But at the time of Madame’s death, many people disagreed with the physicians’ findings. According to Louis XIV’s nineteenth-century biographer John Abbott, the doctors had been bribed to sign the autopsy report. However, other accounts state that both the English and French doctors agreed with the findings, but believed that the autopsy had been so badly botched, it seemed “as if the surgeon’s business were rather to hide the truth than to reveal it.”
Abbott is the only biographer to mention the arrest of Monsieur Pernon, the controller of Minette’s household. Louis XIV questioned him privately, offering him immunity if he revealed the sources of the poison that had killed Madame. Of course, a man who believes he may be executed for murder might say anything to absolve himself, so Pernon’s statements should be taken with several grains of salt. He described a roundabout route that began with the Chevalier de Lorraine and the marquis d’Effiat, who had employed country gentlemen as unwitting intermediaries and mules to transport the poison to confederates of the marquis at Saint-Cloud. According to Pernon, it was the marquis d’Effiat who rubbed it along the inside of Minette’s favorite drinking cup. Pernon assured the king that Monsieur himself knew nothing of the plot. According to Abbott, the interrogation went no further. Pernon was released. No one else was questioned or punished.
However, the anecdotes regarding a poison conspiracy were written years after the fact by those with no connection to the events or to the participants. And the chicory water that Madame ingested was mixed by her closest and most trusted servant, who also tested it by drinking from the same cup. But some of the English still believed the rumors of poisoning, including the Duke of Buckingham, who was all for declaring war on France.
Henriette-Anne was interred among the royalty of France at the Basilica of Saint Denis—by decree of Louis XIV, with all the pomp due to a crowned head. Ironically, Minette’s burial ceremony was more extravagant than her wedding; it was attended by the highest clergy and nobility in France, as well as by several mourners from the general public. There were torches, candles, and incense. The Mass was chanted by the king’s own musicians, a performance organized by the famous court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Minette’s coffin was covered in cloth of gold edged with ermine and embroidered with the arms of her native and adopted kingdoms.
Her heart was removed to the convent of Val-de-Grâce and her entrails brought to the Church of the Celestins, according to the custom of burying a royal’s viscera and vital organs separately. Henriette-Anne’s body was taken by torchlight from Saint-Cloud to Saint Denis and laid alongside that of her mother in the crypt of Saint-Louis. Monsieur’s guards watched over it night and day, and monks chanted Masses around the clock.
Charles II was disconsolate at the news of his beloved sister’s demise. In a rare display of emotion, he shut himself into his bedroom for days, prostrate with grief. The great wit of the Stuart Restoration court, the Earl of Rochester, remarked that Henriette-Anne had died the most lamented person in both England and France, then quipped, “Since which time dying has been the fashion.”
Louis’ court lost some of its innocence after Minette’s death. The years of her fey, cultivated presence corresponded to the lighthearted spring of the Sun King’s reign. But once she was gone, it entered its sultry summer of soulless, vulgar dissipation—the era of the voluptuary, his mistress Athénaïs de Montespan. Louis never again danced in a court ballet, and for the next ten years these entertainments were abandoned entirely.
Monsieur clad himself in extravagant mourning attire, but according to eyewitnesses, he did not appear to be grieving the loss of his wife. The tears he’d shed during her final hours were soon dried. Upon Minette’s death, Philippe seized her letters and the money that was supposed to have been distributed among her servants, fleeing with it to Paris. Such was the behavior of the man known as the founder of the House of Orléans, among the richest, if not the single wealthiest family in France. Because he is the ancestor of most modern Catholic royals, Philippe d’Orléans has also been called “the grandfather of Europe.”
At the urging of Louis XIV, who was eager for his brother to father a male heir to continue the Orléans line, Monsieur remarried in 1671. His new bride was a nineteen-year-old Protestant German, Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate—chosen after the duchesse de Montpensier, now styled as la Grande Mademoiselle, rejected him a second time. But Louis had raised the subject by inquiring of la Grande Mademoiselle whether she was interested in filling the “vacancy” created by the death of the former Madame, so it’s little wonder she’d refused Monsieur.
Louis had rejected a number of other potential brides until he and Philippe settled on Liselotte, as the Palatine princess was known within her family. She was ultimately chosen by the king, and not by Monsieur, because Louis had wanted to secure the reversion of the elector’s rights on the Palatinate.
Born in Heidelberg in 1652, Liselotte was the only daughter of the Elector Palatine, Charles I Louis, and his estranged wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel. The child of a broken home, Liselotte was a short, dumpy blonde with a take-no-prisoners personality. Her mother had refused to recognize her father’s divorce by fiat, and consequently would not move out of the family residence. Meanwhile, her father insisted on dwelling there with his morganatic second wife, a former lady-in-waiting to his first one. Luckily, Liselotte escaped some of this craziness by spending four formative years of her girlhood at the court of her aunt Sophia of Hanover, mother of the future King George I of England. She remained close to Sophia throughout her life, penning some fifty thousand letters to her from the French court.
On November 16, 1671, Liselotte was wed to Monsieur by proxy in the cathedral at Metz with the marshal Plessis-Praslin standing in for the groom. When she exited the cathedral, she was already the duchesse d’Orléans, although she had yet to see her husband. Monsieur rode forth from Paris to greet her, meeting her in his usual glittering splendor on the road between Châlons and Bellay. Stunned by his new bride’s homeliness, Philippe is said to have lamented, “[H]ow shall I ever be able to sleep with her?”
On her arrival at the Bourbon court, Liselotte received a wedding gift from the sovereigns worth as much as her father collected in a year’s revenue as Elector Palatine. Monsieur, too, received a large brevet, or financial gift, from Louis for the maintenance of the new Madame’s household.
Liselotte, who converted to Catholicism upon her marriage, was a tremendous correspondent, and as such was a terrific chronicler of her age and of her brother-in-law’s court. Although French was not her native tongue and she never lost her German accent, Liselotte was already fluent by the time she became Madame, and she spoke and wrote French better than many at the Bourbon court, including her husband. An earthy tomboy with a coarse sense of humor, she was known for her passion for hunting, her disdain for dancing, her brusque demeanor, and her snarkiness, never fearing to say to someone’s face what others might only whisper behind his or her back, even when she was talking about—or to—the king’s maîtresses en titre. Devoid of vanity, she described her appearance in self-deprecating terms: small eyes set in a broad face and a heavy jaw, the physiognomy of a “badger-cat-monkey,” her nose a “badger’s snout,” and her weather-beaten complexion as “red as a crayfish” from the exertions of so much horseback riding outdoors. Liselotte was also highly unfashionable, another faux pas at the French court. She had no taste in clothes, and even less interest in them, an immense contrast to the first Madame, the oh-so-chic Minette. Nor did Liselotte care what people said about her appearance. “All my life I have made fun of my ugliness,” she declared, beating other, potentially crueler tormenters to the punch, noting that even her own father and late brother would remark on her unattractiveness. “I laughed it off and never cared one bit.”
What a pair they made—the fragile, graceful, feminine, and diminutive Philippe, who was nearly a dozen years older than the tactless, dowdy, ungainly,
and butch Liselotte. Only by hanging holy medals from his genitalia did he successfully perform his marital obligations. When Liselotte discovered her husband’s noisy secret, at first he denied it, but one night she yanked the covers back and, shining a light on his privates, burst out laughing. The mirth was contagious, and finally Monsieur insisted that the medals of the Virgin and other relics guaranteed the success of everything they touched. Hysterical with amusement, Liselotte replied that he could never convince her he was respecting the Virgin by “parading her image over those parts made to destroy her virginity.” Still laughing, Monsieur swore his wife to secrecy. Nevertheless, she recorded the event in her memoirs.
Surprisingly, the spouses were more compatible than many might have predicted. Soon after her arrival at court, Liselotte had written to her aunt Sophia, “I will tell you one thing about Monsieur: he is the best man in the world, and we get on very well together. He does not resemble any of his portraits in the least.” Nine months later, Sophia wrote to Liselotte’s father, “I am assured that there is a very perfect love and friendship between Monsieur and Madame.” Three months after this letter came the news of Liselotte’s first pregnancy. The expectant mother’s only disappointment about her condition was the prohibition against horseback riding.
In time, the new Madame made peace with Monsieur’s blatant homosexuality and overt affairs, except when his behavior led to her own humiliation. Her marriage to Philippe got off to a good start, perhaps because the Chevalier de Lorraine was in Italy at the time and did not return to France until 1673. However, Liselotte was unshakable in her conviction that her husband had poisoned his first wife, and would freely share this opinion whenever Monsieur incurred her ire.
Liselotte and Philippe had three children, although their firstborn son, given the title of duc de Valois, died before he reached his third birthday. Born in 1674, their second son, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, styled as the duc de Chartres until he inherited his father’s title, grew up to be quite the rake and dissipate. After a horoscope that was cast for him when he was a baby predicted that he would one day become a pope, with her snarky sense of humor firmly in place Liselotte quipped prophetically, “I am very much afraid that he is more likely to be the Antichrist.” Her son’s morals would eventually leave a lot to be desired; however, as regent for Louis XIV’s successor, the king’s five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV, he was an extremely capable administrator.
Liselotte gave birth to her last child, a daughter, Élisabeth Charlotte, in 1676. After that, by mutual agreement, the spouses agreed to sleep in separate beds. Although she had little to do with her husband after her usefulness as a broodmare was over, and had “never liked the business of making babies” to begin with, Liselotte was an excellent mother to their children and was also very fond of Minette’s daughters.
But with the physical separation of individual bedrooms came emotional estrangement as well. Monsieur had always gotten along better with the second Madame because they did not have competing interests. Liselotte could never become the charming and sylphlike coquette Henriette-Anne had been; whereas Minette’s heightened femininity only served to further humiliate her effeminate husband, Liselotte’s masculinity seemed to complement it.
In the mid-1670s, Philippe distinguished himself on the battlefield against William III of Orange, the future king of England. For the next several years he focused on improvements to his estates and art collections. The Palais Royal reached its zenith as a social mecca during the 1690s, and throughout the 1680s and 1690s, Monsieur also continued to indulge his mania for precious gems. Liselotte often joked that it was a good thing she had no interest in jewelry, or she and her husband would always be competing to wear the choicest pieces.
But no woman’s ego could withstand the indignities of Monsieur’s infatuations for his mignons. By 1682, everyone at court knew that the honeymoon was long over for Philippe and Liselotte, and that they were living “like cat and dog.”
Moreover, Liselotte had begun to lose the king’s favor, principally due to his new relationship with Madame de Maintenon, the former governess to his royal bastards. La Maintenon found Liselotte coarse and grotesque. The distaste was mutual. After the queen died in 1683, Louis may have secretly married Maintenon. He certainly expected the court to treat her as his uncrowned queen. Liselotte, a genuine princess, who harbored a bit of a crush on the king, was disgusted at having to kowtow to the woman she referred to in her correspondence as the old whore.
Her relationship with Monsieur reached a new low when he wished to appoint his favori of the early 1680s, the marquis d’Effiat—“the sodomist” Liselotte also referred to as her “worst enemy” and the “most debauched fellow in the world”—as their son’s governor. Only her most vehement protest blocked Effiat’s assignment.
For the remainder of the 1680s and all through the 1690s, Monsieur’s health finally began to show the effects of decades of debauchery and indolence. He was as much of a gourmand as Madame, although he had a sweet tooth, whereas her tastes still ran to heavy German fare. The pair of them grew morbidly obese, their complexions florid. Philippe never exercised, but once consumed eighty oysters in one sitting. Madame still loved to ride, but now had trouble finding a hunter that could support her weight.
As time went on, their shared bitterness at being perpetual underdogs at court reunited them, so that during Monsieur’s final years, he mellowed to the point of being able to laugh about his flaws with Madame. He no longer allowed people to tell lies about her and attack her in his presence. They even enjoyed fart jokes together. Liselotte had become convinced that “. . . if Monsieur were not so weak and did not permit himself to be bamboozled . . . , he would be the best husband in the world; therefore he is to be pitied more than to be hated when he does one a bad turn.”
On June 8, 1701, Philippe and Louis XIV met at the Château de Marly to discuss Philippe’s son’s conduct. Louis scolded his brother for not reprimanding his son; the duc de Chartres had been obnoxiously parading his mistress, Mademoiselle de Séry, in front of his wife (who happened to be one of Louis’ illegitimate daughters). Monsieur then dared to call the king a hypocrite for doing exactly the same thing with his own mistresses. For years, Chartres’ mother-in-law, Louis’ most glamorous and alluring maîtresse en titre, Athénaïs de Montespan, had been such a prominent fixture at court that people called her the “real queen of France,” while the real queen, Louis’ wife, Marie-Thérèse, looked on in mortification, or retreated to her rooms, humiliated. Monsieur also alluded to his own sexual debauchery over the decades, retorting that fathers who have led certain lives are in no position to lecture their sons on morals.
Louis was shocked to be spoken to with such disrespect, even by Philippe. That evening, Monsieur returned to Saint-Cloud to dine with his son. The following day, June 9, 1701, he suffered a fatal stroke, collapsing into Chartres’ arms. Liselotte remained by his bedside throughout his final hours, from ten p.m. until five a.m., when he slipped into oblivion.
Madame genuinely mourned her husband. Finally, her dignity had been restored and she was “on the point of becoming truly happy when our Lord God saw fit to remove my poor husband from life and I saw vanish in an instant the result of all the trouble and pains I had taken over thirty years to become happy.”
The news of Monsieur’s death hit the king very hard. “I don’t know how to accept the fact that I shall never see my brother again,” Louis murmured. In keeping with the tradition of burying a royal’s body and viscera separately, on June 14, Philippe’s heart was taken to Val-de-Grâce, while his corpse was interred at Saint Denis.
After his death, Liselotte defied conventional protocol, sneaking into theatrical performances incognito, rather than observing the customary two-year waiting period before enjoying herself. And she vociferously refused to retire from court to a convent, despite this retreat from the world being one of the terms of her marriage contract. N
evertheless, she was extremely kind to Monsieur’s memory, stating, “I’ve been through all his things and found all the letters that his mignons wrote to him, and I burned them all, without reading them, to stop them falling into other hands. . . .”—although she also insisted that the heady violet scent he had used to perfume his correspondence nauseated her. Philippe’s grand passion, the Chevalier de Lorraine, whose liaison with their husband had humiliated both Madames, died of an apoplectic attack at the gaming table in 1702, having proudly refused the pension offered to him by Monsieur’s son, the new duc d’Orléans.
Liselotte had assumed that Monsieur had gambled away most of his fortune and left her with next to nothing, his appanage going to their son upon his death. But in fact his investments had been in farsighted, revenue-producing entities such as canals. Founding the House of Orléans, his enormous wealth enabled the family to become independent power players in France’s history.
Through Louis’ generosity, the widowed Liselotte was permitted to retain her rank and remain at court, spending the rest of her life in splendor and luxury. In 1722, at the age of seventy, she died at Saint-Cloud and was buried at Saint Denis.
As for the children of Monsieur’s marriages, Philippe and Minette’s older daughter, Marie Louise, became queen of Spain, wedding the literally imbecilic Carlos II, the progeny of one of the Spanish Hapsburgs’ uncle-niece marriages—this one between Anne of Austria’s brother Philip IV and his other sister’s daughter. Miserable at her adopted court, Marie Louise died childless in 1689 at the age of twenty-six, the same age her mother was when she passed away. Her symptoms were so similar to Henriette-Anne’s that she was also believed to have been poisoned, although there was no merit to this theory. Marie-Louise was most likely a victim of acute appendicitis. When Carlos II died, Louis XIV went to war with the Hapsburgs to claim the Spanish throne for his grandson Philippe, duc d’Anjou, who became Philip V of Spain.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 27
