Louis XIV

by Olivier Bernier

  Indeed, although the marquise’s status remained highly ambiguous - the marriage was never acknowledged - Louis treated her with all the respect due a queen of France. She never appeared at any of the great state functions, but at the daily mass she sat in the queen’s place; she received the princesses sitting in an armchair while they stood; the king, even outdoors, invariably kept his hat off while talking to her, and was often seen, in his gardens, walking next to her sedan chair, bareheaded and bent over. All this conduct, to us, may seem to be no more than common courtesy; in the seventeenth century, it was both startling and shocking.

  Indeed, it caused much whispering when, in late August 1698, war games were held at Compiègne; Saint-Simon, naturally, was there. “The King said he hoped that the troops would be in good condition, and that everyone would do his best: that was enough to give rise to such emulation that all had, later, every reason to regret it. Not only were all the different regiments in perfect shape, and so much so that it was impossible to determine which corps deserved the prize, but also the commanders added [at their own expense] to the majestic and warlike beauty of the men, arms, horses, the ornaments, and magnificence of the Court, and the officers strained themselves further by wearing uniforms which would not have been out of place at a ball. The colonels, and even many captains, held open tables that were abundantly served with delicacies.”256 It was a great occasion, and, for the first time, all the ladies were there as well, along with the ambassadors and the papal nuncio.

  As the climax of these war games, a mock siege of Compiègne was planned; all the maneuvers common to these occasions were carried out in abbreviated form in the plain surrounding the town, and the king, along with his entourage, watched it all from the top of a rampart which also formed a terrace for the château. “I was in the half-circle very near the King, three steps away at most, and with no one before me,” Saint-Simon goes on. “It is impossible to imagine a finer sight than this great army and the prodigious number of onlookers of all stations … But a spectacle of another sort, and which I could describe forty years from now as precisely as today because I was so struck by it, was the one that the King gave to his whole army and the innumerable crowd in the plain and on the rampart itself. Mme de Maintenon was sitting in her sedan chair in front of the plain and the troops; the glass in her three windows was up, and her porters were gone. On the front left pole sat Mme la duchesse de Bourgogne; on the same side, in the rear, stood Madame la Duchesse, Mme la princesse de Conti, all the ladies, and further still some men. The King stood next to the right window of the sedan chair, with, behind him a half-circle of the most distinguished men there. The King was almost always hatless, and was constantly bending over to the window to speak to Mme de Maintenon, to explain what she saw and the reason for it all. Each time, she was polite enough to let the glass down by four of five fingers’s breadth, never even half way, I noticed it especially and must admit I paid more attention to this spectacle than to that of the troops. Sometimes she opened the glass to ask the King a question; but almost always it was he who, without waiting for her to speak to him, would bend over to explain something; and sometimes when she did not notice him, he would knock against the glass. He spoke to her only, except for giving brief and rare orders, and a few answers to Mme la duchesse de Bourgogne … to whom Mme de Maintenon now and again spoke in sign language without lowering the front glass through which the young princess would shout a few words. I looked carefully at everyone’s face and saw a shy, ashamed, and concealed surprise … all with a respect mixed with fear and embarassment.”257 Mme de Maintenon’s true position could not have been more eloquently expressed.

  By the time the war games at Compiègne took place, there had been one major change at Court: On Saturday, December 7, 1697, the duc de Bourgogne and Marie Adélaide de Savoie were married; the groom was fifteen, the bride thirteen, too young, even by seventeenth-century standards, for consummation to be allowed. The king let it be known he would be pleased to see his court splendidly dressed, and, indeed, the greatest luxury prevailed. Saint-Simon, who naturally conformed, noted ruefully that he had spent 20,000 livres - well over $100,000 - on his clothes and his wife’s dresses.

  There were two balls and an evening of opera; on the day of the wedding itself, attended, among others, by James II and Mary of Modena, the royal family dined and supped in public; there was a display of fireworks, rather marred by the pouring rain, and the young couple were put to bed in presence of the entire Court. There they remained for fifteen minutes, Monseigneur sitting at his son’s side; after which Bourgogne left his virgin bride. The next day, the duchesse held court, with far more ease and grace, it was noticed, than the late dauphine. Although such a marriage could hardly yet be said to be real, a new unit had nonetheless been formed. All those who had no hope of preferment when Monseigneur succeeded to the Crown began to gather around the next heir; the king, after all, could not live forever, and a prudent courtier always thought of the future.

  The Court, in fact, now began to split into clans. There were Monseigneur’s friends, led by the princesse de Conti; there was an ultrareligious, conservative group which eventually coalesced around the duc de Bourgogne, who, however, loudly proclaimed his absolute loyalty to the king; there was a small circle of free-thinkers, who mocked the king’s piety and advocated a more adventurous foreign policy, and it centered around the prince de Conti, the brother-in-law of the widowed princesse. Mme de Maintenon, of course, had her own friends, and they, too, formed a distinct group. Although very different from the situation in the sixties and seventies, it never worried the king: Everything still depended on him, and since the several groups detested each other, they could always be used one against the other.

  In the actual exercise of power, though, there were virtually no changes. Even after the war ended, Louis XIV continued to govern by himself. The foreign minister, Colbert’s brother, died in 1696, but just as Barbezieux had succeeded Louvois, so the marquis de Torcy succeeded his father. At first, he shared the office with Pomponne, whose daughter he married at the king’s order, and eventually was given complete charge.

  Thus, by 1698, all seemed settled for a long time. The Court was more splendid than ever; France, though it had not won the war of the League of Augsburg, had not really lost it either, and it was still the richest and mightiest European power. The king, more absolute than ever, saw his succession assured for two generations, with every hope of a third in the not distant future. Peace was assured: Unlike its predecessors, the Treaty of Ryswick had left no contentious issue unsettled. The only cloud on the horizon was the fate of Spain, where the childless King Charles II was not expected to live much longer. But negotiations among France, England, and the Empire were under way; candidates to the Spanish throne were canvassed, and all were anxious to avoid another conflict. There was no reason why the reign of Louis XIV should not enter a long and golden sunset.

  * All in all, it produced 2.5 million livres. Silver church furniture went next.

  * A king’s son was called Fils de France, Son of France; Chartres, being Louis XIII’s grandson, was called Grandson of France.

  * The letter is undated.

  * It was very unusual for a foreign princess coming to France not to have been first married by procuration, but Marie Adélaide was still too young to become duchesse de Bourgogne.

  * Meudon is just outside Versailles.

  The courtiers who gathered around Louis XIV at Versailles, watching, scheming, hoping for advancement, might have been forgiven for thinking that the world as they knew it had become eternal. At an age when most of his predecessors had been dead, the king, who was sixty-one in 1698, seemed as vigorous as ever, and a good deal more majestic. Better still, he had come through the late war almost unscathed; such defeats as the French army had suffered might actually be considered a positive element in that they guaranteed the peace. France, though still distrusted, no longer seemed the enemy of mankind.

  It wa
s, in fact, in a successful effort to avoid any future cause for war that Louis, in the deepest secrecy, began a negotiation with the man in Europe who hated him most, and King William III, fully aware that the English had had their fill of war, was equally anxious to reach an agreement. Of course, the subject of these talks was a little awkward since it predicated the death of the king of Spain at a time when Charles II was still quite alive. Indeed, that wretched and childless monarch had been expected to die at any moment ever since his birth, some thirty-seven years before; still, he was growing weaker, and unless an agreed-upon heir was ready to succeed him, a new, and even more terrible war could be expected to break out.

  There were, in 1698, three possible successors: one of Louis XIV’s grandsons, whose claim came through Queen Marie Thérèse; one of the emperor’s sons, whose claim came through his grandmother; and one of the elector of Bavaria’s sons, whose mother was Queen Marie Thérèse’s younger sister. Quite obviously, choosing the Bourbon or the Habsburg would entail far too great an accretion of power to either dynasty, but the Bavarian candidate, a three-year-old child, was the perfect compromise, so Louis and William agreed that he was to inherit Spain and the Indies, while the Spanish possessions in Italy would be split between France and Austria. It was an eminently sensible arrangement, as the emperor agreed, and thus it was settled.

  It remained to inform Charles II; pressed by his ministers, he agreed to do as he was asked and, in November, signed a will leaving his many crowns to Joseph-Ferdinand of Bavaria, upon which, three months later, that richest of legatees predeceased the testator: Spain and the Indies were once again without an heir.

  At that point, still as anxious as ever to maintain the peace, Louis XIV came up with a new solution: Since there was no longer a compromise heir, let the Spanish possessions be partitioned between France and Austria. A new negotiation was started, Louis and William came to an agreement, only to find that, in the meantime, the emperor had become greedy and refused his consent; it was mid-August, 1700 before the negotiation failed, and it seemed clearer than ever that Charles II was at death’s door. No one could tell what would happen when he actually died, but clearly, he now had to write a new will; his wife, a German, pressed him to leave everything to the Archduke Charles, the emperor’s younger son; his ministers, who preferred France, urged him to choose, instead, the duc d’Anjou, Monseigneur’s second son. It was perfectly clear to everyone that if either of these two possibilities became fact, war would follow.

  These grave matters were debated by the four rulers and their ministers in the deepest of secrecy, but at Versailles, another topic seemed far more important: Once again, an obscure religious doctrine was arousing violent controversies, and, this time, it looked as if they might involve some of the most powerful people at Court.

  The abbé de Fénelon, a churchman highly popular among the more pious ladies of the Court, was not only tall, handsome, intelligent and full of charm, he had also long been a close friend of Mme de Maintenon; as if that were not enough, Louis XIV had appointed him preceptor to the duc de Bourgogne, the next heir to the throne after Monseigneur, a post which gave him virtual control of the young man’s education, especially since the governor, the man in ultimate charge of the king’s grandchildren, was the duc de Beauvillier, a close friend and fervent admirer of Fénelon’s.

  That the abbé was a gifted and effective teacher cannot be doubted. He took a violent and inattentive child, who seemed destined to be the scourge of France if and when he succeeded to the throne and, entirely through persuasion and encouragement, turned him into a serious, self-controlled, and cultivated adolescent. As a result, of course, Bourgogne became devoted to his preceptor, a feeling warmly encouraged by the duc de Beauvillier.

  Still, for a while, there had been a rather large fly in the ointment: Like many of his fellow aristocrats, Fénelon deeply resented the domestication of his order. From there to saying, sotto voce, that the king was little better than a tyrant was but a short step. That, in turn, led to advocating a radically different system of government, one in which the state would be run by several Councils composed entirely of great nobles, with the sovereign as a sort of chairman of the board. Of course, the abbé knew better than to propound his theories to Louis XIV’s face, but he undoubtedly gave Mme de Maintenon some pretty broad hints, and composed a treatise, Les Aventures de Télémaque, in which, under the guise of recounting the story of the Greek hero in the shape of an educational tale, he set forth his views.

  As if that were not already dangerous enough, the abbé, in the nineties, protected an odd religious sect founded by a mystic, Mme Guyon, which relied heavily on ecstasy and messages from above, all bathed in “pure love.” Already Bossuet, that strictly orthodox churchman, had fought this rather peculiar doctrine; soon the bishop of Chartres, Godet des Marais, a man of little merit but much cunning, saw his chance: If Fénelon could be accused of heresy, he, Godet, would become Mme de Maintenon’s chief religious adviser, with a number of pleasant consequences for himself. At the same time, the bishop of Chalons, a member of the powerful Noailles family in which Mme de Maintenon had found a husband for her niece, was pressing her to renounce Mme Guyon’s dangerous ideas.

  For a woman of Mme de Maintenon’s intelligence, the risks of remaining close to Fénelon were all too obvious. When Godet warned her that the school she had founded* and where Mme Guyon’s teachings were highly popular, was in danger of heresy, she hesitated no longer. The mystic’s writings were shown to the king, who thought them pernicious nonsense. Bossuet, helped by two other bishops, spent eight months examining Mme Guyon and her doctrine, upon which he concluded that her peaceful, passive ecstasies led straight to the death of the soul. Docilely, Mme Guyon recognized her error and retired to a convent; on his side, Fénelon accepted the verdict. Still, it had been a close thing: Mme de Maintenon, always frightened that the king might turn against her, had seen a precipice gaping at her feet. She hastened to close it by withdrawing her support from Fénelon.

  Of course, none of these proceedings appeared outwardly. Mme Guyon had been condemned, Fénelon had accepted the verdict, and that was that: His disciples, including first and foremost the duc de Beauvillier, saw it all as a minor and temporary setback. Indeed, Beauvillier, the only great noble ever called to the conseil d’en haut by the king, seemed powerful enough to guarantee the abbé’s position.

  As it happened, however, Fénelon had not only give Mme de Maintenon a severe fright, his very position at Court now threatened to undo one of her most cherished schemes: It had long been her ambition to have the determining voice in the distribution of ecclesiastical patronage. Heretofore, Louis XIV had consulted only his confessor, the Père de La Chaise, a man Mme de Maintenon disliked and distrusted, and the saintly archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon; then, in 1695, Champvallon died. If the marquise was to succeed in her ambition, it was obviously crucial that one of her closest allies be appointed to his seat. To everyone’s amazement, that most important See went, not to Fénelon, as everyone thought it must, but to the marquise’s trusted friend, Noailles, bishop of Chalons, and the abbé’s position became clearer still when he was made archbishop of Cambrai.

  On the face of it, Cambrai was a dazzling promotion. A title of duc et pair went with the seat, whose income - some 200,000 livres a year - was one of the largest in France. But it was also far away in northern France, and the king promptly announced that he expected the new archbishop to reside there for nine months out of every year: That came perilously close to permanent exile. Even so, M. de Cambrai, as Fénelon was now known, did not give up: He kept up a busy correspondence with his friends at Court and continued to defend his political ideas.

  That was hardly prudent: Louis XIV was still the best informed man in France, and he disliked opposition as much as ever. When, in 1699, the archbishop published his Télémaque, which had originally been written solely for his pupil, the king struck, and so, at his request, did the pope. On March 12
, 1699, Innocent XII published the brief cum alias denouncing twenty-three principles from Fénelon’s Explication des maximes des saints. Without a moment’s hesitation, the archbishop submitted to the Holy See, but it was too late. He was forbidden to appear at Court or correspond with his former pupil.

  None of this drama would have mattered much had it not been that religion here was only a cloak for Court intrigues. For a while, it looked as if the duc de Beauvillier, too, would be disgraced. “The King, coming back from mass, found M. de Beauvillier waiting in his cabinet for the forthcoming Council. As soon as he saw him, he went to him and said: ‘Well, M. de Beauvillier, what do you say now? M. de Cambrai has been well and thoroughly Condemned.’

  “‘Sire,’ the Duke answered respectfully and yet in a firm voice, ‘I have been, and will always remain, M. de Cambrai’s close friend; but if he does not submit to the Pope I will never again communicate with him.’ The King remained speechless, and those present much admired so firm a generosity on the one hand, and so clear a declaration on the other.”258 Only the unexpected support of the new archbishop of Paris saved Beauvillier, but even so, the balance of power shifted: A potential opposition had just been decapitated while Mme de Maintenon’s power grew enormously. Still, with every passing year, it was becoming clearer that the Court was split into several parties, one of which hoped to oppose the heir presumptive to his grandfather - the very thing the king wanted to avoid. It is no wonder he struck at Fénelon with such speed and such vigor.

  In other respects, however, little changed at Versailles. The légitimés were still being gradually advanced by the king: More and more, the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse were being treated like real princes of the blood while their sisters were allowed certain privileges - having their ladies-in-waiting ride in the royal carriages, for instance - which had, hitherto, been reserved for Daughters of France. Politically, too, the changes inevitably wrought by the passage of time made little difference: In 1699, Torcy, who had long had the job without the title, became Foreign Minister; the old Chancelier Boucherat died and was replaced by Pontchartrain, whose job as controller general went to Chamillart, a tall, intelligent, and kindly man with a talent for billiards, somewhat lacking in energy, but certainly adequate in peacetime. With all that, it was as clear as ever that the king was in charge.