Life became routine for Jean-Jacques de Mesmes and Françoise Prevost, until one day, King Louis XV summoned the ambassador to Versailles in connection with his diplomatic duties. Prevost assured him she would spend the interval fretting over his absence and made him promise to write to her every day and to let her know when he would be returning. He thought otherwise – “a surprise visit to a mistress one longs to see is so blissful”. He decided to surprise her, but blissfully, in the middle of the night.

He did. He surprised her in bed making love to an actor from the opera. The new boyfriend fled precipitously, hiding his modesty behind the clothes he was clutching in his hands. The knight of Malta lost his temper. Lost it to the point of fury.

This annoying mishap would have flustered anyone, but not Prevost. She explained patiently, like one trying to spell out the obvious to a dull schoolboy, that she was having sex with someone else for eminently moral reasons.

Her mother, she said, had appeared to her in a dream (she specified how her mother’s eyes were flashing in anger), and had admonished her about the evils of intimacy with a knight bound by the vow of chastity and who could never marry her and support her in the future. That voice from the grave urged her not to be devoted to the knight who would one day walk out of her life when she was most in need. She would be wrong to persist in loving none but him. Her mother’s warning had aroused in her a great sense of guilt, and the only way to overcome it was to have sex with others.

In fact, she blurted out, the one who fled from her bed was her husband – she had already entered into a marriage of convenience with the actor who had just escaped with nothing on except his fright. She made it clear she was now in a marriage of convenience with him. She forgot to explain of convenience to whom.

Only his dumbness exceeded his pain, only his credulity surpassed his love

This shattered de Mesmes, but he desperately wanted to believe all the crap she was throwing at him – and he did. “Following his tears, his sighs, his caresses and his promises, she agreed to reverse that marriage at once.” On the spur of that very emotional moment, he vowed he would make up for his failings by setting up in her favour “a life annuity of 6,000 livres a year that would secure her financial future”. Talk about denying being in denial.

Apparently, the marriage of convenience with the inconvenient actor had not been formally finalised, and Prevost reneged on it. She and de Mesmes settled back in their old idyll. With 6,000 livres a year beckoning, the dead mother felt no further need to save her daughter’s soul.

The cohabitation went on for another three years, during which the ballerina “was getting older and prone to replace her former long rides in the park with card games in her drawing room” where the light was kinder to eye bags and wrinkles, he adds in a wholly ungentlemanly aside.

She spent most of the time in front of the mirror “studying her face for blemishes, which no amount of white (the deadly white lead, abused by Elizabeth I), rouge or patches could conceal”, though refined men were still easily fired “by the dancer’s soft abandon in a Sarabande or her lascivious movements in a Tabourine”.

The ambassador grudgingly tolerated her admirers, but felt terribly annoyed by the interminable card games in which every pretext was good for men to touch her and rub against her – they offered her snuff, only to grasp and hold her hand lingeringly.

He particularly resented “the costly presents of diamonds and snuff boxes that did not come from him” to the point that “he finally banned from his mistress’s home some of these embarrassing benefactors”.

Prevost subscribed to a different school of thought. “She ran away to the country with one of these lovers.”

De Mesmes lost it completely. “His anger knew no bounds.” He stormed into her house and destroyed everything that reminded him of his vapidity. He tore the tapestries to shreds, ripped the paintings, smashed the mirrors and her portrait. His long career in diplomacy had given him a good grounding in the more polished meanders of finesse.

Then Prevost got bored of the countryside, and the money of the two innamorati ran out. “She resolved to return to him, a penitent, and was once more reinstated,” on the solemn undertaking that she would never again attempt to see her lover – here called Medor.

In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Medoro was the Saracen knight who had abducted the innocent Angelica and taken her to China, breaking Roland’s heart and driving him to madness. The choice by de Mesmes of Medor as the new lover’s stage name was surely not coincidental.The story of Angelica and Medoro had been set to music by Lully, and Prevost danced Angelica’s part every time the piece was staged between 1705 and 1727. Work out the symbolism.

Régine Astier has given a name to Prevost’s ‘Medor it was the Count of Midelbourg, Alexander Maximilien Balthazar de Gand.

Shortly after returning from the country, she announced that she was pregnant, and within seven months, in January, 1718, she gave premature birth to a little girl, Auguste. She was 37, he 44.

The ambassador “was ecstatic. Domestic bliss was complete; the past was forgotten”. He “became as good a father as he had been a lover”, and Prevost never missed an occasion to repeat how baby Auguste was the spitting image of the ambassador. He bought a house for his little girl in Pantin, to the northeast of Paris, and later gave a larger one to the mother, overlooking the gardens of the Palais-Royal.

He furnished it with all that was most precious and luxurious: paintings, bronzes, Japanese vases and furniture for all seasons. He smothered her in presents: Persian tapestries, paintings of Bacchantes, Chinese flowerpots, clocks, harpsichords. “Every trinket found its place, from medals to jars of cherries pickled in brandy.”

All his lavish spending on his mistress was subsidised by the Church benefices that his brother, the powerful Premier Presidént of France, had siphoned off in his favour – he virtually had little other income, and because of his overspending on his mistress, he started getting into serious financial straits.

For the next seven years, the couple maintained all the appearances of family bliss, until Prevost became more and more reckless in hiding her affairs, her matter-of-fact cheating.

On another unannounced visit, he again caught her in bed – with Medor, the one she had sworn eight years earlier never to meet again. De Mesmes does not, this time round, record if the lover fled hiding his manhood behind his powdered wig.

Fatigued by the burden of serial cuckolding that had become seriously facsimile, the Ambassador of Malta finally gave up. He listed all the sacrifices he had undergone because of her, including “the hostility of his family and the censure of his friends”.

He reminded her how he had ruined himself financially to satisfy every extravagance of hers. He told her he would withdraw from her life, and only take back the house and his daughter as “she is all I love, she is my honour and my conscience”. He could not leave his daughter behind.

Prevost’s answer came, calm and blast-chilling: “Forget it. The house is in my name and is mine in ownership. And as for little Auguste, you are not her father at all. You believed I was seven months pregnant by you? I was nine months pregnant by Medor” – the Count of Midelbourg.

The universe of the wretched de Mesmes collapsed when that blast hit him from his private Hiroshima. “I am confounded by such horror” – she had de-wifed and de-fathered him in one single blow.

The last three pages of his memoir contain a relentless outburst of the ambassador’s hurt, his humiliation and resentment. He calls Prevost names which it would be slipshod to consider endearing.

He ends with a flourish: “This woman has been unfaithful, had betrayed him and targeted him. It would seem fair to take away from her the furniture, the table sets, the jewellery from the home where she lives. To strip this person of her gowns of gold cloth, of her buckles of diamond girandoles, to push her back to the coarse sackcloth hovel from which the ambassador had rescued her, and to have her return to the condition of Fanchonnette, from which she should never have emerged.”

What was a personal tragedy, he managed to turn into a public circus

What the exalted knight of Malta hoped to achieve by throwing at the public all the details of this sordid, seedy love affair remains quite baffling. His former mistress claimed she had in her possession a signed and legally enforceable undertaking that he owed her 6,000 livres a year for the rest of her life, independently of any obligations to chastity or faithfulness.

Did he publish his factum to impress the judges should she come to sue him? Was it to save face in the royal circles for reneging so brazenly on a legal obligation? Was it to discredit the harlot and shatter her theatre career, then at its peak?

Whatever his motives, he only managed to draw public attention to his private woes, to make himself the laughing stock of Paris, and to bring into disrepute the Order of Malta which he represented in France between one hormone overflow and the next.

De Mesmes no doubt had many virtues, but including among them a critical intelligence may be pushing it towards extravagance. What was surely an immense personal tragedy, he managed to turn into a public circus for the amusement of the cynics.

Prevost, not surprisingly, reacted to her former lover’s soulful flare-up. In a full, but far briefer factum, she gave vent to her feelings and broadcast her point of view. Though the statement is, rightly, attributed to her, I believe that someone more literate actually wrote it, probably a lawyer. Astier reproduced the ballerina’s signature on a marriage document. She copied or drew each letter separately and laboriously – the signature of someone who can barely write.

Her statement, though far more dignified, businesslike and rational than that of the jilted lover, does not skimp on fierceness and on some wit too: if she was as awful as the ambassador had branded her to be, how is it he fell so madly in love with her? How could he for so many years have stayed by her side and settled anything on her?

Her claim for 6,000 livres a year had nothing at all to do with their sentimental life or lack of it. She had two signed documents to prove he owed her that money. At a time when he was broke (“seeing his finances deteriorating day by day” through his show-off over-spending) she had lent him 60,000 livres from her savings, to keep his accounts afloat. There was a loan agreement co-signed by the ambassador and by Prevost’s lawyer to attest to this.

As de Mesmes started experiencing difficulties in keeping up with the loan and was defaulting in repayments, on November 22, 1725, they renegotiated the terms, and agreed that he would pay her 6,000 livres a year for the rest of her life – an annuity to extinguish the loan. The National Archives in Paris still preserve the original of this document.

“The way which he recalls their first encounter makes it obvious that he is seeking neither the truth nor good sense, and that the only interest and ardent desire he has is to avoid payment; this has prompted him to cloud his memory with childish futilities that lead nowhere, and which have aroused in the public much more pity towards him than hate against his target.” That was how far “the man of honour and good faith” had been truthful in his factum.

At this point, Prevost comes to terms with the legal difficulties she had improvidently let herself into: she had not realised she was lending money to a man who, in his capacity as ambassador, could plead diplomatic immunity if sued in the courts for repayment.

She added that even the house in Pantin was part of that deal, to make good his liability should he die before her and the promised annuity becomes ineffective.

As to his other accusations against her, “she would not even deign to reply: those were complaints written by a man blinded by anger, and which the people would surely know how to judge”. The ambassador had closed his pleadings with a fine exhortation – the best part of his statement and the most truthful. She would do likewise.

She had nothing else to add except to wish that Monsieur l’ Ambassadeur would some day reflect on his high office (which prevents her from suing him) and keep in mind the eminent dignity he was vested with and the sacrosanct honour that should regulate all his actions. May he one day remember that.

I believe a contemporary lawyer best summed up this unseemly war of words. When the two facta started circulating in Paris, Mathieu Marais commented: “The Maltese memorials were equally dishonourable for both parties.” They raised “many chuckles among the populace and some eyebrows in the higher spheres”.

These memorials proved to be the definitive, if far too belated, parting of the ways. Auguste, the little girl de Mesmes had foolishly believed to be his daughter, grew up with her mother and her real father, Midelbourg, who eventually acknowledged her as his illegitimate daughter. At 15, Auguste got married and then went on to have two children, but she sadly died unexpectedly before she had reached the age of 20, when her infants were two years and eight months old respectively.

Barely four weeks after his daughter’s wedding, Midelbourg ditched Prevost to marry a girl barely 15 years old. Anyone say poetic justice? Hardly the exquisite politesse Medoro had treated Angelica with. He exited the ballerina’s life with a betrayal no less shameful than the one she had inflicted on the hapless knight of Malta.

Surely, despite the burdens of ludicrous publicity and pettiness under which the victim of the ballerina demeaned that romance-gone-sour, the ambassador had been living a love of epic proportions – a fatal obsession roller-coaster that damaged him morally and injured him socially and materially. That is often the fate of the one in any couple who loves more intensely.

Only his dumbness exceeded his pain, only his credulity surpassed his love. It is easy to turn this man’s torment into a snigger, but the price he paid for his compulsive pursuit, in terms of rejection, betrayal, distress and bruised pride must have been nothing short of tragic. Why is it that we tend to empathise with the pain of the admirable and laugh at that of the mindless?

Prevost retired from the opera, and her last years seem to have been dogged by ill-health. When she drew up her will, the notary put her down as an invalid, but sound of mind, memory and judgement.

Three years before, she had transferred to her two orphaned grandchildren what she still owed out of the dowry she had promised her daughter on her wedding day. Then, strangely and inexplicably, when she came to draw up her will, she ignores her grandchildren completely and makes not one mention of them – she left everything to her first cousin Jeanne Prevost.

De Mesmes and Prevost died a few months apart: he on February 2, 1741, and she on September 30. The ballerina who had become a household name in France asked to be buried in the chapel of St Theresa in the church of the Discalced Carme­lites, next door to where she lived. Her will bequeathed all her damask hangings to that church.

(Concluded)

Acknowledgement
I have often relied on Régine Astier’s translation of the original French documents.