais-Royal, however, that the duke chose to bring up his son and heir Louis Philippe Joseph. The life and career of this young prince was to be one of the most extra-ordinary in French history. Born to a life of unimaginable privilege, cousin of Louis XVI, he was to become the promoter, paymaster and figurehead of the French Revolution.

  The future Duke of Orléans was given a strict if highly privileged upbringing in the palace. In his early childhood, on his father’s instructions, he was allowed no familiarity with servants or dogs, but, once he reached adolescence, Philippe soon acquired the dissolute habits of his ancestors. At the age of 15, the Duke of Chartres, as he was known, was introduced to the attractive Rosalie Duthe, one of the most alluring young courtesans in Paris, who had been painted in the nude by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, renowned for his playful and erotic paintings. Rosalie was soon a regular visitor to the Palais-Royal, eagerly anticipated by Philippe, and he was spotted, as Louis XV’s spy Marais reported to his master, going round to her house every day, carried in a sedan chair. Once he had acquired a taste for the fair sex, Philippe progressed to spending the night with three dancers, Emilie, Zelmire and La Guérin. They were seen leaving at day-break, each clutching six gold Louis, a fortune even for courtesans at the height of their profession.

  Although his parents had neglected his upbringing, they were determined that their high-born son sh
ould make a suitable match. Philippe was soon courting Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon, a tall, slender beauty, with translucent skin, blue eyes and golden hair. More importantly she was also the richest heiress in France and grand-daughter of Louis XIV (her father, the Duke of Penthièvre, was the bastard son of the Sun King and Madame de Montespan). Within a few months of their initial meeting, Philippe and Louise were engaged to be married. Contemporaries were astonished at the scale of the dowry that the fabulously wealthy Penthièvre bequeathed on the fortunate couple: 6 million livres in cash, a further 4 million in rents on land and chateâux, and an annual income of 240,000 livres, later increased to 400,000. When the Duke and Duchess of Chartres returned to the Palais-Royal from their magnificent wedding in Versailles in 1769, the audience celebrated their position at the pinnacle of society by greeting them, as they entered their box at the Comédie Française in Paris, with the cry: ‘Long live the royal family’.

  The design of the palace gates, with their ironwork tracery, allowed passers-by to gaze into the forecourt. For those who wished to explore further, it was permitted to visit the interior of the palace and to wander through the gardens. Performances at the palace theatre were extremely popular and, when it was burnt down in 1763, it was rapidly rebuilt by Victor Louis, who had made his name as architect of the magnificent neo-classical theatre in Bordeaux. Philippe and Louise were keen patrons of the arts and had new apartments designed for them within the palace. The palace had a magnificent entrance, with an oval staircase designed by Pierre Contant d’Ivry and decorated with palm trees and putti made of wrought iron and bronze. The duke held court here daily, and his position as President of the Parlement of Paris (the most important legal body in the capital), meant that there was a constant stream of visitors.