Then, too, there seemed something especially appropriate in having the Court’s amusements and festivities led by a princess, and that, in short order, is what Madame’s role turned out to be. She had been married in the spring of 1661; by the summer, it was noticed that the king paid particular attention to one of her maids-in-waiting. “Mlle de La Vallière was very amiable, and her beauty was much enhanced by her dazzling pink and white complexion, her blue eyes which had a very sweet expression and the attraction of her silvery blond hair which made her face still more appealing,”103 wrote one eyewitness. And another added: “She has a handsome figure and a noble look; there is something majestic in the way she walks; her eyes have a kind of languor which must charm all those who have a tender heart. She has the most beautiful hair in the world, and in great abundance. She is kind, has taste, likes books, and is a good judge of them. She is polite, generous, helpful.”104
At first, both Madame and the comtesse de Soissons encouraged the king’s romance with Mlle de La Vallière, Madame because she really thought of it as a way for the king to be around all the time without incurring blame herself, the comtesse de Soissons, whose own affair with Louis XIV was only the first of many, because she favored sex in general. Neither imagined for a moment that the meek, mild La Vallière, a penniless girl from an undistinguished provincial family, would be anything more than a passing amusement; certainly it never occurred to them that Louis XIV might begin to give her the time he was still spending with them. As for the queen, slow as ever, she was firmly convinced that a king could only love a woman of royal blood, so while she had been most upset about Madame, she simply did not worry about La Vallière. Only Anne of Austria, who knew her son and the world, showed her disapproval.
All these intrigues naturally fascinated the Court. Interest in the love life of the great is hardly an unusual phenomenon: In our own day, more than one publication is devoted to precisely that topic. In seventeenth-century France, however, there were no gossip sheets; personal presence was all. Of course, it would be silly to say that Louis XIV fell in love so as to provide the nobility with yet another reason to stay at Court; he was highly sexed and fell in love easily, but there is no denying that keeping up with the latest news was a powerful incentive to many.
With all that action, however, the Court, in the early sixties, remained small - larger, to be sure, than under the regency or Mazarin, but still composed of probably no more than 200 people. Slowly, it began to grow: Events like the Carrousel of 1662 brought a number of nobles to Paris, and many of them stayed; then it became plain that the royal houses were very far from sufficient to contain them all. There were, in fact, two clear deficiencies: One was size, the other shabbiness.
Splendor was very much a part of the royal mystique: God’s representative on earth must be surrounded by pomp and glory. That was easy enough to achieve in clothes and party-giving; coming up with suitably impressive palaces was obviously more difficult; the royal houses, when Louis XIV took over, left a great deal to be desired.
The Louvre, the king’s main palace, was, in fact, an architectural catastrophe. Unfinished wings, some started as early as 1550, ran smack into remnants of the old medieval fortress; there was neither an impressive entrance nor an adequate garden; inside, many rooms were either impossibly shabby or simply unfinished. Because the problems involved were so great, Louis XIV and Colbert turned to the smaller Palace of the Tuileries.* Started in the 1560s by Catherine de Médici, it remained uncompleted in 1661, so Le Vau was commissioned to finish it outside and in. By 1662, the king was able to move into new and splendid apartments decorated by Le Brun in the modern style first seen at Vaux, Fouquet’s château.
There were painted ceilings, and white-and-gold wood paneling, Gobelins tapestries and Aubusson carpets - both manufactures were just then taken over by the Crown - as well as gilded wood and solid silver furniture: Louis XIV might jail Fouquet, but he knew talent when he saw it, so he simply took over the people who had done such spectacular work at Vaux. Le Vau became his architect, Le Brun his painter and designer, Le Nôtre his garden architect, and new plans for the Tuileries garden were soon put in hand. The results, everyone agreed, were spectacular; still, the Tuileries hardly seemed grand enough for “le plus grand roi du monde,” as the king began to be called.
Of course, there were houses outside Paris. Fontainebleau was large but antiquated: No work had been done there since Henri IV’s death in 1610, and taste had changed. Compiègne was still more like a medieval fortress than a château, so while visiting Fontainebleau at regular intervals, the Court spent more time at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. That, too, was an antiquated castle, or rather, two castles, the first built in the early sixteenth century, the other erected under Henri IV, but at least it was in better condition because it had been one of Louis XIII’s favorite residences, and it boasted terraced gardens and a splendid view over the Seine and Paris.
Both Fontainebleau and Saint Germain required improvements, and these were soon started, but by 1662, it became clear that the project closer to the king’s heart was the new park, naturally designed by Le Nôtre, which was being laid out at fairly considerable expense - close to half a million livres a year - around a little hunting lodge at Versailles; it was, however, nothing more than a good place for a stroll, and the king still lacked a really impressive palace. Together with Colbert, therefore, he decided that a new, grand entrance must be added on the eastern end of the Louvre: This wing would then form one side of a square inner courtyard, of which the southern side had been built by Henri II and the western side by Henri IV and Louis XIII; a northern wing would now connect this section to the new constructions and close the courtyard. And because Le Vau, with all his talent, was arrogant and demanding, Louis XIV decided to confine him to the Tuileries, and instead, consulted the western world’s greatest and most famous architect, the cavaliere Bernini.
All these apparent indulgences - in buildings, fetes, and women - absolutely failed to distract the king from what he saw as his main task, the government of France. Indeed, they were really one of its aspects, and much as he enjoyed them, he cared for politics more. Through a unique piece of luck, it is possible to know exactly how he felt about what one might call his profession.
In 1671, he decided to write memoirs for the use of his son should he, Louis XIV, die while the dauphin was still a child. These memoirs were strictly confidential; they were dictated by the king to one of his secretaries, the Président Rose, and were first published in 1806. They are well worth quoting at length because they give a true picture of Louis XIV’s actions and attitudes at the beginning of his reign, seen from a sufficient distance to ensure a cool and dispassionate appraisal.
It was not, he realized, an easy job to be king. “I have given thought to the situation of kings, which is hard and rigorous in that they owe, so to speak, a public account of all their actions to the world and to posterity and yet cannot provide it to anyone at the time without revealing the secrets of their policy and thus endangering their most crucial interests … I therefore want you to have [these notes] so that you can correct the historians if they were to misunderstand or be mistaken for lack of having properly understood my plans and motivations. I will explain it all without disguise even in the cases where my good intentions have not succeeded: as I believe that only small minds, who are usually wrong, want always to be right, and that in those who have sufficient merit to be most often successful, there is, I think, some magnanimity in admitting one’s faults.”105
It is usually the case that people are never more deluded than when they announce they are perfectly willing to admit they sometimes (very rarely) err. In this case, however, because the king was watched by so many clear-eyed observers, we can check his claims against the descriptions of Frenchmen and foreigners alike, and there can be no doubt that what he wrote is true. As for his description of the rationale behind his methods of government, that, too, is easily verified: The rest of his reign pr
oved that he meant what he said.
“Since the main hope of [the success] of these reforms,” he noted, “lay in my own will, the best way to consolidate them was to make my decisions supreme through a behavior that would inspire submission and respect. I was exact in doing justice to all who had a claim; but as to favors, I gave them freely and without constraint when I pleased and to whom I pleased: but in such a way that as time passed people would see that while I needed to justify myself to no one, I still governed rationally and that … my awareness of past services, my distinguishing and raising men of merit, in one word my doing good, was not only the most important occupation but also the greatest pleasure of a prince. Unquestionably, two things were necessary: I needed to work very hard, I needed to find a wide choice of people who could help and relieve me.
“As for work, my son, you may first read these memoirs when you are at an age when one usually fears it … But I will tell you not only that it is a necessary way of ruling, and the reason we rule, but also that we would show God pride and ingratitude, and men injustice and tyranny, if we wanted the one without the other …
“Nothing would be more wearisome than ceaseless pleasure if you were so unhappy as to experience it; first bored with business, you would soon tire of pleasures, then of leisure itself …
“I made it a law for myself to work twice a day for two or three hours each time with different persons, without counting the hours I spent alone or those I might give exceptionally to unusual problems if they came up; there was not a moment but [the ministers] were allowed to speak to me about them if they required a prompt resolution …
“I cannot tell you how fruitful this new way of life proved to be. I felt as if my mind and courage had grown, I felt like another man, I found in myself much I had not known, and I joyfully reproached myself with having ignored it so long. That early shyness which our judgment always causes in us, and from which I suffered, especially when I had to speak at length and in public, vanished in no time. Only then did I feel like a king and realize I was born to be one. I felt a pleasure I can hardly describe, and which you yourself will never know unless you earn it as I did … No satisfaction can equal that of seeing every day some progress in high and glorious undertakings, and the happiness of the people when it has been brought about by one’s own plans and goals.
“Whatever is most needed in this work is also most pleasant for it means, in a word, my son, having one’s eyes open to this earth; learning at all times the news from the provinces and from abroad, the secrets of all the [foreign] courts and all their ministers, knowing an infinite number of things we are thought to ignore; discovering the most secret views of our own courtiers, their most hidden interests which come to us through the play of contrary interests, so I know of no other pleasure we would not give up for this one.”106
Hard work, concern for the people, fascination in the workings of the government: It would be difficult to ask for more, but that Louis XIV should have felt that way is all the more striking that it broke with well-established precedent. Even if one disregards the admittedly exceptional circumstances of the regency, the rulers in France had always spent far more time on pleasure than on work; the better of these kings had made up for that by entrusting an able minister with the reality of power. Indeed, it would be necessary to go back some 200 years to find in Louis XI* another monarch who ruled himself.
Nor was this most delicate of all pleasures a selfish one. It is striking to see listed among the rewards of hard work the welfare of the people. Although he never forgot his gloire, Louis XIV understood very well that the purpose of government was not his own aggrandizement (unlike, for instance, Napoleon or some recent presidents of the United States) but the happiness of those over whom he reigned. While he never doubted that he had been chosen by God to sit on the throne and that he was His direct representative, that meant he considered himself something like a trustee. France, and the French, did not belong to him: Rather, he had been placed at their head so that he might improve their lot.
This kind of mystical attitude is, of course, still completely medieval, and could be found in countless early treatises, some of which were still read in the seventeenth century. But in the Middle Ages, power had been limited by a belief in the inalienable rights of the varying components of society, first and foremost the Church. It is thus perhaps the most striking paradox about Louis XIV that he managed to be at the same time an eminently modern ruler who relied on the power of the state (a clearly nonreligious notion) and the last of the priest-kings.
When his belief in his connection with God gave him the assurance he needed to rule well and fairly, it was undoubtedly an asset, but like all deeply held nonrational beliefs, it could also prove exceedingly dangerous. Not, of course, that Louis XIV was controlled by the Catholic Church; on the contrary, he considered it very much one of the tools of his rule and was at odds with the pope more often than not, but then there was the vexed question of religious toleration.
In most of Europe, the principle Cujus regio, ejus religio had prevailed: The subjects’ religion was that of the ruler. In most cases - Spain, for instance, or Sweden - the minority belief had been entirely eliminated. In others - England is the best example - a strong religious minority found itself forced, under pain of extreme penalties, to conform to the established Church. France, however, was a virtually unique case. At the end of the long and ferocious wars of religion that had pitted Catholics against Protestants, each trying hard to exterminate the other, Henri IV had, in 1598, promulgated the Edict of Nantes. This decree allowed the Protestants public places of worship everywhere except at Court and within the city walls of Paris, schools, universities, special tribunals, and a number of fortified cities.
These last soon came to form a state within the state, and it had been one of Richelieu’s great achievements to win them back again; thus, in 1661, there were no more independent fortresses in France, but the Protestants still enjoyed all the other privileges given them by the Edict.
Seen in retrospect, this solution was eminently sensible: While the most of the French were Catholic, the rights of the Protestant minority (probably about 12 percent of the population with a very uneven distribution) were preserved. By 1661, however, there were strong anti-Protestant pressures, and the guarantees of the Edict, while they stood legally, were often nibbled away. Sense, unfortunately, is often vanquished by intolerance, and Louis XIV, who knew that the Catholics were right and thought that the Protestants were at best deluded and at worst willful heretics, found the situation almost intolerable.
“As for that great number of my subjects of the RPR,* which was an evil which caused me then and still causes me today [in 1671] great pain, I decided right then how to behave with them, and I must have done the right things since God has granted that it result … in a very great number of conversions.
“It seemed to me that those who chose to use violent remedies did not understand the nature of the problem … which must be allowed gradually to pass and die away rather than exciting it anew by strong contradictions, which are in any event useless when the disease … is spread throughout the state …
“I thought that the best way to reduce the number of Huguenots was no longer to press them with any new rigor, and to see that the guarantees they obtained from my predecessors were observed; but I granted them no new ones, and saw to it that they be kept within the narrowest limits that justice and fairness would allow. But as for those favors which depended on me alone, I decided to allow them none, and that through kindness rather than anger, so that they would be forced to consider of themselves, from time to time and without violence whether they had good reason to deprive themselves of the advantages which otherwise they would have shared with my other subjects.”107
Given the king’s beliefs, this stand was notably liberal - far more so, in fact, than that to be shortly taken by the English Parliament. Of course, the “favors” in question included a good many promotions wh
ich, today, come as of right, but there can be no doubt that many Frenchmen would have supported a far more rigorous policy. That this moderation was prompted not by tolerance but by the belief that, in the long run, it would prove more effective than persecutions changes nothing: Trying to convince or seduce is not at all the same as converting forcibly.
It should be added that, had Louis XIV thought that force would be effective, he, no doubt, would have used it. But here, as everywhere, he showed the acutest instinct for the nature, extent, and limitations of his power. Indeed, just as he had taken naturally to governing, and proceeded to enjoy it almost voluptuously, so he seemed born with an exact understanding of how power can be gained or lost; while he was soon going to demonstrate this trait in his foreign policy, he also applied his knowledge to the people closest to him, his ministers.
“I decided first never to have a prime minister,” he wrote. “Nothing could be more shameful than to see, on one side the functions, on the other the sole title of King. It was thus absolutely necessary for me to share out my trust and the execution of my orders without giving all of it to any one man; and to use these different people for different jobs, this being perhaps a prince’s first and greatest talent.
“Because I wanted to concentrate in myself all the authority [of the state], and even though there are, in every sort of field, details to which our occupations and even our dignity do not allow us to lower ourselves, I decided, once I had chosen my ministers, to look after these, now and again, with each of them whenever they least expected it so that they understood I might do the same things at other times and on other subjects.
“I cannot easily tell you, my son, how to choose the several ministers. Luck plays just as great a role as wisdom in this … and instinct is often more effective than reasoning.”108
The king then goes on to explain that, in choosing men of little importance, he was shoring up his own authority since they would depend on him entirely for the realization of their hopes, while princes or great aristocrats would never have the humility or the selflessness required by the new autocrat. What follows is a cry of pride.
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