Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/248

 Valois homosexual, and a type in general of the unprincipled, vicious, effeminate prince. Three of Henri's so-called "mignons" (a word that turned into the English "minion" now has lost its full offense) were François Maugiron (Duc de Bellegarde); the Duc d'Epernon; and the even more celebrated Quélus. To all of them Henri was attached by passions that bordered on erotic manias; to none so much as to Quélus. The assassination of Quélus brought Henri to a morbid climax of grief, like that of Alexander the Great for Hephaestion. Another royal French homosexual was Louis XIII, a somewhat more tolerable uranian, but not much more so in the weakness, fatuity, faithlessness and selfish egotism that gave full play to the statecraft of Richelieu. The most impassioned uranistic love of Louis XIII was that for Henri d'Effiat, better known as the Marquis de Cinq-Mars. Not only a private and political vengeance made Richelieu inflexible in demanding the death-penalty for this young nobleman, when Cinq-Mars was detected in his famous conspiracy; for the great Minister was resolved to break forever the sentimental influence of Cinq-Mars on Louis. Cinq-Mars seems romantically homosexual also in his relation to his nearest friend, François-Auguste de Thou, the son of the historian. De Thou was a quite different type from Cinq-Mars. Highly intellectual, profoundly moral and religious, the latter trait was emphasized even to pietism in de Thou. But his passion for young Cinq-Mars—considerably his junior—was intense. De Thou not only joined in the ill-starred plot in devotion to d'Effiat, but may be said to have deliberately thrown away his life, rather than survive his friend. Both ascended the scaffold at Lyons.

Another French sovereign, one of wholly different stamp from the two just named, the marvellously politic tyrannical, superstitious, cruel Louis XI, impresses one as an innately uranistic nature; uniting it with a cold-blooded homicidal mania worthy of Caligula. One of Louis's special