In the early part of the 18th century, few knights of Malta enjoyed a higher profile than the Bali de Mesmes. He was the top-ranking Ambassador of the Order of St John – to the mighty King of France no less, and is today still remembered in Malta for having been instrumental in convincing (and paying) the Abbé de Vertot to write his tremendously popular history of the Knights of Malta, published in 1726.

His other lasting achievements included his determining input in purchasing the wonderful Gobelins tapestries for the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, and in bringing over to work in Malta the architect and military engineer François de Mondion. Together with several others, these were no mean accomplishments. But then he lost his head, and very badly, over a young ballerina. He precipitated, with the most blissful abandon, into public mockery and contempt.

Not everyone who knew Jean-Jacques de Mesmes had the highest opinion of the prominent knight of Malta. One of the most acidic and pungent diarists, the Duc de Saint-Simon, delighted in rubbing in the high scorn in which he held de Mesmes and his family. He dismisses them haughtily as “of peasant stock” who had falsified their family tree to dissemble a noble pedigree they never had. Saint-Simon pokes fun at the three de Mesmes brothers: “The eldest became Premier Presidént; the second, a certain Abbé de Mesmes, was monstrously de­bauch­ed; the third, a knight of Malta, was scarcely less so, but was nonetheless loaded with benefices and commanderies through his brother’s influence, and later became our am­bas­sador to Malta.”

Incorrect: de Mesmes was Malta’s ambassador to France, not vice-versa, though the Grand Master had succumbed into making that appointment after some arm-twisting from France.

Contemporaries shared Saint-Simon’s sneering view of de Mesmes “as big in size as he was poor in spirit, wanting looks, peculiarly debauched, ‘a great leaking bucket’ (grand panier percé) who was a disgrace to his job and who often ran the risk of losing it”.

De Mesmes, born in 1674, had hard­ly distinguished himself at all in the Hospitaller Order, or elsewhere, before his appointment as Ambassador of Malta to Versailles. He had been accep­ted in the Order when still a minor, during the Chapter of June 12, 1691.

His protectors in France – his brother was Premier Président of Parliament of that country – put pressure on King Louis XIV (who needed the support of the de Mesmes for dynastic reasons) to obtain his selection by Grand Master Ramon Perellos to that high diplomatic post in 1715. It is only after that insider promotion that his star started shining.

On taking up his post, de Mesmes staged sumptuous celebrations, worthy of the highest dignitary of a leading world power. He wanted to impress Paris with his great magnificence and his greater munificence, class and splendour. He did impress – with the crass showiness of a relentless parvenu.

Like many others, he believed that money buys everything, with bad taste and ostentation heading the list. De Mesmes later published a similar self-aggrandising pamphlet on the impressive embassy to Versailles he organised on February 12, 1737, to an­nounce Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena’s death and the election of Grand Master Ramon Despuig.

The ambassador fancied himself a bit of a scientist too. He released to the French press a letter he had received from Malta in 1725 which extolled the miraculous healing properties of iced water, a cure discovered in Malta by a Capuchin friar who used to treat most illnesses with cold melted snow (presumably obtained from the slopes of Mount Etna). Many knights who had benefitted from this inexpensive remedy testified to its unfailing efficacy.

Sadly, France remembers de Mes­mes better for a pathetically prurient scandal than for his diplomatic, political or cultural skills and achievements.

In 1726, Paris was laughing be­hind his back, not at his uncontrolled lust – Parisians were among the most un­shock­able around, and wholly im­mune to all that and much else be­sides – but for his improvidence in at­tracting attention to his silliness, his infatuation, his raw cuckolding and in putting all his trashy corna on public display.

The masses relished nothing better than to gloat over the downfall of the pretentious. Those who in their lives will never be central to anything except their wedding day and their funeral, rejoice at the ruination of others.

The knight of Malta and his deceitful lover had fallen out through her serial cheating, and he thought it clever to publish all the details of that deception and to record how badly he had been treated by that ungrateful slut, hoping for a rich return in public sympathy and in discrediting the money-grubbing vixen. What he got instead was an enormous backlash of ridicule and scorn. There is no fool like a fool in love.

Two detailed statements were composed, almost certainly with the help of ghost-writers or lawyers. They contain the long pleadings by de Mesmes in a substantial money claim made against him by Françoise Prevost, and her shorter reply to her former lover.

Though certainly authentic, it is not quite clear what these pleadings formed part of. They have all the hallmarks of written evidence in court proceedings – she was claiming off him a yearly pension of 6,000 livres for life, and had in her possession signed contracts to prove it. The archives registered each statement as a factum, which is a technical term for a written declaration in court litigation.

De Mesmes is a primordial drama queen

Régine Astier, the modern author of the ballerina’s life, takes those two statements to be memoranda that the parties made public in an attempt at image-building and to give vent to the huge animosity that had overtaken both the litigants – a literary vendetta, a social or moral, rather than a legal, justification, of their claims and counter-claims. The ballerina could not sue de Mesmes in the civil courts, due to the immunity his diplomatic status as ambassador conferred on him.

Apart from their gossip interest, certainly not to be overlooked, these statements are absolutely unique for understanding the human condition of a knight of the Order of St John. They are the only personal ‘confessions’, embarrassingly personal, that have come down to us from 260 years of Hospitaller rule in Malta. Warts and all – actually warts and not much else besides.

They are the authentic, open confidences of a knight of Malta, who bares his soul (not to mention the unspeakable rest) in those most intimate of matters which others normally try their best to keep concealed. These statements represent the only known insight we have of how a knight looked at himself from the inside, rather than how a spectator saw him from outside.

They read like a chapter from the wondrous autobiography of Giacomo Casanova: lewd, brazen, pleasure-obsessive, mischievous – with the difference that Casanova could laugh at everything and everyone. He could laugh at others and himself, at success and failure, but de Mesmes definitely couldn’t. Casanova un-dramatised drama itself. De Mesmes is a primordial drama queen. He takes everything seriously, but mostly himself.

The unrepressed energies of these confessions look even more outrageous because De Mesmes was a professed knight in a religious order, a man who had solemnly bound himself by the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He felt no compunction in flaunting a high-profile mistress to an international audience and at servicing his horizontal performances from the income of pious Church benefices.

De Mesmes’s outpourings also have the gift of timelessness. Though penned 300 years ago, they recount conflicts and miseries, passions and resolutions that could just as well have happened yesterday. Minus the brocades, plus the technology, and the plot could easily be tomorrow’s soap. Human weakness, greed, lust, deceit, insecurity, dysfunction, attention seeking – nothing has changed.

This story proves to be an emblematic and rare forerunner of feminism triumphant. The little woman is on a par with the powerful aristocrat, the king’s protégée, who takes for granted that sense of entitlement the ancien régime conferred on the aristocracy.

Man and woman confront each other with all the odds – birth, money, power, position, masculinity, massively staked in the man’s favour – and the woman wins hands down. In dignity, by cunning, through crafty manipulation of public perception.

Hurrah for this suffragette ante litteram who single-handedly defeated the historic arrogance of class and the pre-ordained supremacy of gender. It was all about how the great love of de Mesmes and Prevost went askew, and instead of destroying the more vulnerable, the failure toppled the colossus.

Françoise Prevost in time became the leading ballerina in France, the outstanding diva of the Paris stage, the favourite of the court and of theatre-goers. She was born in 1681 to a Spanish mother and a father who worked at the Opera – humble parents. She danced from a young age and clawed her way single-mindedly to the very top, establishing herself slowly as a great innovator who broke away with convention and as the theatre crowd-puller in the capital. De Mesmes, born in 1674, was seven years her senior.

The memoir of the ambassador, written in the third person, recorded step by step how he was smitten by her (he implies that she was smitten by him – the macho in him would cultivate that self-delusion, now wouldn’t it?). He refers to himself in the third person as ‘the knight’ or ‘the ambassador’.

“The dancer, still young, already liked men... She met the knight and fell for him, but she lived with her parents and their living conditions at first disheartened the aspiring lover.” He describes the meagre and shoddy apartment the family shared – barely furnished with only beds and four chairs, but quite clean nonetheless.

He once visited her unexpectedly and found her in a housecoat fashioned out of upholstery fabric, wearing a soiled night bonnet held by a dirtier pink ribbon – a far cry from the ethereal creature who danced on stage, but the one at home was the real Fanchonnette – the low-class corruption of Françoise.

“The knight was startled, speechless and found the scene embarrassing. The visit ended abruptly, and after the usual civilities paid to the parents and to the girl, he scuttled away, ashamed of his enterprise and resolved to avoid similar misadventures in the future.” She must have been about 25 then, and was still neither famous nor rich.

But notwithstanding the elitist let-down, he all the same could not fight back the compulsion to return to the theatre, and there, all he saw was a totally transformed Fanchonnette, “charming coyness, lascivious glances and a variety of postures constantly renewed and arresting. The public’s ovation stirred the knight’s emotions again”.

In summary, he lost what little judgement he might have had to begin with. “He went back to every performance, and Fanchonnette became his obsession. He loved her as a nymph, he adored her as a shepherdess, and fulfilled through her the craving he had for novelty.” He begged her for a second chance, but she told him to get lost. He was not yet ambassador then.

She already had a tetchy lover who suffered no competition – this tormented de Mesmes and “he grew feverish”. Try and try again, he finally succeeded to get her to agree to a fur­tive date in a dark alley near the Palais Royal – “his raptures of joy were not to be believed and defied all description”.

Having no choice, he accepted to take second place to her official lover, and she promised she would signal him when to visit – each time boyfriend number one was safely away – provided the knight paid all the bills at inns and taverns. With these details ironed out, “the lovers took immediate possession of each other that very night... He found her eyes tender, her teeth beautiful, her skin soft to the touch”. His other findings he was too much of a gentleman to place on record.

De Mesmes “spent the night basking in the delights his good fortune had thrown his way, and that night was followed by others equally passionate” – provided lover number one was at a safe distance, that is. On that first occasion, Fanchonnette drank so much she got wasted – he did not specify whether she needed to get numb be­fore, or after, making love to him. He ensured never to miss her every performance at the opera. She danced suggestively “as if to keep alive the fantasies so dear to her lover (number two)”. “He grew more and more enamoured.”

Years passed by this way, until fate eventually disposed of her first lover and of her parents too: “The knight was at last able to take free and entire possession of his mistress” (he repeatedly uses the word ‘possession’ in relation to his lover. Above the waist, Françoise was a chattel, and more so below).

After this, to add to his ecstasy, “he received large Church benefits, was elevated to the dignity of Bailly, and eventually became ambassador of Malta... His mistress was considerably proud of her lover” and insisted no longer to be addressed as Fanchonnette but as demoiselle Prevost.

Proud or not, the accountant often dormant in those born in deprived backgrounds saw to his pleasures being translated into investment. “She requested a fully furnished apartment, with cellar and kitchen, furniture in every colour, clothes for all seasons – everything the most expensive.

“Not to mention a well-provided table. Her dressers filled with china, her cupboards with household linen, her wardrobe with gowns, and the ambassador delighted in hiding daily all kinds of jewellery in her drawers.”

Together they entertained both his friends: nobles, judges, military officers, and hers: hairdressers, seamstresses and choir girls. She was openly acknowledged as the ambassador’s official mistress, vows of chastity air-brushed out of the equation.

“The ambassador spent his life in the most delightful and peaceful manner. He blessed the day he had met this faithful mistress whom he adored and who only talked to him about her love and her gratitude.” He gave no special weight to the fact that she had betrayed her first lover with him – the infallibly reliable guarantee she would be betraying again with a new one.

(To be concluded)