La princesse de Clèves (1961)

In 1559, Henry II’s reign is nearing its end, while the lavish life at the Valois court is full of hypocrisy and deceit. Mademoiselle de Chartres marries the Prince of Clèves, who is twenty years her senior, without loving him. At the wedding ball held at the Louvre Palace, Queen Catherine de’ Medici is wildly jealous of Diane de Poitiers, the king’s influential mistress, who may also once have been the mistress of his late father, Francis I. Courted by the Vidame of Chartres, Catherine orders him to devote himself entirely to her, on pain of terrible punishment. The queen’s daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, unhappily married to the king’s young son, the dauphin and future Francis II, watches for the arrival of the Duke of Nemours, whom she secretly loves and whose reputation as a seducer is known even at the English court, where Henry II is impatient for Nemours to become king. By chance, during a dance figure, the beautiful bride finds herself without a partner. As a forfeit, King Henry II tells her to invite the first man to arrive to dance. The Duke of Nemours enters at that very moment. Thus the gentle young princess meets the handsome, brilliant lord of the court. From the outset, the princess is as troubled as the duke. The two young people meet again from time to time: at a portrait-painter’s sitting and at a game of real tennis. A tender feeling soon binds them, revealed through apparently trivial incidents that are nonetheless full of meaning, such as the exchange of scarves that Clèves notices. He adores his wife, but is not happy: “You have for me, madam, only a kind of affection that cannot satisfy me.” The princess swears fidelity to him and vows that she will not break her oath. She longs for happiness but cannot barter away her virtue. She wants to love without betraying. The Vidame of Chartres, the princess’s cousin and Nemours’s friend, has lost a love letter. If it falls into Queen Catherine de’ Medici’s hands, the vidame’s days are numbered. The unsigned letter is found by the king’s treacherous, hypocritical jester, who immediately hands it to the dauphine, Mary Stuart. She sends it to the Princess of Clèves to authenticate the handwriting. Chartres asks Nemours for help, so that he will agree to pass himself off as the letter’s recipient; reading it greatly saddens the princess. Nevertheless, at her husband’s request, she agrees to receive Nemours, who succeeds in convincing her of his sincerity. She then decides to burn the letter. But the ruthless queen, warned by the sinister jester of Chartres’s infidelity, demands it. To save their cousin Chartres, the Prince of Clèves asks his wife to rewrite the letter together with the Duke of Nemours, who can now claim it as his own. The time they spend jointly composing this declaration of love gives them an exquisite moment of intimacy, during which Nemours thinks he has secretly taken the princess’s portrait without her noticing. When the queen reads the letter, she is not fooled and throws the jester into the dungeon. Madame de Clèves, realizing that her love for Nemours is growing ever stronger, asks her husband to let her withdraw to the country, to the château at Coulommiers. During a walk, the princess tells her husband she no longer wants to return to court because she is in danger of falling in love there. She confesses that she loves another man but, despite the prince’s insistence, does not name him. Hidden nearby, the Duke of Nemours hears this confession and understands that the princess is speaking of him, because she alludes to the theft of her portrait, so precious to her husband. Assuring her husband of her innocence and fidelity, the princess implores him to protect her. Clèves agrees out of love. Proud and happy to know of the princess’s love for him, Nemours makes the mistake of recounting the scene to the Vidame of Chartres without revealing the identities of those involved or saying that the story concerns him. But soon the whole court has heard the rumor, encouraged by Mary Stuart, who wants revenge on her rival, the Princess of Clèves. At the royal tournament, in the depths of despair, the princess accuses her husband of spreading her confession in order to discover the identity of her rival. Unaware of the Duke of Nemours’s indiscretion, they each accuse the other of having started the rumor. The Prince of Clèves, guessing that his wife loves the Duke of Nemours, decides they will soon return to Coulommiers. But during a joust, a splinter from a lance strikes the king in the eye, and he dies. Now a widow, Catherine takes her revenge by banishing Diane. “The king is dead, long live the king!” While the Prince of Clèves is kept at Chambord in the service of the new king, Francis II, his wife returns to Coulommiers to rest. Madly in love, Nemours goes there hoping to see her, but he is not alone: Mary Stuart, suspecting the duke’s intentions, has sent the jester to spy on him. Recklessly, Nemours tries to enter his beloved’s bedroom at night, but has to withdraw in haste for fear of being caught by the maids. The prince, informed by the vile jester, suffers a violent fainting spell. Learning that her husband is gravely ill, the princess returns to Chambord for a final conversation with her dying husband. She denies having had any affair with the Duke of Nemours, but cannot convince him of her innocence: he dies of grief, convinced that he has been betrayed. Faithful to the memory of a husband she tenderly respected, if not loved, the Princess of Clèves rejects the Duke of Nemours’s love, holding him responsible for her husband’s death. Nevertheless, Chartres arranges for the two young people to meet, and at last they confess their love to each other. The princess then returns to her solitude at her retreat in Coulommiers. And when, weakened by her wasting illness and no longer able to endure her life, she arranges to meet Nemours, it is too late. By the time he arrives, the princess is dead. “She has nothing more to fear from this world!”