The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon

by Veronica Buckley

  No woman, in any case, could have satisfied the promiscuously homosexual Monsieur, though Monsieur himself had met his marital duty manfully. From his first marriage, two daughters survived, and by the time of Françoise’s arrival at court, Liselotte herself had a son, Alexandre—“so terrifically big and strong, he’s much more of a German than a Frenchman; everyone here says he takes after me, so you’ll gather he’s no oil painting”—and she had recently conceived a second. Though not beautiful, Liselotte was at least no fool; utterly unaffected, shrewd and witty, with an earthy, self-deprecating humour, she had endeared herself surprisingly strongly to both husband and brother-in-law.

  Where Monsieur was concerned, she had understood the state of the case at once. Accepting their mutual duty to produce a few dynastic scions, the pair had agreed to demand no more of each other, and in consequence became, at least for most of the time, relaxed and affectionate friends. As for the King, though he could not admire Liselotte for any womanly charm, he did enjoy her company. Their mutual passion for stag-hunting, not shared by the Queen or any of Louis’s mistresses, brought them regularly together, and he was constantly amused by her pithy observations on the vanity and hypocrisy of the court. But, like the Queen, Liselotte dreamed of more from the King, and the very impossibility of her dream embittered her towards the women he admired, and more than any of them, towards Françoise. “The King invites me every Saturday to Madame de Montespan’s medianoche,” Liselotte informed her Aunt Sophie in Hanover, and every Saturday at this midnight supper she encountered the governess, beautiful, amusing, and most frustrating: being neither vain nor hypocritical, nor flirtatious, nor frivolous, she provided none of the usual easy targets for Liselotte’s pungent wit. The solid princess was reduced to disparaging the Widow Scarron for her humble background and modest position at court, the only respects in which Liselotte herself indisputably had the advantage.

  It was unfortunate, for in fact the two had much in common, and they might have formed an alliance of good sense to counter the costumed piglets and other follies that infected so much of court life. Neither was a natural courtier, each lacking the instinct to manipulate and dissimulate, so necessary to hold one’s own in “that country.” Françoise either said what she thought or said nothing at all; Liselotte simply said what she thought, and added a rude joke. Both women were clever without being intellectual, both witty, both fond of children; both missed the quiet pleasures of family life in the country—stocky Liselotte even missed “running and jumping about”—metaphorically, perhaps. Not least, both held to a straightforward, practical Christianity, dismissive of rosary beads and statues, unimpressed by the melodramatic lives of the Catholic saints and martyrs. Though both were now formally children of Rome, Liselotte was Lutheran by birth and unsubtle temperament, and Françoise at least half-Huguenot, by upbringing and by nature, too. “If people hadn’t been likely to talk, I wouldn’t even bother going to mass on a Sunday,” she had said, and Liselotte would no doubt have agreed. “Catholic sermons are too long,” she sighed, jolting awake at the end of one of them. “They work on me like opium. The minute one starts, I fall asleep, and it’s the same whenever nuns start singing.”

  Above all, both Françoise and Liselotte were outsiders, suspect in times of conflict for their earlier Protestant lives, never quite fitting in among the silky courtiers born and bred, never quite sure of their place in the pecking order. As the wife of Monsieur, Liselotte (“Madame”) supposedly held precedence after the women of the King’s immediate family, but in the attitudes of the court it was not so simple: Liselotte was obliged to make unofficial way for Louise de la Vallière, still maîtresse déclarée, and for Athénaïs, always pushing her way into the front row, and now and then even for Madame Scarron, treated with rather more deference than she was strictly entitled to.

  But if this was true, Françoise herself took no reassurance from it. Certainly, her graceful and contained manner encouraged the courtiers to behave towards her with respect: no one was going to push her off her chair or try to pinch her bottom, or berate her or make fun of her in public—though from time to time Athénaïs issued instructions to her, each one a tiny humiliation, as if she were a maidservant. Her place at court, all the same, was not secure; at any moment she could be dismissed by Athénaïs, or even by the King. But then, it was not her ambition to spend her life at court. She had her 6,000 livres a year, and with that, she could be comfortable anywhere. The pension could be revoked, of course, but so vindictive a step was unlikely. All that mattered, while she remained at court, was that she should continue to receive the respect which she so prized, and without which she could not thrive. While Liselotte willed her to slip down a rung or two, Françoise battled, mostly with herself, to keep a steady footing. “You’re very particular about what’s due to you,” she said to her Mignon, in an unreflecting reprimand. “Look at the King: he is relaxed and polite; he never makes a fuss about what’s due to him.” “Ah, but Madame,” replied the clever little boy, “the King is sure of his position, while I cannot be sure of mine.”

  Secure in himself at court, Louis was by now equally secure in his kingdom. No threat remained from ambitious princes seizing the advantage in a country weakly governed. The civil wars of the King’s early youth had brought the lesson firmly home, contributing in no small part to his determination to maintain an absolute monarchy. After ten years of personal rule, with the Fronde almost twenty years in the past, he was confident of his own power and popularity. In 1667, he had instructed the Paris and provincial parlements to confirm all his royal edicts as the law of the land, and they had supinely accepted the instruction without a murmur.

  “The old parliamentary resistance has fallen out of fashion,” wrote Colbert. “It’s all so long ago now that people scarcely remember it.” As for the princes, they were sufficiently occupied, it seemed, in money-making and social politicking at the newly vibrant court—the antidote to plotting and Frondes that Louis had hoped. So it was not to distract his nobles and safeguard his own position at home that the King and his minister now decided to engage in a foreign war. Rather, it was a matter of national prosperity, at least for Colbert—and for Louis, a matter of national pride.

  Colbert was a convinced “mercantilist” in the fashion of the day, a believer in strict protections for his own nation’s commerce, and constant, no-holds-barred attacks on everyone else’s. As Minister for Finance and Secretary of State for the Navy, he was perfectly placed to manage both sides of the equation, with ultimate control of tariffs and taxes and all the nation’s shipping, not only the vessels and galleys of the war fleet but, lucratively, the merchant fleet as well. Both fleets were as yet small in comparison with those of other powers—the Swedish, for example, or the English, and especially the Dutch—but things were soon to be different: Colbert had already set in train a massive programme of naval expansion. With this completed, he believed, France was bound to emerge the victor of these ongoing “money wars,” since France was by nature endowed more bountifully than any other nation in Europe. Only France was large enough, its people numerous enough, its towns sufficiently inventive, its climate and lands sufficiently diverse and fertile, to provide every need of its own, and still have produce and goods to spare, to sell beyond its borders.

  All dreams and rhetoric: in a man less powerful than Colbert, it would have been recognized at once for the wishful thinking that it was. France in 1672 was rich only in potential, and its insignificant navy was the least of its commercial problems. Its population of twenty-two million was boasted of as the largest in the whole of Europe—“Monsieur Colbert said that a King’s wealth lay in having many subjects; he wanted everyone to get married and have children”—but, if the largest, it was also among the most backward.

  A hundred years and more after Flemish and English farmers had begun the productive enclosure of lands, the peasants of France, some three-quarters of the population, were still working according to the wasteful “fa
llow field” system of the Middle Ages, effectively leaving a third of the country’s arable land untilled. Their tools were medieval, too, commonly made of wood and wicker; a lucky man might possess a solid wheat scythe imported from the Habsburg lands. Far from producing surplus goods for trade, France was nowhere near providing even for its own consumption: the poorer Frenchman, as often as not, was clothed in Spanish wool and ate from English tin, while his richer compatriot wore elegant fabrics from Leiden and dined from plates of German or South American silver, before retiring to bed in sheets of English linen. France’s soldiers went into battle armed with Swedish muskets charged with Flemish gunpowder, supported by Danish cannon pulled by horses shod with good Flemish iron. Copper for French coins came from Japan; one tiny southern town produced the only steel in the land, and after two centuries of valuable coal-mining in England and the nearby Spanish Netherlands, the French had made no effort to exploit their own reserves of this most promising of minerals. The very cheese eaten in France was, much of it, Dutch. And all of it, cheese, gunpowder, copper, linen, everything, passed through the busy hands of the merchants of Amsterdam, whose enterprise and industry had created a golden age for their own United Provinces of the Netherlands.

  France had no banks, no stock exchange, nor even a proper national exchequer. The needs of the state were financed spasmodically by loans from banquiers (actually merchants) to the King, commonly at 25 percent interest. The ensuing huge liabilities were frequently reduced by devaluation of the currency—a tactically shrewd step, perhaps, but strategically naïve, since it encouraged the better off to keep their wealth “sleeping” in elaborate silverware and other expensive household goods, so reducing the amount of money in general circulation and hampering trade throughout the country. France was rich in land and in people, and it should have been rich in fact, but in 1672, the tiny, windblown, half-drowned Dutch Republic, with its paltry million and a half souls, was very much richer, indeed by far the richest country in Europe.

  It was more than Louis could stand. These plain Dutch boers, with their great black-and-white cows spurting the best quality milk and their disconcertingly productive farms and market gardens, these shop-soiled townsmen, jangling the coins of fifty different countries in their pockets, consulting one another everlastingly in their citizens’ councils, had not even a king to call their own. It was an affront to the princely houses of Europe that they dared to call themselves a nation at all. Disgusted by their Protestant pride and ambition, and “tired of these [commercial] insolences,” intoned Jean Racine, Louis’s dutiful poet-turned-historiographer, “the King resolved to punish them.”

  In reality, the pride and ambition belonged above all to Louis himself. The French could not remotely compete with the vast network of international trade masterminded from Amsterdam. Even the produce of France’s Caribbean islands, the indigo and tobacco in which Françoise’s wayward father had planted his hopes, and the laboriously cultivated sugar, prospering at last on her own childhood islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, were bought and sold by the Dutch.

  As if all this were not injury enough, the little republic had added two grave insults to la grande nation. First, the Dutch had instigated an alliance with England and Sweden to contain French ambitions in the Spanish Netherlands, then slipping from the grasp of a weakened Spain: at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668, this “Triple Alliance” had been able to pressure France into handing back to Spain much of the territory it had only just conquered. And subsequently, they had declined to accept a French invitation to a dual partitioning of the Spanish Netherlands. Louis had regarded this latter affair almost as a question of noblesse oblige, and was shocked to be repulsed by the upstart pseudo-nation, but the Dutch had preferred to avoid having a clearly aggressive France as their immediate neighbour. “When a Prince is wounded in his reputation…this is the subject of a just war,” wrote the English polemicist Henry Stubbes, hitting the French nail precisely on the head. Colbert’s worries about cheese and gunpowder aside, Louis’s offended pride proved a more than sufficient casus belli.

  The ground for war had been prepared by secret diplomatic overtures to others who stood to lose by the Dutchmen’s vibrant trading successes, notably their two partners in the Triple Alliance. Sweden’s herring men and England’s cloth and timber men were more than pleased to anticipate a reversal of the United Provinces’ too-happy trading fortunes; the Swedish government agreed to stand aside and let France have its way, and the English lent the power of their substantial navy to assist the small French fleet.

  Since the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, concluded very much to their advantage, the Dutch had neglected matters of national defence to pour all their resources into trading, so that by 1672 their army had declined to a mishmash of poorly trained soldiers and casual militias, standing to desultory arms in a series of crumbling fortresses. In consequence, when Louis rode off northwards on May 12 of that year, he was anticipating a second promenade militaire in the mode of his 1667 War of Devolution. Confident of a victory that would dazzle the Dutch into permanent submission, and determined to reinforce it by his own majestic presence, he even allowed a flicker of glory to illuminate a stunned Queen Marie-Thérèse, who found herself declared Regent of France for the duration of His Majesty’s absence—to no great harm, since Colbert remained behind with her.

  Leading the 120,000 French troops, apart from the King himself, were Maréchal Turenne and the prince de Condé, his two best generals, as well as the little Maréchal de Luxembourg and the brilliant Sébastien Vauban, still only a captain at almost forty years of age, but soon to prove himself without peer throughout Europe in the vital art and science of military engineering. Their pockets lined with papers of alliance with the Archbishopric of Cologne and the Bishopric of Münster, whence a further 30,000 troops had been contributed, the French planned to march through these territories neighbouring the Spanish Netherlands, and thence into the United Provinces. By the second week of June 1672, they had captured six towns, avoiding pitched battles and opting instead for the expensive but more predictable siege warfare, the “most theatrical form of warfare,” that Louis so enjoyed.

  Despite the poor state of his nation’s defence forces, the energetic twenty-two-year-old Prince Willem of Orange, newly appointed Captain-General, had managed to harass and drag together a Dutch army of 20,000 men. They stood waiting now, with trenches dug and defensive walls thrown up, at Ijssel on the south bank of the Rhine, in Netherlands territory, with the French, under Condé, pressing up towards them. But at the ford of Tolhuis, Condé unexpectedly diverted his army across to the north bank of the river, in German territory near the fort of Schenk, so bypassing the young prince and his troops altogether. A small band of Dutchmen, hidden behind hedges, engaged them on the other side, and though Condé himself was badly wounded, the French sustained few losses.

  Condé in fact had gone across the river in a boat, and the King had been miles away in Doesburg, but a handful of inexperienced young cavalrymen had charged excitedly into the water on their horses, and though most of these had lost their lives, the drama was ripe for exploitation. The crossing of the Rhine at once acquired legendary status in France, providing the subject for countless paintings and tapestries extolling the martial exploits of the newly acclaimed Louis le Grand. “I can’t understand how they managed to cross the Rhine swimming,” a breathless Madame de Sévigné wrote to her cousin five days after the great event. “To plunge into the river on horseback, like dogs hunting a deer, and not to be drowned, or killed once they got to the other side, it staggers me just to think of it.”

  In Vienna, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I was also staggered just to think of it, and his shock was mixed with outrage. Though he had agreed to remain neutral in any Franco-Dutch conflict, he viewed this French Rhine crossing now as an act of aggression on his own imperial territory. Abandoning his promise of neutrality, he determined to support the Dutch, who were already seeking out others w
illing to join them in driving the French out of the Netherlands and back into their own country. They found a feeble ally in Leopold’s Habsburg cousin, King Carlos II of Spain, and stronger support in the “Great Elector” Friedrich Wilhelm II of the rising Prussian state of Brandenburg. But this new coalition was months in the making, and in the meantime the French were making alarmingly swift progress. Once on the north bank, they advanced along the river, capturing all the riverside towns, and finally Arnhem, where Condé, swathed in bandages and frustration, was deposited to recuperate. There was now nothing to stop the French from marching on Utrecht, and then on to the priceless wharves and warehouses and businesses and banking houses of undefended Amsterdam itself.

  This had been Condé’s plan, and it would almost certainly have made a swift and brilliant end to a swift and brilliant campaign. But the prince’s command had perforce fallen to his rival, Maréchal Turenne, who decided instead to backtrack part of the army and besiege the city of Nijmegen. The alert Prince of Orange took advantage of the time thus gained to move his own small army to Amsterdam, and there, on June 20, 1672, the great dykes to the Zuidersee were opened, flooding the city and the plains around it, causing great loss to the local people, but putting a definitive end to any French plan to capture the capital. Further opened dykes left French troops helpless all over the country: the Dutchmen’s last and only real defence, their waterlinie, had saved them. Though troops under Louis took Utrecht on June 30, and Turenne’s men took Nijmegen on July 9, the initiative had been lost. After the dreadful spring and summer of this, their rampjaar, their year of disaster, the Dutch took heart at last, and dug in their heels in stubborn resistance.