At least on the northern front the war was going well; the French won the Battle of Fleurus, and in August, Catinat beat the duke of Savoy near Saluzzo. These victories, however, reinforced Louvois’s position, with one disastrous consequence: Since England was virtually bare of troops, Seignelai advocated an invasion. The French fleet had command of the sea, and the troops once landed would meet no real army. Of course, Louvois objected. The fleet was expensive, Ireland a failure, the army victorious: Louis XIV listened to the war minister and ordered his ships back into harbor until the next campaigning season.
In spite of the financial strain, nothing at Court was allowed to change. The Mercure for January 1690 noted: “The King has, as is his custom, given splendid suppers since the beginning of Carnival and no evening was spent at Versailles without a masquerade or some other amusement. Monseigneur the Dauphin also attended several balls in Paris and having particularly enjoyed the first one Monsieur gave him asked His Royal Highness to give him another one.”233 If there was anything Monsieur loved (and Madame hated) it was a good party, so, of course, he carried out his nephew’s wish. In February, “Monseigneur the Dauphin came to the ball given by His Royal Highness Monsieur. From the beginning until the end at four in the morning, eight to ten thousand masked dancers were counted. Monseigneur was given yet another ball on the last Sunday of Carnival. On Monday there was a ball at Versailles at M. le duc du Maine’s [the King and Mme de Montespan’s eldest son] where the entire Court was present, and on Tuesday at the King’s where Monseigneur the Dauphin appeared in four different costumes. On that same Tuesday, M. le duc de Chartres [Monsieur’s son] gave a ball for Mademoiselle at the Palais Royal.”234
Amusingly enough, in the very same issue, the Mercure, after marveling at the quantity of silver brought in to the Mint by private people who were following the king’s example, went on to comment about the successful efforts made at curbing luxury: We may justly suppose that the balls given by the king, Monsieur, and the duc du Maine were not exactly examples of austerity.
Unchanged also was the king’s desire to advance his illegitimate children. Those of his daughters who were of age to be married were now part of the royal family; it was time to do something for the nineteen-year-old duc du Maine: The comte de Toulouse, the youngest of his sons, was only eleven in 1689.
That, however, was not so very easy. To begin with, the duc du Maine had not grown up quite straight in spite of Mme de Maintenon’s best efforts: One hip was a little out of line, one leg a little shorter than the other, so he had a slight limp; partly because of this infirmity, he was greatly beloved by his former governess whose special charge he had been and whose protégé he now became. This physical disadvantage, however, made two key royal activities, hunting and leading soldiers to war, markedly more difficult, and to this deficiency was added an equivalent - and visible - lack of moral backbone. Given to intrigue, he had few friends and fewer sympathizers. Something, obviously, had to be done, and the king decided that military prowess was the answer.
“I am sending my son, the duc du Maine, to the army you command,” he wrote the maréchal d’Humières on May 21, 1689. “You know how fond I am of him and how very much I wish him to be worthy of his position. I have ordered him always to believe what you tell him, as I feel sure you will advise him to do what he must and even a little more,” adding, however, “Allow the duc du Maine to see everything, but avoid whenever possible his fighting in small engagements where he might be captured.”235
What the king was really saying was that he wished his son to acquire glory without taking risks. Humières, who was an excellent courtier, carried out his instructions, but he quickly found that, while it was easy to keep du Maine safe, getting him near the fighting was a more difficult proposition. For the moment, at least, this uncomfortable fact was discreetly kept quiet, but it was likely to emerge one day.
That, all through 1689 and 1690, Louis XIV should have preserved the Olympian calm for which he was now famous surprised no one, but the cost of the Court, added to that of the war, caused considerable resentment. There now appeared, once again, the kind of critical pamphlets which had largely disappeared since the middle sixties. Of course, they attack that most vulnerable target, Mme de Maintenon, whose first marriage to the impotent Scarron was always good for some ribald fun, but, more significantly, she is also usually depicted as sold to the Jesuits. As for Louis, he is said to support James II only because Mary of Modena has become his mistress, and Mme de Maintenon is represented as countering this affair by procuring a young and virile abbé for the exiled queen.236 All nonsense, of course, but indicative of a growing disaffection.
It might, however, have been better if it had been true: James II, back from Ireland, was once again received as the true King of England. On October 11, 1690, he came to Fontainebleau on a visit, was invariably given the place of honor on the king’s right and treated like a reigning monarch.237 It was perhaps wise not to abandon the wretched James in the middle of a war with William III - or, at least, it would have been if William had been allowed to think that support to James might be part of a general trade-off. Unfortunately, it was the very opposite message he received: A French victory would also mean the restoration of his father-in-law, and he naturally fought all the harder.
At the same time, a mild annoyance to both Louis XIV and the dauphin was removed: On April 20, 1690, the dauphine, who had never really recovered from her last confinement, finally died. She was missed by no one except her maid, a Piedmontese named Bessola, with whom she appears to have been having an affair. The king had disliked her ever since, four years earlier, she had ventured to criticize his policies. The dauphin, who spent most of his time with his brilliant half-sister the princesse de Conti, had taken as his mistress one of the princess’s maids of honor, Mlle Choin, a large-breasted, stupid young woman whom he seems to have really loved. Still, the dauphine’s death opened the terrifying perspective that the twenty-eight-year-old Monseigneur might be found a new wife, and so, in the only act of his life which was not authorized by his father, he secretly married Mlle Choin. Outwardly, nothing was changed; the lady remained in the princesse de Conti’s Household, and many years passed before the secret leaked out, but immediately, the dauphin informed Mme de Maintenon. “I feel that I might start sinning,” he wrote her. “I know of no princess who would suit me, I realize that the one thing the King would mind the most would be if I slid into debauchery. Tell me when I may see you so that we may speak a little. Once again, absolute secrecy …”238
In fact, cautious as always, Mme de Maintenon waited until 1694 before telling the king, and even then did it in a characteristically indirect way: A letter to the dauphin in which she mentioned his wife found its way, apparently by mistake, into the king’s pouch. We know nothing of the royal reaction, but given the parallel between the two secret marriages, and the fact that neither the dauphin nor Mlle Choin was punished, we can only suppose that Louis took it fairly well; it may even have seemed like an inspired act of flattery, imitation being the sincerest form of admiration.
Still, the fact remains that at the proudest and most splendid court in Europe, the king and his only legitimate son had made morganatic marriages: Amid all the pomp and the etiquette, and even as the monarch seemed to rise above the rest of mankind, both he and his heir had wives that a small nobleman would have scorned. Nor were things much better in his immediate family. Monsieur, who had always had a taste for handsome young men, now openly depended on the chevalier de Lorraine: There were constant scenes, motivated either by the chevalier’s greed or, much worse, by his affairs with women; up the backstairs, a stream of good-looking lackeys came to serve Monsieur when the chevalier was busy elsewhere.
The king’s grandchildren were still too young to matter, but already his married daughters, the princesse de Conti (widowed in 1685) and the duchesse de Bourbon, irreverent, antireligious, and mad for amusement, gave rise to repeated scandals. As a result, the
latter half of the reign cannot be understood if one disregards the constant tension between the stately appearances and the far less admirable reality.
In one aspect of his personal life, however, Louis XIV felt nothing but satisfaction: Year by year, he grew to love Mme de Maintenon more. In the summers of 1690 and 1691, he continued an earlier tradition by going off to command his army in person, and from the north letters streamed to the marquise, to give her news of a naval battle,239 tell her that James II was leaving Ireland240 or that the king himself was preparing to return to Versailles.241 On reading them, the sense of closeness is very evident, and there are also love letters. “I take advantage of Montchevreuil’s departure,” Louis wrote in April, 1691, “to assure you of a truth which pleases me so that I can never tire of telling it to you; it is that I always cherish you and care for you beyond expression; and that, in a word, no matter how much you may love me, I love you still more, my whole heart being yours.”242
The corollary of this great love was the advancement of the duc du Maine and the final departure of his mother. In March 1691, Mme de Montespan’s apartment at Versailles was taken from her and given to duc du Maine; after one last scene, she finally gave up the court and thereafter divided her time between Clagny and her apartment in the Convent of Saint Joseph. With her departure, every last vestige of the king’s profligate youth was gone: Mme de Maintenon had good reason to feel triumphant.
All through 1691 and 1692, the war continued. The French armies went on winning, William III went on being defeated: Indeed, the only battle he ever won is that of the Boyne, but it made no difference. The Coalition refused to give up, and no victory was ever thorough enough to prevent the enemy from being again ready to fight within a short time: It was, in fact, a new kind of war, fought not for a specific object, but simply to reduce the power of France. Thus, it hardly mattered that the king in person took Mons in April 1691 or Namur in 1692. These sieges were just as carefully planned, and just as successful, as those of the earlier wars, only now, they made no difference at all.
Still, in 1692, the maréchal de Luxembourg proved his mastery of the art of war: At Steinkerque, the French won a major victory in which the eighteen-year-old Philippe, duc de Chartres, Monsieur’s son and thus the king’s nephew, fought with extraordinary courage and skill. Because Chartres outshone the duc du Maine, and because his behavior gave him added prestige, the king was displeased, and he saw to it that the young man was not given a significant command. At the same time, one last attempt to put James II back on the throne failed. On May 30, 1692, the French fleet, which was to secure a landing in England, was beaten by the British navy, and although by no means destroyed, it was never again strong enough for so difficult an enterprise.
One event, at least, seemed to make a difference: On July 16, 1691, Louvois died suddenly. It was clear that the king was relieved, but he immediately appointed the marquis de Barbezieux, the dead man’s son, in his place, so that it began to look as if the ministries were hereditary: This man was the third generation of the Le Tellier family to be in charge of the army. Barbezieux, who was as bad-tempered as his father, had neither his love of work nor his genius. With the death of the last great minister of the reign, everything was now, more than ever, up to the king. More and more, he governed directly rather than through aides he trusted; less time, every day, was spent on pleasure, more on the endless details of ruling. Louis XIV had been an effective king for thirty years, but after 1691, he became the government.
The endless paperwork which resulted from this increased involvement did nothing to distract the king from the gravity of the situation; thus it was that he gave up his best chance of crushing William III once and for all. Early in June 1693, William found himself trapped before Louvain by two vastly superior French armies, but instead of giving battle, Louis sent one army off to Germany under Monseigneur’s nominal command while he himself returned to Versailles: News from Germany made it seem likely that a great effort on that front would force the emperor to sue for peace. “I gave in to the strong remonstrances which were made and to the conclusions of my own reason,” the king wrote Monsieur, “and I sacrificed with pleasure my own preference and my satisfaction and what would have been most flattering to me to the well-being of the state.”243
In fact, the king had misjudged his enemies. It was William who was the moving spirit of the Coalition, not the emperor, and so the war went on, as usual with no decisive result. On July 29, 1693, the maréchal de Luxembourg defeated William III at Neerwinden, and on August 18, Catinat beat the emperor’s army at La Marsaille, but the war went on as if nothing had happened.
The way in which the king had chosen to fight it, however, seemed, for a moment to bring back the past: His refusal to give battle before Louvain was widely attributed to cowardice; the princes began to criticize as if the days of the early Fronde were to be revived, and Louis XIV took due note. One consequence was his refusal to use the duc de Chartres’s talents; another was the continued promotion of the bastards: In 1693, while firmly ignoring the princes of the blood, he appointed the duc du Maine Grand master of the artillery and the comte de Toulouse grand admiral of France, two positions which had, heretofore, been reserved for the royal family.
Even before these appointments, he had taken a major step to fuse his two families, and the young Saint-Simon, who cared greatly about etiquette and rank, was a horrified witness. “The King, preoccupied with the position of his bastards whom he raised higher day by day, had married two of his daughters to two princes of the blood royal,” he wrote. “For a long time already, Mme de Maintenon, even more than the King … had wanted to wed Mlle de Blois, the King and Mme de Montespan’s second daughter, to M. le duc de Chartres. He was the King’s only nephew, and much above the Princes of the Blood, both by his rank as Grandson of France* and by the splendid Court which surrounded Monsieur. The marriage of the two princes had scandalized everyone. The King knew it and realized the effect to be expected from a marriage so much more dazzling.”244 So, Saint-Simon tells us, he decided first to sway Monsieur, who was likely to resist his only son’s misalliance, and that was done easily enough: Both the comte d’Armagnac, the king’s Grand Equerry, and his brother the chevalier de Lorraine were given the order of the Saint Esprit with precedence over the dukes on the grounds that they belonged (if distantly) to a ruling family; the chevalier, whom Monsieur loved passionately, saw to it that the prince agreed to the marriage.
There remained Madame, who was violently opposed, and the groom himself, the duc de Chartres, but the latter’s tutor, the abbé Dubois, was made to see clearly where his advantage lay, and he convinced his pupil, at the last moment, that he must carry out the king’s wishes. “Madame heard about it. She spoke to her son about the indignity of this marriage with all her strength, a quality in which she was not deficient, and made him swear he would not give in …
“One early afternoon, as I was walking through the Upper Gallery, I saw M. le duc de Chartres coming out of one of his apartment’s back doors, looking very sad and embarrassed … I asked him where he was rushing to at this odd hour. He answered, with a hurried and unhappy look, that the King had sent for him … M. de Chartres found the King alone in his cabinet with Monsieur, whom he had not expected to see there. The King was friendly to M. de Chartres, told him he wanted to take care of him; that the war which was raging on every side made otherwise suitable princesses unavailable; that when it came to princesses of the blood, none was the right age; that he could not better show his affection than by offering him his daughter, whose two sisters had married princes of the blood; that this would make him not just the King’s nephew but his son-in-law as well; but that, although he wanted this marriage with a passion, he did not wish to force him, and left him free to decide. This speech, spoken with that terrifying majesty so characteristic of the King, to a prince who was both shy and not prepared to answer, placed him beyond his depth. He thought to escape so slippery a situation by tur
ning to Monsieur and Madame, and answered that the King was the master, but that his (the duc de Chartres’s) answer, depended on his parents. ‘You are quite right to say so,’ the King told him, ‘but if you consent, your father and mother will do the same’; and turning to Monsieur: ‘Is that not true, brother?’ Monsieur consented to the marriage, as he had done beforehand when alone with the King, so the King promptly said that the only question now lay with Madame; and he had her sent for … Madame arrived, and immediately the King told her that he expected she would not be opposed to a proposal which Monsieur desired and to which M. de Chartres had agreed: that it was his marriage with Mlle de Blois, that he wanted it passionately, and he then added all the same things he had just told M. le duc de Chartres, all in the most imposing way, but looking as if it had not occurred to him that Madame might be anything but delighted, although he knew very well the opposite was true. Madame, who had been counting on the refusal her son had promised he would make, and which, in fact, he had tried to carry out by his embarrassed and conditional answer, found herself trapped and speechless. She looked furiously at Monsieur and M. de Chartres, said that, if they were agreed, she had nothing to say, curtsied and left. Her son followed her, but she carried on with such vehemence that he was not able to tell her what had happened.”245
There is every reason to believe that this extraordinary scene happened just as Saint-Simon describes it: Because he was a close friend of the duc de Chartres, it is clear that he received his information from the unhappy young man. As for what happened next, he was himself an eyewitness. After the betrothal was made public, he wrote, he saw “Madame, walking in the Hall of Mirrors … her handkerchief in her hand, sobbing openly, speaking quite loudly, gesticulating, the very image of Ceres, after the rape of her daughter Proserpina, looking for her with fury and asking Jupiter to give her back … Nothing could have been more ashamed than Monsieur’s expression … His son looked desolate, and even his fiancée seemed extremely sad and embarrassed …
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