The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  Mme de Montespan, who had been melancholy ever since the death in 1704 of Mme de Fontevrault, died herself in 1707, while taking the waters at Bourbon. She had a fainting fit, was given an emetic and expired a day or two later, calmly, religiously and without fear. The King was told the news at Marly as he was going out hunting; he showed no sign of emotion but, after he had killed his stag, he went for a walk alone. When he returned to the château, the Duchesse de Bourgogne asked him whether he felt sad; he replied that he had regarded Mme de Montespan as a dead person from the moment she left Versailles. But Mme de Maintenon hid herself in her privy and wept bitterly.

  In 1708, the King thought it time for Bourgogne to take part in the war. He had been to the front with Tallart 1702 and 1703, but had seen little fighting, merely some camping out and the siege of a small town which had soon fallen. Luckily for him he had stayed at home in 1704 to be with the Duchess when her baby was born, so he had not seen Tallart losing the battle of Blenheim. The Marshal’s son had been killed beside him and he himself languished in prison at Nottingham for the next seven years.

  Berri was to go with his brother and so was the ‘Chevalier de Saint-Georges’, the Old Pretender. These young men had never done any soldiering at all. The three of them were put in charge of the Duc de Vendôme, a great-nephew of Mazarin and a left-handed grandson of Henri IV. Vendôme was very friendly with du Maine, who supported him up to the hilt in order to give an air of importance to the whole species of bastards and who arranged for him to marry the ugliest of M. le Duc’s sisters. Saint-Simon said one would have to be very ambitious to marry Mlle d’Enghien, and very brave to marry M. de Vendôme, whose nose was quite eaten away by syphilis. Vendôme was disgusting and, at the age of fifty-four he looked like an old, fat, dirty, diseased woman. He was one of the King’s most unaccountable favourites — he treated Louis XIV as nobody else dared to. When they were in the middle of working out the campaign of 1708 Vendôme suddenly left Versailles to go and amuse himself with the financier Crozat and only came back again when it suited him, in spite of urgent messages from the King.

  He was enormously rich; his country seat was the Château d’Anet; the King bought his town house and built the Place Vendôme on its site.

  At the front Vendôme paraded gluttony, sloth, sodomy, and practically all the deadly sins — and amused the soldiers, who adored him. They deserved a little amusement; their lot had never been so hard in any of the King’s wars, owing to the constant breakdown of staff arrangements. Louis XIV thought that Vendôme was his best general; he was a born leader but he had one grave failing. He was too fond of entering the thick of the fight and leaving the operations to take care of themselves. The holy set at Versailles said that God would never bestow victory on one so wicked. Vendôme got to hear of this and observed that he did not imagine that Marlborough went to church much more than he did. Incredible as it may seem, the King hoped that the presence of Bourgogne would check the licentiousness of this hardened old fellow, who was to be nominally under his orders.

  The campaign was a disaster in every way. Bourgogne had no soldierly quality, he was too sensitive and took no pleasure in the fighting. The cruelty with which Vendôme’s soldiers treated the peasants, destroying their crops and raping their daughters, appalled him almost more than the horrors of the battlefield. He soon had only one idea — to stop the whole thing. The officers who were put to look after him also had only one — to bring him back alive. Unfortunately all this was well known at Versailles, so that after Eugène and Marlborough had carried off the great battle of Oudenarde. Vendôme was believed when he said that it had all been the fault of Bourgogne. According to Vendôme’s dispatches, night had fallen upon an indecisive field; he intended to stay upon his positions, when he could easily have won the battle the next day; but Bourgogne had insisted upon a retreat. In truth, the French army was beaten and on the run and Vendôme alone was responsible. He had disobeyed strict orders from Versailles and (in the words of Sir Winston Churchill) ‘embarked upon the one thing the Great King had always forbidden, an infantry battle in broken and enclosed country’. He had then indulged his love of hand-to-hand fighting, ‘crashing about like an enraged animal’ instead of remaining at the post of command. Back at his headquarters, after dark, he pretended to think that the soldiers could be rallied to begin again; his officers told him that if he stayed he would be alone upon the field; there was no alternative to a retreat. ‘Very well, gentlemen, I see that your minds are made up; so we shall have to retire. As for you, Monseigneur,’ he said, staring with bloodshot eyes at Bourgogne, ‘you have wanted this for a long time!’ Such words, addressed to the eventual heir to the throne, amounted to high treason: the bystanders waited for Bourgogne to order his arrest. But he said nothing, merely looked very sad — and was despised for it. He told Beauvilliers afterwards that he had offered up his deep humiliation as a sacrifice to God. Some of the officers wanted to carry the three princes to a safe place in a coach, escorted by five hundred soldiers, but Vendôme rightly said that this would be too shameful, so finally they rode off the field, while Nangis fought a brilliant rearguard action. Vendôme made straight for Ghent where he fell into bed and slept for thirty hours without bothering to find out what had become of his army. After this débâcle, he subsided into a sulky lethargy and left Bourgogne in full control. The young man lost Lille and other towns, entirely by his own fault — after much wavering he generally took an unlucky decision. One of his officers, exasperated, said ‘I don’t know if you will have the Kingdom in Heaven but as to an earthly one, Prince Eugène sets about it better than you do’.

  Meanwhile the King continued his usual existence. Only once was a look of anxiety (son visage altéré) noticed on his face. He went out hunting all day, to the despair of the courtiers because the post bags from the front were only opened at his return. Nearly all had loved ones in the army, and it may be imagined how feverishly they longed for letters. In the raging controversy which followed this fatal campaign most people took Vendôme’s side. Unfortunately Bourgogne had given the impression of not caring for the outcome: he never looked worried when things went badly, and instead of concentrating on military problems he was often on the tennis court or in church. Even Fénelon said that he had paid too much attention to his confessor, who ought not to have interfered with the conduct of the war. On his return to Versailles and his beloved wife, he was altogether too cheerful and carefree for one whose army had suffered such dire reverses. Mme la Duchesse, now thoroughly embittered by the treatment of her love, the Prince de Conti (still unemployed), wrote an unkind poem about Bourgogne which went the rounds, and was not the only one. The King, much affected by the loss of Lille, talked of going in person to win it back the following summer. One of the fine traits of his character was his generosity to subordinates when things went wrong. He never blamed his generals. He had written and condoled with Tallart for losing the battle of Blenheim and for the death of his son; when Tallart finally returned from England, looking very old, he made him a duke. After Ramillies, all he said to the defeated Villeroy was: ‘At our age, M. le Maréchal, one is not lucky’. He now received both Bourgogne and Vendôme most kindly, though a few weeks later, on the insistence of Marie-Adélaïde, Vendôme had a short disgrace, was removed from Flanders and sent to the Spanish front, where he succeeded brilliantly. Bourgogne never went to the wars again. But there was one good result of all this: the Duchesse de Bourgogne, vehemently on her husband’s side, was shaken out of her futile existence and began to show the stuff she was made of.

  The next year, 1709, was perhaps the most terrible that France has ever known. On 12 January the cold came down. In four days the Seine, all the rivers and the sea on the Atlantic coast were frozen solid. The frost lasted for two months, then there was a complete thaw; as soon as the snow which had hitherto afforded some protection to the land, melted away, the frost began again, as hard as ever. The winter wheat, of course, was killed, so were the fruit, o
live and walnut trees and nearly all the vines; the rabbits froze in their burrows; the beasts of the field died like flies. The fate of the poor was terrible and the rich at Versailles were not to be envied — the fires which roared up the chimneys night and day hardly altered the temperature of the enormous rooms; spirits froze on the very chimney-pieces. The Princesse de Soubise died of cold at sixty-one and so did Père de La Chaise.

  He had long been failing and had often asked to retire but the King insisted on keeping him, until he was more like a corpse than a man, with no memory or judgment left. He was succeeded by Père Tellier, a Jesuit, who came to be loathed so much so that he was perhaps chiefly responsible for the expulsion of his Order from France. A sort of Rasputin, with ardent, black eyes in a false, terrible face, ignorant and wildly ambitious, he was a peasant and boasted of it to the King, who was unimpressed since in his eyes the peasantry and the bourgeoisie rated exactly the same — the only non-royal people slightly superior, in his eyes, to the rank and file of his subjects, were dukes, Fagon, who witnessed the first interview between the King and his new confessor, said ‘What a bird of prey — I wouldn’t care to meet him on a dark night. The public which has forgiven the King all his mistresses will never forgive him this confessor’. Dear old Père de La Chaise was regretted by everybody; this sinister figure was ever at the King’s elbow. He made his influence felt pretty soon by sending the twenty-two holy women, who were all that were left at Port-Royal, to other convents. A few months later, in 1710, the convent buildings of Port-Royal were destroyed and the graveyard was desecrated. Louis XIV hesitated a good long time before taking such violent action. Tellier told him that the convent was a nest of republicanism and this dreaded word may have decided him. He had much better have left the dying sect alone. The pointless persecution — especially the violated tombs of holy and famous people — only gave it an impetus. Jansenists attributed the King’s family tragedies of the next two years to this deed; but the King probably thought that the victory of Denain was his just reward for it.

  On 21 February the Prince de Conti died, at forty-five, to the intense grief of nearly all Frenchmen except the King, M. le Duc and the Duc du Maine. His death was particularly poignant because the King, despairing of his generals, had at last decided to put Conti in command of an army. The news came too late, and indeed only served to make his last days even sadder by giving him an intense desire for life. Conti had some obscure digestive trouble; he lived for a time on milk but finally could no longer swallow anything. His old friend the Dauphin having infuriated the Parisians by driving past the Hôtel de Conti to go to the Opéra while his cousin was receiving the last rites, was told of his death as he was setting out for the hunt. He made no observation and galloped off; but who knows what memories of childhood and youth may have passed through his fair head as he followed his hounds up and down the icy glades that day? (Like his grandson, Louis XV, he hunted whatever the weather, taking no account of the horses’ legs.) Mme la Duchesse concealed her grief as best she could and decided to be a perfect wife to M. le Duc, possibly because she knew she could never love again or possibly from ambition, since M. le Duc was bound to become an important personage at the death of the King. But the tiny fellow himself died a year later, making horrible faces. He had become terrifyingly mad, and was found to have a tumour on the brain. A son and a daughter of Mme la Duchesse eventually married a daughter and a son of the Prince de Conti; they are among the ancestors of the present French pretender.

  As the winter dragged on there was a shortage of bread in Paris; after several bad riots a mob of women set out for Versailles. Louis XIV had them stopped at Sèvres and escorted back to Paris by the army. The Venetian ambassador wrote home to say that the King had better make peace, because the French nation had no stomach for defeat and privation and soon he would not be safe in his own house. (All the same, the King’s personality was such that a revolution in his lifetime would have been unthinkable.) The conversation at Versailles was of nothing but wheat, oats and barley; and Mme de Maintenon was suspected by her enemies of speculating in these commodities — without a scrap of evidence. No doubt some people really did so though on the whole there was a wave of solidarity in the land and the little that could be done, was done for the poor. Saint-Cyr, for example, was put on to reduced rations, and the surplus distributed.

  Horrible stories went the rounds, for instance, of starving children found by a magistrate huddling under the body of their father, who had hanged himself. People stayed indoors sooner than see the faces in the street, black with hunger. Public and private finances were in a desperate way; the currency lost a third of its value in a few months; the famous financier Samuel Bernard was declared bankrupt, in spite of backing from the exchequer. The King asked people to give up their silver, either to send it as a loan to his goldsmith, M. de Launay, or to sell it to the mint. Launay was to keep a list and when times improved the King would give back the weight of the metal and the permission (which in those days was always required) to make it up. In short it would be an advantage to the lender, since eventually he would have silver of the very latest style. Only about a hundred sent to Launay; more sold outright, especially dirty old family silver which was out of fashion. Many bought pottery and used it ostentatiously while hiding their silver. The King himself melted his gold plate and ate off silver gilt. He made a few other economies: indeed he was obliged to — he did not know where to turn for cash. He seemed completely unmoved, and declared that the balls and parties must go on as usual. But the Duchesse de Bourgogne, plunged in sadness, put a stop to them.

  Mansart’s beautiful chapel at Versailles was practically finished and the King went every day to see Coypel painting the ceiling. Mme de Maintenon, who never thought that Versailles would survive Louis XIV, and who cared not a rap for works of art, did her best to stop any more expenditure on the house and especially on this chapel, but fortunately she was not heeded. It is rather a pity that the famous sermons of the reign were preached either in one of the two temporary chapels at Versailles or at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, so that the visitor to the existing chapel cannot conjure up Bossuet, pointing at Louise de La Vallière, fit to sink through the floor, and booming out: Vide hanc mulierem!, or preaching the great funeral orations on Henrietta of England and Condé. Or Massillon: ‘It’s not the sovereign but the law, Sire, which must reign over the people; you are only the Prime Minister.’ Or Mascaron, bravest of all: ‘A conqueror is not better than a thief.’ And it was not here that the King frowned furiously at giggling courtiers, to double up himself with laughter when the joke was repeated to him after the service; nor here that some wag gave out that His Majesty would not be coming to evensong, so that when he did he was amazed to find exactly three people in the congregation. This chapel only served for the five, sad last years of his life. Mr Dunlop, in his book on Versailles, says quite rightly that the tour of the château ought to end, instead of beginning, with the chapel. Its plain white stone purposely affords a contrast with the gilded bronze and coloured marbles of the state rooms; it is of Gothic inspiration, calm and religious. One hopes that the King found comfort there in the trials that lay ahead.

  After the appalling winter of 1709, Louis XIV realized that he must sue for peace. Having made various preliminary moves, he was still negotiating when the season for resuming hostilities opened with the indecisive battle of Malplaquet and the loss of Mons. The Grand Alliance, thinking that France was beaten to her knees, proposed terms of unexampled severity which the King felt obliged to accept. But then they went too far. It was not enough that Louis XIV should give up Alsace, destroy the fortifications of his frontier cities, including Dunkirk, give Lille, Tournai, Ypres, Menin, Furnes, Condé and Maubeuge to the Dutch and recognize the Archduke Charles as King of Spain. They also insisted that the French Army should be used to chase Philip V off his throne. When this was explained to the King he said ‘Since I must go on fighting I would rather it were against my enemies than my gr
andchildren.’ Then he appealed to his people. The Allied demands were sent to the governors of all his provinces and published in the churches. The result was an extraordinary upsurge of patriotism; men flocked to the colours. The Spaniards, too, were still fighting like demons for Philip — heroes of resistance, said the French; a rascally foot militia, said General Stanhope. Feeling that both he and his grandson had the moral support of their subjects, Louis XIV decided to continue the war. His courage was to be amply rewarded.

  19. THREE IN ELEVEN MONTHS

  Me sera-t-il permis d’ouvrir un tombeau devant la cour?

  BOSSUET

  For half a century Frenchmen had assumed that, at the death of Louis XIV, they would be governed by the Grand Dauphin. In 1711 the King, though in excellent health, was over seventy while his son, though no longer young, had hardly ever known a day’s illness. The Dauphin’s heir was a young man with two brothers and two little boys of his own. Louis used to say that the succession to the French throne had not been so well assured for hundreds of years. The schemers and plotters who always surround pinnacles of power were divided into two factions, looking either to the Dauphin or to Bourgogne. It was not possible to be well with both of them: the two men disliked each other to such a point that the Dauphin’s entourage had taken Vendôme’s side after Oudenarde. Those who paid their court to the father had an eye on the immediate future, whereas the son stood for the present, through his wife’s influence over Louis XIV, and the more distant future when he would reign. In a way this seemed the better investment, especially as the Dauphin led a curiously enclosed life, mostly at Meudon, into which it was not easy to penetrate. His companions were his wife Mlle de Choin, fatter and squashier than ever, and his two sisters, the once beautiful Princesse de Conti and the ever adorable Mme la Duchesse. Even among his intimates the Dauphin spoke so little that it seemed as if he counted his words, only allowing himself a limited number — impossible to tell if he were pleased or displeased or how much or how little he knew of public events. He certainly knew what went on in the countryside, and though so submissive and timid with the King he was among those few who dared to broach the unpopular topic of the peasant and his dreadful lot. He got a resounding snub for his pains. His servants were devoted to him and so were his two younger sons. Mlle de Choin must have loved him since she got no advantage whatever from her position except that of sitting in an armchair, when the Duchesse de Bourgogne only had a footstool at Meudon, and referring to her as ‘la Duchesse’ instead of ‘Mme la Duchesse de Bourgogne’. Mlle de Choin was not interested in politics, dressed like a poor person and did not own a carriage; she used to go from Paris to rejoin the Dauphin at Meudon, when he had been absent, in a hackney cab. She slept in the state bedroom next to his but when the King visited Meudon she was relegated to an entresol. She and Mme de Maintenon (the two sultanas, as Saint-Simon called them) were on pretty good terms. But Mme de Maintenon despised the Meudon set and was very much afraid that Mme la Duchesse would take the Duchesse de Bourgogne’s rightful place when the Dauphin succeeded to the throne.