Seductress (38 page)

When Charles VII first saw her on a state visit, he stood “abashed and amazed.” At the time he was no great shakes either physically or governmentally. After letting Joan of Arc’s offensive fizzle out, he trifled with paramours and base companions while the British lorded it over Normandy and Aquitaine. He suffered fits of “weak nerves” and showed it. Bald, with hooded eyes and fat lips bracketed by deep creases, he hid his scarecrow physique in voluminous robes when courtiers wore codpieces and tunics.

Agnès, though, saw possibilities in this unprepossessing “pauper king.” In the best courtly love tradition, she snapped him out of his swoon and ignited his latent intellectual, military, and managerial gifts. According to legend, she made the salvation of France the price of her favors. She forbade him to touch her “beneath the chin” unless he shaped up. She told him an astrologer had promised her a “valiant and courageous” king; obviously that man wore the crown of England. At that Charles burst into tears and promised to reform.

He did. As soon as she became his mistress in 1444, he publicly acknowledged her at court and, defying the ordinances against “women’s words” and “advice,” made her his chief counselor. At her insistence, he sacked his dissolute sidekicks, resumed the war against the English, and assembled a loyal team of competent “men of arms and kind companions.”

These Agnès handpicked for him. Her friend, capitalist entrepreneur Jacques Coeur, salvaged the economy. As treasurer steward he stabilized the currency, reformed taxation, and revived commerce and industry, ushering in a period of unprecedented prosperity.

Two other brilliant recruits—Pierre de Breze, “the eagle of all the world,” and the scholarly Adonis Étienne Chevalier—both fell in love with her. With Étienne, Agnès may have had (true to her free-range character) a secret affair; he carved an amorous quotation with her initials on his wall, commissioned her portrait, carried her insignia on his shield, and spent his life “obsessed by the Lady of Beauty.”

Agnès created the same obsession in Charles; “he could not bear to have her away from him for an instant.” But she was often away. During their seventeen years together, Agnès traveled incessantly among the many châteaus he gave her, from Beauté sur Marne to Chinon to Vernon in Normandy. The
vagatio
stereotype crumbled in her wake. She dispensed charity on her estates and loved her four children and many pets tenderly. Jean Fouquet painted her as the Madonna.

The church was not persuaded. When Charles first brought her to Paris, she headed the procession on horseback like a graven idol. Bedizened in the gaudiest wares from Jacques Coeur’s Eastern trade, she floated through the streets in a red velvet gown, jeweled poulaines (pointed shoes over a foot long), and a high-peaked miter trailing an azure veil to the ground.

Her face bore the mark of “Lucifer”—thick white paint, rouge, shaved eyebrows, and a hairline plucked back to the crown of her head. The clergy published broadsides calling her the “Beast of the Apocalypse,” and the Bishop des Ursins threatened the king in person.

None of which deterred Agnès. Emboldened by the attacks, she laid it on. Wafting rare oriental perfumes, she appeared at court feasts in riotous luxury: long trains, ropes of emerald and gold necklaces, and tight silk dresses with peekaboo lacing that exposed her whole left breast. Secure in her power, influence, and position, she “felt invulnerable.”

Foolishly so. She didn’t reckon on the resistance to such undue female power and freedom. Charles’s eldest son, Louis, the “universal spider,” hired a Lothario to seduce her and, failing in that, slapped her in the face and rounded up a group of nobles who banished her to Loches, her castle on the Loire.

Vengeful women also hovered on the sidelines, poised to strike. Her first cousin and “sister” tried to seduce Charles the moment Agnès invited her to Loches and turned her back. With competitive rapacity, Antoinette ambushed him in hallways and cried on his shoulder but got nowhere until after Agnès’s death.

Antoinette didn’t have to wait long. With her customary wanderlust and thirst for action, Agnès set off in 1450 to join Charles, as usual, on the battlefield. Conditions couldn’t have been worse. The hundred-mile route was war-ravaged and dangerous, and Agnès was in the last stages of pregnancy. She gave birth on arrival and died a few days later of dysentery and other complications from the trip. Baffling the Madonna-whore typecast to the end, she read aloud from her breviary and behaved with celestial piety in her final hours. Charles buried her like a saint at Loches in a stately sarcophagus with two angels at her head and two lambs at her feet.

Afterward he knew no peace. Inconsolable and unmoored, he relapsed into his old debauchery and toyed first with Antoinette, then with a revolving seraglio of young playthings. In a pathologic inversion of his mistress’s roving spirit, he spent the remaining ten years of his life moving restlessly from château to château “consumed with sorrow and anger.”

Predictably, historians have found her less memorable, writing her off as a no-count royal courtesan. Self-willed enchantresses who violate propriety and women’s place still ruffle feathers. It’s easier for posterity to eulogize the unproblematic, asexual St. Joan than deal with the complex, dissident Agnès, who directed a king and held “heroes and sages” “in her chains.” Worse, one who struck off her
own
chains. Agnès’s favorite pet was a greyhound that refused to follow the pack and obeyed “neither whistle nor call.” And for decades French soldiers marched into battle chanting, “We’ve got to move! Agnès ordered it!”

When seventeen-year-old Jane Digby wafted into St. James’s Palace for her debut in a demure white gown, Regency England took her to their heart. With her pastel beauty—blond ringlets, cameo features, violet eyes—and her “pleasing modesty,” she incarnated the Romantic ideal of 1824. She became the iconic heroine of the age, Wordsworth’s “Phantom of delight” given form and substance, a maiden bathed in “angelic light,” born for the “household.”

Except she wasn’t. Appearances to the contrary, Jane Digby was born for adventure and the repudiation of every genteel female virtue. A Romantic of the perfervid Byronic school, she led a life of pure costume melodrama. As polite society watched aghast, she divorced three husbands, migrated from bed to titled bed, lived with an outlaw “Mountain King,” and married a Bedouin sheikh in her late forties. She ended her days as “Queen of the Banditti” on the Syrian desert, leading raids on charging stallions and spellbinding men until her seventies.

How she went wrong confounded the best minds. Born to noble parents—the illustrious Digbys—she was raised according to the most orthodox pattern for young ladies. She was taught the sanctity of “confinement to the bounds of home” and the proper graces and arts that accompanied it: needlework, flower arranging, pious offices, and sedate gentility. But the demonic child behaved like a changeling. She refused to sit at her tatting, escaped outdoors for rough-and-tumble games with her male cousins, and eavesdropped on their lessons.

She went bad early and ran off with a band of itinerant Gypsies. Her charm, though, always saved her from punishment. Her parents could not bear to reprimand their “golden-haired mischief maker,” with the result that the mischief increased and multiplied.

By her teens she was a confirmed high-estrogen scamp. Although she took well to the debutante drill of dance, piano, and voice lessons, she couldn’t be broken to harness sexually. She wrote florid love poems to a lady-killer cousin, attracted beaux from Bath to Dorset, and once eloped with her groom, leading her frenzied father on a horse chase over three counties.

Her modest maid performance at her debut presentation backfired. Overidentifying with the part, Jane followed the aristocratic script and married the highest bidder, a starchy lord who might have come from central casting. In less than a year she learned why Edward Law, Lord Ellenborough, had been called Horrid Law at Eton. Rarely at home, he clubbed with his buddies by night and frolicked with his mistress by day, leaving her picture on the bureau for Jane to discover.

Vengeance followed fast. Dressed in décolleté gowns that exposed her nipples, Jane trolled the party circuit and worked swiftly—first an affair with her cousin (with a child whom she palmed off as Edward’s); next her father’s librarian; then, penultimately, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg. She and this mesmeric Bohemian prince locked eyes across the ballroom, waltzed to “
Ah quel plaisir d’être en voyage
” (Ah, what a pleasure to be traveling), and plunged headlong into one of the most talked-about amours in London. Pedestrians on Harley Street watched Felix lace up her stays through open blinds, and the entire reading public devoured the
Times
after Edward found out and staged a divorce trial, replete with salacious evidence and lurid testimonials.

Mid-trial Jane slipped off to France by packet boat—pregnant, disgraced, and barred forever from polite society. For several stormy years she and her lover circulated among the Parisian demimonde. She had two children (one of whom died following the death of her English son), and Felix played the man-about-town, often in the company of diplomatic widows. Eventually she had enough and dumped the prince, deaf to his pleas that he loved her “better and longer” than any other woman. “Waiting,” she retorted, “was never my forte.”

She packed up and wended her way to Munich, the pleasure capital of Europe and mecca for adventuresses. King Ludwig I, a handsome womanizer, was ever on the watch for fascinators. When he saw Jane at an open-air café, he pounced; he declared her his soul mate, placed her portrait in the “Gallery of Beauties,” and snared her into a six-year “deep intimacy.” Throughout the affair Jane fielded dozens of marriage proposals from German nobles and officers and slept where she pleased. One of these transient bedmates, Baron Karl Theodore von Venningen Üllner, made such a row that she broke down and married him when she became pregnant. He installed her in his glamorous schloss and poured a fortune into her happiness. But Jane had a housing problem. Despite a deluxe house and garden renovation and new baby, she started going AWOL to parties in Munich.

At a ball there, she met Spiridion Theotoky, a Greek count built like Mr. Universe togged out in a white tutu and gold-encrusted red velvet vest. She pleaded “nerves” to Karl and, from a nearby spa, sped out each night on her stallion for trysts with Spiro. When the lovers tried to elope, her husband apprehended them, shot his rival, and took him back to the schloss to die. Under Jane’s ministrations, Spiro made a full recovery, and they fled again, ignoring Karl’s pleas for a ménage à trois.

Jane then divorced Karl, for whom there was never “another woman,” and married a third time. She moved to Spiro’s baronial seat on Corfu and Hellenized herself. She converted to Greek Orthodoxy, swam in the Aegean, and threw syrtaki-dancing parties where guests smashed gold-monogrammed china on the tiles. She had a son, the only child she ever cared about, and seemed to have geared down. But all that changed when her husband was posted to Athens. King Otto fell in love with her, Spiro retaliated with casual affairs, her son died, and once more she lit out.

After leaving the count, Jane toured the Mediterranean and drowned her sorrows in the beaux who came her way—two so serious one died in a duel and the other committed suicide. On her return to Athens in 1852 she found a frisson worthy of her attention. General Xristodolous Hadji-Petros, leader of a tribe of mercenary bandits, looked as though he had walked off the set of
Abduction from the Seraglio.
A huge mustachioed ruffian in a tasseled beret, pleated skirt, and cinch belt loaded with weapons, he bore Jane off to the Lamian mountains.

With the self-fluidity of the “one who roams,” Jane changed her persona to suit the occasion. She exchanged her Parisian wardrobe for Albanian shifts, slept in caves, and galloped over ravines with his hard-drinking banditti. She gave Xristo a mansion with a bedroom built like a “throne-room,” but the setting went to his head, and she discovered him flagrante with her maid.

At this juncture Jane’s real adventures began. Still beautiful at forty-five and the “incarnation of vitality and health,” she ditched Xristo and set sail for Damascus. Speaking perfect Turkish and costumed in green satin riding habits, she hired Bedouins for long treks through the desert and took them to her tent by night.

One became the great love of her life. Medjuel el Mezrab, a tribal prince twenty years her junior, combined the looks of Rudolph Valentino with the manners and cultivation of a “polished English-man.” During a brutal twenty-four-hour camel ride across the Syrian desert, he grew so taken with Jane’s charm, courage, and explorer zest that he asked her to marry him.

With characteristic impetuosity, Jane agreed—on condition that he divorce his wife and live monogamously. When she married Medjuel in a Muslim ceremony in 1855, she was written out of the rolls of humanity. Her family disowned her and turned her picture to the wall; she had wed a black man. But for once Jane had landed on her feet. Medjuel answered her most romantic heartsongs and resolved her claustrophobia and nineteenth-century gender bind. As his wife Jane had the best of all worlds—male warrior status, nomadic domesticity, and femaleness cranked up to high.

Dressing in the height of Arabian seductiveness, she wore transparent gauze on her face, a blue caftan festooned with jewelry, and a veil that fell from a coronet of gold coins to her feet. With her eyes lined with kohl and her hair dyed black and arranged in two ankle-length braids, she passed for “a woman of thirty” instead of fifty-one.

On her wedding night she amazed her husband with her prowess. In his culture that meant something. Much was required of both sexes. Medjuel, a renowned cocksman, a
Nak. kaz al-ga’ad,
had to master the nuances of thirty-eight kinds of vagina, imaginative foreplay, and the thrust work to induce multiple female orgasms. Jane, by the same token, was expected to do her part. She must kiss in a hundred ways, clasp the penis with her vulva, and execute the up-and-down swinging motions of the hips called
hez,
“moving [her] bottom like a riddle.”