The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  Mme de Montespan and Mme de Thianges obtained a percentage on the meat and tobacco sold in Paris, and numerous other benefits with which they were to make their fortunes. All the same, Mme de Montespan had some pride — she never would take jewels from the King. May this have been because the ones he lent her were even larger and finer than any he would have given away?

  4. THE ENVELOPE

  Le luxe est la discipline de l’abondance.

  ANDRÉ GIDE

  In 1674 the King began going to Versailles for prolonged visits; the enlarged house was more or less habitable and he was able to take his family, some of the courtiers and the government officials. The ministers now had lodgings of their own so that they could bring the archives, many waggon-loads of them, as they always had to do when the Court went for the annual visit to Fontainebleau, and work there properly. Louis XIV, his wife and his mistress were comfortably lodged at last. He lived on the first floor of the old château, behind the windows of his father’s rooms which faced both east and west, since the Galerie des Glaces had not yet shut up the western wall. His private sitting-rooms were at a right angle to his bedroom, facing south over the Cour de Marbre. This courtyard was the business side of the château, the scene of comings and goings; all the kings who lived at Versailles liked to keep an eye on it; Louis XV had a secret window through which he could see and not be seen; Louis XVI went so far as to set up a telescope. The Cour de Marbre was sometimes called the Cour du Louvre because it was only available to those who had the privilege of bringing their coaches into the great square courtyard of the Louvre — princes, dukes, marshals of France and ambassadors.

  The Queen’s rooms, also on the first floor, were in the southern part of the ‘envelope’ or new building and the beautiful ‘Queen’s staircase’ led to them. Her bedroom and drawing-rooms looked across the Orangery and Pièce d’Eau des Suisses up to the wooded heights of Satory. Here she herself died and so did one other Queen, Marie Leczinska, and two Dauphines, and here nineteen royal children were born. Versailles was fated never to have a queen who could sustain the rôle as envisaged by Louis XIV; there was never to be another Anne of Austria. He wanted somebody who would not only shine in society, with infinite politeness, and ornament the royal pageant, but also rule over the courtiers and take an interest in their human problems. Marie-Thérèse knew very well how to behave at ceremonies and if her husband had no reason to be proud of her, he had no reason to be ashamed either. But she had the mentality of a child, liked to play with little dogs and half-mad dwarfs and never learnt to speak French properly; she made no impact on her subjects. In spite of a pretty face she was not attractive; she had short legs and black teeth from eating too much chocolate and garlic. The King was fond of her and treated her in a fatherly way; and she worshipped him, though she avoided being left alone with him, it embarrassed her. One kind look from him made her happy all day. She believed everything he told her and the courtiers knew that she always repeated things to him. She suffered agonies of jealousy. At the beginning of the King’s affair with Louise de La Vallière she had tried to assert herself by refusing to sleep with him. This was a very bad idea; it alienated him completely — months, and the intervention of the Queen Mother, were needed before their relationship became normal once more. ‘The Lady of the Manor’ as Mme de Sévigné called her, never tried that again. According to various contemporaries, the King and Queen had a black daughter who was kept in a convent near Melun. Certainly a little ‘Moor’ existed there and was regularly visited by the Queen and women of the royal family when the Court was at Fontainebleau. Whether she was really the daughter of Marie-Thérèse and Louis XIV will probably never be known.

  The King’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, always known as Monsieur, had temporary rooms in the château of 1674 and a much grander suite when Versailles became even bigger. Until the Dauphin grew up Monsieur was the most important person at the Court. Louis was devoted to him though he regarded him as a joke and sometimes as a bad joke at that. Physically he was a caricature of his brother, three-quarters his height and more oriental-looking, swarthy, with eyes like black currants. In spite of being one of history’s most famous sodomites, Monsieur had two wives, a mistress and eleven legitimate children of whom seven died in infancy or were born dead; and he is the ‘grandfather of Europe’. Every Roman Catholic royal family has him among its ancestors; all the kings of France after Louis XIV, as well as Marie-Antoinette and the son of Napoleon descend from him. He modelled himself on the exquisite Henri III, even to the point of being devout, though this also came from his love of ceremony. Carefully brought up by Mazarin and Anne of Austria in total ignorance of public affairs, so that he should not embarrass his brother with political ambitions, his interests in life were clothes and jewels, parties, etiquette (on which he was sound), objects of art and boys. He loved his château at Saint-Cloud, which was perhaps the most attractive of all the royal country residences; the King also gave him Richelieu’s town house, the Palais-Royal.

  In his youth Monsieur was partial to battles. He would arrive rather late on the field, having got himself up to kill; painted, powdered, all his eyelashes stuck together; covered with ribbons and diamonds — hatless. He never would wear a hat for fear of flattening his wig. Once in action he was as brave as a lion, only afraid of what the sun and dust might do to his complexion; and he proved an excellent strategist. But he soon found warfare too fatiguing; he was the only member of his family not to require violent exercise; he never went out hunting and seldom put his nose out of doors if he could help it.

  Monsieur could be amusing — he was a chatterbox and at family gatherings his was the voice mostly heard. Louis, who had no small talk, said he was glad of it when he thought of the rivers of nonsense spouted by his brother. He treated the King with an infinitely respectful familiarity; he knew his place and stayed in it; the King responded affectionately but with more than a hint of condescension: ‘Now we are going to work; go and amuse yourself, Brother.’ He always called him ‘Mon Frère’ — Monsieur called the King ‘Monsieur’. Sometimes the two of them would quarrel, that is to say Monsieur, who was extremely touchy, would behave rather like a Pomeranian yapping at a lion, for their set-tos were always of his making. This sort of thing was typical: a gentleman of his household, M. de Flamarens, offended Monsieur in some way and he dismissed him on a slender pretext. (The little court at Saint-Cloud is described by contemporaries as ‘stormy’.) Soon afterwards Flamarens appeared at one of the King’s evening parties. Monsieur, shaking with anger, went to the King and said ‘Monsieur, Flamarens is being disrespectful to me. I did not forbid him your house as I know it would not be in order for me to do so, but I forbade him to appear before me and I find it very strange and insolent that he should be here.’ ‘But, Brother,’ said the King, ‘it’s not my fault!’ Monsieur then became so furious that the King said they had better talk about it when he was calmer; but the subject was never raised again and Flamarens continued to appear at Court.

  Monsieur’s first wife was his cousin Henrietta of England, much loved by all except him. She was the subject of Bossuet’s sermon, delivered to a loudly sobbing Court: ‘Madame se meurt; Madame est morte—(1670). It was freely said in England that Madame was dead because she was poisoned by Monsieur’s two minions, the Chevalier de Lorraine and the Marquis d’Effiat, and that her husband was an accessory before the fact; but nobody who knew the little man believed this. Very probably she was not murdered at all. Her health had always been bad; all her eight children but two were still-born, one of them quite rotten, or died immediately; she was opened after her death and found to have an abscess on her liver. Be it as it may, Monsieur was ruled by Lorraine and d’Effiat to the end of his life. The King himself, who hated sodomites as a rule, was partial to the Chevalier de Lorraine, beautiful to look at and an amusing scoundrel.

  After a year of freedom, Monsieur married again, another close relation of the English royal family, Princess Elizabeth-
Charlotte (Liselotte) of the Palatinate. She was a Protestant and had to be converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry a French prince; as a result she lost her claim, which was better than that of George I, to the throne of England. She did not mind at all — she disliked the English if possible even more than she did the French and became a good Catholic, although retaining a certain Protestant manner during her devotions. She found the French Catholics less bigoted than the Germans! ‘Whoever wishes may read the Holy Scriptures and one is not obliged to believe in nonsense and stupid miracles. The Pope is not adored here and no value is set on pilgrimages and such things.’

  Madame the second was a great blonde Teutonic tomboy; delicate little Monsieur seemed to be his wife’s wife. When he first saw her he told his friends, despairingly, that he would never be able to manage. However, by dint of hanging holy medals in a certain place, rather impeding any pleasure Madame might have felt, he did manage and they had three children. After that, by mutual consent, they slept in different beds. He liked Liselotte better than Henrietta, who was an intriguer and, he thought, might have had lovers. The courtiers noticed that the King too seemed fonder of her. Their short flirtation over, he had never paid much attention to Henrietta. Liselotte had one great advantage in her husband’s eyes: she did not care for diamonds, so that he was able to plaster his own clothes with all he had. Somebody asked their little boy, the Duc de Chartres, if he was fond of dressing up: ‘I like it better than Madame does, but not as much as Monsieur.’ She never bothered about clothes; she only had full dress gowns and riding habits.

  Madame adored hunting; she rode hard, eight hours on end, looking like an enormous policeman, until well over sixty. She was fond of animals and had many pets; little dogs and a tame duck; she hoped they had immortal souls, while doubting whether anybody had. She also collected medals and geological specimens. The rest of her time was spent in a small room lined with portraits of German princes, writing letters — at least thirty pages every day to various royal relations all over Europe, including Henrietta’s two daughters, the Duchess of Savoy and the Queen of Spain, whom she loved like younger sisters. She is one of the best sources of information about Versailles, but her letters, entertaining as they are, are not quite reliable. Like Saint-Simon, who arrived at the Court twenty-three years later than she did, she was full of prejudices and was inclined to invent all sorts of lies with which to justify them. She complained bitterly about the French! ‘People only have to marry in France and the desire to laugh will leave them.’ But she liked Versailles; she said it was so comfortable having everything under the same roof and the hunting at one’s door. She hated Paris.

  Madame knew quite well that her letters were opened by the King’s police and often read by him — she used them in the rashest way, to let off steam or tell home truths as she never would have dared to his face. She was obsessed by him; probably in love with him. Monsieur and Madame were both very fond of Mme de Montespan. Madame does not seem to have been jealous of her, as she was of the King’s later attachment. She was already established as mistress before Madame arrived in France, besides which Athénaïs got on with everybody.

  Madame described her day as follows: she gets up at nine and goes where you can guess; then says her prayers, reads three chapters of the Bible, dresses and receives visits. At eleven, she reads and writes for an hour. After chapel comes dinner, over at about two. Then, on days when there is no hunting, she reads and writes until the King’s supper at a quarter to eleven. He often doesn’t appear until half past. At twelve-thirty he says goodnight. When there is a play it is given at about seven (the King grew to like the theatre less and less but Monsieur and Madame greatly enjoyed it and in the end he only had plays at Versailles when they were there). On hunting days Madame gets up at eight and goes to church at eleven.

  At the beginning of Mme de Montespan’s reign, she and the King received their friends at Versailles in a large and beautiful flat on the ground floor called the Appartement des Bains. It contained a sort of Turkish or Roman bath, with rooms for washing and for resting and one with a large marble basin, filled with warm water, where people, having already washed, could disport themselves. The inhabitants of Versailles were by no means as dirty as has sometimes been said, although then, as now, some people were cleaner than others. The King and his brother were almost fanatically clean in their persons; they were rubbed down with spirits every morning, before the ceremonial lever; and they changed their linen three times a day. Mlle de La Vallière and her daughter, too, were clean to the point of fussiness; Mme de Montespan was a grubby woman. The Queen’s chief pleasure in life was long, hot baths. (The soap which they used was made at Marseilles from olive oil.) As for the château, Madame thought it rather dirty, and with such crowds milling to and fro it could hardly have been polished and shiny like some small German palace. But it is certainly not true to say that people relieved themselves on the staircase; there were privies in the courtyard where the W.C.s are now. When crowds came down from Paris for balls or fêtes there was sometimes a queue for the public conveniences and then a rich bourgeois in a hurry would pay a nobleman’s servant as much as four louis to be conducted to his master’s privy. Versailles was not unique in depending upon the chamber-pot and the chaise percée for all sanitation; most houses and palaces did so until the twentieth century. The present writer well remembers arriving at Buckingham Palace to be presented, in 1923, after a long, chilly wait in the Mall; and finding that the only possibility offered was a chamber-pot behind a screen in the ladies’ cloakroom.

  Mme de Montespan was lodged next door to the King’s own flat, in rooms looking south on to the courtyard. They have been completely refashioned by subsequent occupants in the eighteenth century and are now shown as the Cabinet Doré of Mme Adélaïde and the library of Louis XVI. But the windows are the same. When Mme de Montespan and Louis XIV were known to be together behind these windows, the courtiers would do anything sooner than pass underneath them — they called it going before the firing squad. Both she and the King frightened people; she was a tease, a mocking-bird, noted for her wonderful imitations and said to be hard-hearted. This meant that she regarded serious events with a cheerful realism; she was not sentimental. When her coach ran over a man and killed him the other women present all cried — they reproached Athénaïs for seeming unmoved. But she pointed out that they only cried because they had seen the thing happening; they never gave a thought to the men who were run over every day. She received a message from Mme de Maintenon to say that her children’s house was on fire. As she was at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the house was in Paris there was nothing she could do about it — she remarked that no doubt it would bring the children good luck and went on playing cards.

  As for Louis XIV, it would be impossible to exaggerate the terror which he inspired, and with good reason. He had a ruthless side to his nature, especially when he was young. This came partly from lack of imagination and partly because he thought it was his duty to uphold the dignity of God’s representative on earth. A poor woman once shouted crazy insults at him. Her son had been killed in an accident during the building of Versailles and people thought that when the King heard the whole story he would surely forgive her. But he had her whipped. People talked under their breath of the Man in the Iron Mask, that prisoner of quality kept in solitary confinement, of whom nobody knew either the identity or the crime. Some courtiers lost out hunting were welcomed, warmed and fed by a mysterious gentleman whose house they came upon in the forest not twenty miles from Versailles. He turned out to be an old Frondeur who had lived there peacefully ever since the rebellion, an event so remote that it seemed like history to the new generation. The King’s friends thought to amuse him with this adventure; to their horror, and in spite of all their protests, the man was arrested and executed. One of Louis’ small, intimate set, Lauzun, spent ten years in a fortress either for wanting to marry the Grande Mademoiselle, the King’s cousin, or for going too far with his
jokes — in short, for being altogether above himself.

  Louis XIV took no account of feminine weaknesses. If one of his mistresses was pregnant she was told to conceal the fact; when her time came she had better have the baby quickly and silently and join the other courtiers as soon as the child had been smuggled out of sight. ‘Why so pale, Mademoiselle?’ the Queen unkindly asked Louise de La Vallière, knowing quite well why. ‘Too many tuberoses and lilies in my room, Your Majesty.’

  When he travelled from one of his houses to another he only took women with him in his coach — his mistress, later on his daughters or great friends. He thought if he spent several hours alone with a man he would be sure to ask some boon and embarrass the King. These journeys, except for the prestige they gave, were a real torment to his companions. In the coldest weather all the windows had to be kept open as he could not bear stuffiness. The ladies were expected to be merry, to eat a great deal (he hated people to refuse food) and to have no physical needs which would force them to leave the coach. If by any chance they were taken ill, fainted, or felt sick, they could expect no sympathy; on the contrary, disfavour set in. One of his closest friends, the Duchesse de Chevreuse, Colbert’s daughter, went alone with him from Versailles to Fontainebleau, a journey which took about six hours. Hardly had they left Versailles when she was seized with a pressing and seemingly irresistible need to retire. She knew that there was nothing to be done, though every mile that went by increased her misery. About half way there the King stopped the coach and a meal was served; she ate and drank as little as she possibly could but even that little made her condition worse. She cast longing glances at a peasant’s house near by but dared not go to it. They started off again. Several times she nearly fainted, but she hung on and at last they arrived. Her brother-in-law, the Duc de Beauvilliers, was waiting in the courtyard to meet them and she hissed in his ear the state she was in, saying she would never be able to get as far as her own room. He hurried her to the chapel and mounted guard while she relieved herself there.