Louis XIV

by Olivier Bernier

  Indeed, it was increasingly clear that the war, never in real danger of being lost, apparently could not be won either. Turenne’s death in July 1675 - he was killed by a cannonball - was immediately followed by a new invasion of Alsace, at which the king gave Condé the command of the army. The imperial troops were swept away once more, and then, at the end of the campaigning season, Monsieur le Prince, who was only fifty-four years old but already declining, retired to his castle of Chantilly. Luckily, Montecucculli did the same on his side, so that, by the end of 1675, neither army could boast a general of genius.

  Once again, however, appearances were misleading. Just as Turenne lay dying, the duc de Vivonne, Mme de Montespan’s brother, attacked and defeated the Spanish fleet near Messina, and starting in 1676, the French began to accumulate victories. In April and May 1676, Bouchain and Condé were taken; in March and April 1677, Valenciennes and Cambrai followed; in March, 1678, Ypres and Gand fell in turn. All the sieges had been conducted by the king in person, so that, every year, he could point to new conquests. In Germany, after losing Philippsburg in 1676, the French army went on to win battle after battle in 1677 and 1678; on April 11, 1677, at the battle of Mont-Cassel, in Flanders, William of Orange, who was accustomed to being defeated by Louis XIV, was now beaten by Monsieur, “who charged with a courage and a presence of mind that no one expected from this effeminate prince. Never has there been a clearer example that bravery is not incompatible with softness; that prince, who often dressed in women’s clothes and had a woman’s tastes, behaved like a general and a soldier.”173 These remarks of Voltaire’s, accurate as they are, need perhaps still more emphasis: Monsieur did, indeed, dazzle everyone. The Mercure galant, naturally, published a poem by Isaac de Benserade, a fashionable author of plays, libretti and occasional verse. It was addressed to the king. “Un frère généreux par ton example instruit Cherche tes ennemis, les combat, les détruit Et vient mettre à tes pieds sa brillante victoire./ De l’encens qu’il mérite il n’est point satisfait Il veut qu’on te le donne …” (A courageous brother learns from your example He seeks out your foes, fights and destroys them And put his brilliant victory at your feet. He is not satisfied with the praise he has won / He wants you to have it …).174

  That was enough for the king. He ignored the fact that Monsieur was absolutely loyal to him, and that his habits made him a laughingstock. Primi Visconti, for instance, could not refrain from commenting on them: “Monsieur,” he wrote, “looked after his toilette and dressed during the campaign exactly as if he were on his way to a ball … He went, all made-up and languid, to the most perilous and exposed places … He is so naturally brave that he seems unaware that he is risking his life and yet he looks like a woman because he is always repairing his make-up; he covers himself with ribbons and jewellery, he never wears a hat so as not to muss his wig and because he is short, he wears very high heels on which he is perched so that I really do not know how he keeps from falling. The King, on the contrary, dresses richly and conveniently, without all those unnecessary adornments.”175 Still, Louis refrained from visiting or even congratulating his brother and saw to it that Monsieur never again commanded an army: The very last thing he wanted was a brave and popular brother who might, even now, become a rallying point for the opposition. Similarly, he ignored Monsieur le Prince’s pleas that his son succeed to his command: Henceforth, no member of the royal family would ever again be in a position to become a hero.

  By the spring of 1678, it seemed clear that France had the upper hand, so on April 9, the king made new offers for peace. Because, after all these years and all these battles, the Dutch had come to seem relatively unimportant, the conditions he offered them were lenient; most important, he gave up Maestricht and his other conquests, but Spain as usual was to pay for all. France demanded a large slice of the Spanish Netherlands (Flanders), including the towns and cities of Bouchain, Condé, Ypres, Valenciennes, Cambrai, and Maubeuge, along with the Franche-Comté; from the emperor, he wanted a free hand in managing Strasbourg, then an imperial fief; the elector of Brandenburg, who had attacked Sweden, France’s old ally, was to disgorge his conquests; finally, the duke of Lorraine, whose states had been occupied by the French, was allowed back only on condition that France retain the right to move its army through the duchy how and when it chose.

  Given the military situation, these were not unreasonable conditions, but they obviously fell short of a complete French triumph, something the king was very unwilling to admit publicly. So he masked this deficiency by transforming what should have been a negotiation into an ultimatum, and amazingly enough, it worked: On August 10, at Nijmegen, the Dutch signed a treaty which embodied all the French demands; Spain and the emperor soon joined them.

  France, as defined by the Peace of Nijmegen, was unquestionably the first power in Europe: The alliance of Holland, Spain, and the Empire had been unable to prevent it from gaining a significant accretion of territory, and while the allies disbanded their armies as soon as the war was over, Louis XIV kept his at full strength. This decision resulted in costs that had always been too heavy for his predecessors, but could now easily be borne. In 1680, in spite of the vast sums spent on six years of steady campaigning, in spite of the building of the third Versailles, the deficit was only 4.5 million in a budget of over 96 million,176 and that last number was, in itself, a major achievement. In 1675, the budget had risen as high as 113 million livres.177 Well might the king write Colbert, on March 10, 1678: “You are doing wonders with the money and I am more pleased with you every day.”178

  As for the king himself, never had his glory been so brilliant. In 1680, the Paris municipality awarded him the title of Grand: henceforth, in all public inscriptions, on all public buildings, in every document, he was to be known as Louis le Grand; indeed, for the rest of the reign the medals bear the words Ludovicus Magnus. The praise offered him all through the war was - in France, at least - universal. In 1674, for instance, the Mercure was reporting: “[During the siege of Maestricht] nothing was ever seen to equal His Majesty’s activity. This great monarch seems to be everywhere at once; he goes himself to check every posted troop; he is always on horseback; he spends his nights under the tent. All follows his impulse, he gives the orders for everything; and there is so much prudence, wisdom, and experience in everything he orders that the greatest generals … never displayed more.”179

  Three years later, it was: “Grand Roy, porte en tous lieux la guerre / La Fortune guide tes pas Le dieu Mars te prête son bras et Jupiter te prête son tonnerre” (Great King, take war everywhere Fortune guides your steps the god Mars lends you his arm and Jupiter lends you his thunder).180 And when prose succeeded verse, the Mercure’s readers were told: “The King’s vigilance, intrepidity, and tirelessness cannot be expressed. He was within the trench two hours after it was dug and went all the way … to its head. A few days earlier, a cannonball went just past the Sieur de Givry, Equerry of the Petite Ecurie, who is never far from His Majesty”181; again, a month later: “Never has a monarch given so many orders himself or spent so many days on horseback than [Louis XIV] before Cambrai. He visited everything, acted immediately, ordered everything, was everywhere.”182 By May, verse was once again required: “Miraculeux héros, vainqueur inimitable Par tes fameux exploits tu te fais admirer … L’Alexandre orgueilleux qui se fit adorer Se verrait s’il vivait réduit à soupirer D’être moins grand que toi …” (Miraculous hero, inimitable victor Your famous exploits have made you admired … That proud Alexander who had himself worshiped would be forced to sigh, if he lived today still / that he is not so great as you).183

  That is only a small sample, and at Court, naturally, the praise was as exaggerated as it was ceaseless, although there was an occasional discordant note: The nobles, after all, followed the king to war and they had occasion to notice that he was often less than heroic. To us, accustomed as we are to generals in chief sitting in perfect safety well away from the battlefield, this behavior is hardly surp
rising: No greater catastrophe could have befallen the army or the country than the king’s death, but to many aristocratic officers, who still believed in the medieval tradition of dauntless (if often disastrous) charges, this very necessary prudence sometimes seemed like cowardice, and there were rumors to that effect of which Louis was very well aware. As it was, they were unquestionably unfair: Given the occasion, the king showed his courage clearly enough. In one of the trenches at the siege of Lille, for instance, “he [provoked] by his bravery a fine retort from a soldier who saw that he was exposed to enemy fire and that a page of the grande Ecurie had been killed behind him. The man took him roughly by the arm and said to him: ‘Go away, is this your place?’“184

  Even the king’s victories struck those courtiers as less than admirable: Taking city after city by means of superior siege techniques was perhaps good enough for an engineer - a sort of person for whom they had nothing but contempt. A monarch, however, should lead his troops into battle: Henri IV, Louis’s grandfather, had been famous for telling the army to rally around the white plume on his helmet.

  Of course, these mutterings, which were restricted to a tiny circle, hardly mattered in the real world, but they showed that the old spirit of rashness and rebellion was not dead, merely contained. The king expected no less: The very fact that such rumors still circulated proved the success of his policies and the need to continue them. Far from relaxing because the war had ended, he applied himself to his tasks as a ruler with even more energy.

  The construction of Versailles was pushed forward, and the Court, now thoroughly convinced that pleasing his majesty was the only path to success, was more servile than ever. Not a penny was paid by the Treasury without the king’s authorization, not a place given, not a promotion granted, and an observer could legitimately note in 1680: “Thus the King had reached the height of power; all obeyed him inside and outside the realm. He only had to wish in order to obtain; even the weather seemed to favor him; when he wanted to hunt, or to go for a walk, if it was raining, it stopped, which I have noticed particularly since I have been in France. Besides all this, he had wealth, glory, and above all perfect health: in a word he only lacked immortality.”185 And another observer noted: “King Louis the Great, by making peace at Nijmegen, had reached the apex of human glory … Satisfied with his conquests, he had given peace to Europe in just the manner he pleased.”186

  It was, in fact, at about this time that the king’s identification with the sun, and Apollo, the sun god, came to seem less like a piece of hyperbole than a factual description. Like the sun, nothing could stop him; like the sun, he dazzled all who looked at him. His very appearance confirmed it: As his face had changed from the slightly rounded shape of his youth to the hawklike mask of maturity, he had adopted the great leonine wig which gave him still more presence and majesty, “The King is not handsome,” an observer wrote, “but he has regular features; his face is marked with smallpox [a common defect in the seventeenth century]; the eyes are as you will have them: majestic, lively, cheerful, voluptuous, tender, or awe-inspiring; in a word, he has presence and … a truly royal look: even if he were only one of the courtiers, he would stand out among them.”187 And then, the splendor of the Court added yet another element to his semidivine state.

  During a stay at Fontainebleau in August 1677, for instance, the king was seen to wear, besides the usual number of new suits, twelve especially splendid costumes ordered for him by the prince de Marcillac, his grand master of the wardrobe. We know at least what one of these looked like thanks to the slightly breathless reporting in the Mercure galant: “[At a ball] the King appeared with a suit of gold lamé embroidered with gold and silver. His jewels were shaped like so many buckles and besides these, he carried a sword on which the precious stones were worth more than 150,000 livres.

  “The Queen seemed covered with jewels of an extraordinary size. Because her gown was black, and its fabric used only to make them brighter, one can fairly say that they dazzled. Monsieur’s costume was covered with jewels arranged like the long buttonholes of the Brandenburg coats … The time spent at Fontainebleau was so full of pleasures that, on the nights of médianoche,* when the opera or the play ended too early, there were small private balls until midnight.”188 The operas in question, the Mercure tells us, were all by Lulli (Thésée, Alceste, Athis); the plays were by Molière (L’Avare, Le Misanthrope, L’Ecole des femmes), Racine, and Corneille - surprising since he had long been out of fashion. Hunting, of course, was a major amusement, but nothing was more impressive than the balls: Splendid though the royal family looked, the courtiers did almost as well. After a minute description of the newly fashionable hairdo - a complex arrangement of curls and one very wide braid - the Mercure goes on, as was its wont, to describe every detail: “All the coiffures were adorned with jeweled clasps with a pearl center. All kinds of pearl or jewel bows, replacing the usual ribbons, were set on the sides … Their gowns were all covered with jewels, especially on the scarves, and the seams, along with big bows on the front. Their sleeves were adorned in different ways with ties, buttons, or just cabochons of precious stones. The whole front of their skirts was also similarly adorned and the [overskirts] were held back by big diamond clips. Several more jewels formed a bow behind … The undersleeves were made of lace, slashed along the length, and turned up at the bottom with a different sort of lace, which held more jewels above and below …

  “The buffet after the first ball was superb … The four tiers had, at the bottom, eight large baskets of fruit; in the corners there were little circles of candied fruit; the next level had four more baskets and the corners were the same as below. At the top was a large square of fruit that was two feet high. All the rounds and ovals were full of fruit and candied fruit filled all the squares that line the table … everywhere … there were torches and candlesticks … along with crystal saucers bearing quantities of goblets full of iced waters, and there were rare porcelain vases filled with all kinds of compotes …

  “Imagine then this dazzling array of lights which were reflected one in the other as the torches were reflected in the crystal adorning the candlesticks and the candles in the gold of the torch holders; this was made brighter still by the sheen of the caramels and the candied fruit. Add to that the colors of the fruit, the ribbons in the baskets and the crystal of the saucers and the effect produced by the jewels worn by Their Majesties and the forty ladies who sat around the table.”189 We forget, in this age of electricity, how magical night lighting could be: The scene as described by the Mercure, must, indeed, have been awe-inspiring.

  Just as the Court became increasingly more splendid, so the king’s private life assumed almost the dimensions of a matter of state: Besides his official mistresses, he had always had brief, often unknown affairs that might last less than a week; others might prove enduring but equally discreet, that with the princesse de Soubise being a perfect example. The princesse was beautiful and, naturally, willing; her husband, a member of the ambitious Rohan family, was the soul of tact; as a result, the king slept with Mme de Soubise now and again over the years while showering her family with favors, but the liaison never became fully public.

  In the late seventies, however, all that was changed, and the king’s new amours became quickly and fully known. First, there was Mme de Ludres. “The King went off to war on March 1 [1677] at the very time when the courtiers thought him occupied with nothing but games, ballets, and a new love. That happened because Mme de Montespan, who had first persecuted Mme de Ludres, believing her influence definitively at an end, has called her back near her. That return, however, renewed the King’s desires so that he was seen, more than once, followed by Chamarande, his premier valet de chambre, who was in charge of the negotiations, going in a private* sedan chair from the château vieux at St. Germain to the château neuf where Mme de Ludres was lodged.”190 That he was now tired of Mme de Montespan was perhaps not surprising: The lusty //marquise had become enormously fat and even more de
manding; worse, she made the most dreadful scenes when she failed to get her way, so the king, whose eye never ceased roving, now began setting up official rivals. Unlike La Vallière, however, Mme de Montespan was firmly determined to stay at Court, partly in the hope that she would recapture her lover.

  In the meantime, however, there was no doubt at all that a new star had risen. “Solely because they believed her to be loved by the King, all the princesses and the duchesses stood up when she came in, even in the Queen’s presence, and only sat down again when Mme de Ludres asked them to do so, just as it was done with Mme de Montespan. And it was through this mark of distinction given to Mme de Ludres that the Queen learned about the King’s new infidelity … The Queen, then, had grown accustomed to these affairs but Mme de Montespan was enraged by them. I watched, at the Tuileries, Mme de Ludres and Mme de Thianges* exchanging venomous glances. They bumped into each other when they met.† Mme de Montespan did everything she could to hurt her rival but Mme de Ludres was herself responsible for her downfall. She had as her sole adviser a certain poet called Benserade‡ and as her sole confidante a certain Marianne, the daughter of an apothecary who was married to one Montataire, a wretch with neither influence nor friends. In order to make him more valued, [Marianne] thought of using him as an intermediary between Mme de Ludres and the King. This last, who had already given the job to Chamarande, was so surprised to find himself face to face with Montataire that he stopped seeing Mme de Ludres and ordered her to retire to a convent, offering her 200,000 livres which she did not accept.”191 In one respect, however, Visconti misunderstands the king: What caused Mme de Ludres’s dismissal was not surprise; there was nothing Louis XIV hated more than indiscretion, and that applied as well to an affair as to matters of state. Chamarande, obviously, could be trusted to keep his mouth shut; Montataire was likely to talk: No more was needed to make Mme de Ludres expendable.