Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

by Antonia Fraser

  Everyone at court could see that the Queen Mother's death, whenever it came, would bring great changes. The King for one would no longer have that emotional tug towards his mother's approval which had, at least in part, guided his behaviour. Anne's death might see the return to the French court of the maîtresse en titre last seen in the reign of Henri IV. It was significant that in October the King had dared to introduce Louise into the usual crowd in the Queen Mother's salon for a game of cards. Although Anne was horrified and withdrew into an inner sanctum, she made no official objection. Louise gave birth on 7 January 1665 to a second son, Philippe, who was smuggled away in the same fashion as the first and like him died in infancy. Louis's gallantry, or galanterie in that useful French term, was however leading him in new directions. While the court reacted predictably: if the King was sexually available, perhaps he was available to more women than one?

  The reason galanterie was a useful term at this period was that it had no single meaning and could therefore be discreetly employed to cover a number of modes of behaviour. The range was considerable. To the Comtesse de La Fayette, gallantry was merely ‘a polite or agreeable manner of saying a thing'. For Madeleine de Scudéry, analysing the subject, it all began with a wish to please and thus style was all-important. A gallant man with a certain ‘worldly je tie sais quoi' could say out loud things that other people would not dare mention. At the same time the word definitely had other darker and more exciting meanings, from amorous conduct, the ‘sweet badinage of love', to passionate flirtation and outright sex. In her famous Map of Love, included in her best-selling novel Clélie, Madeleine de Scudéry was quick to admit that the River of Inclination flowed all too fast into the Sea of Danger and beyond this Sea lay ‘the Unknown Lands.’26

  Just as gallantry itself was an ambivalent term, it was not always clear how far the King's own gallantry with particular ladies actually went. What exactly transpired when the King was chez les dames late of an afternoon, as the contemporary euphemism had it? (His own apartments were never used for such rendezvous.) A seventeenth-century dictionary actually defined a chambre or bedroom as ‘a place where you sleep and receive guests’.27 Thus beds were everywhere and ladies happily entertained from them according to the manners of the time. The ruelle was the name for the space between a bed and the wall where a gallant might conventionally sit enjoying his lady's conversation. But it was a remarkably short hop from ruelle to bed.

  For Louis, there was a brief affair, as it probably was, with the saucy and malicious Princesse de Monaco, sister of the Comte de Guiche.* Another candidate for a fling was the rather more agreeable Anne de Rohan-Chabot, Princesse de Soubise, with her reddish hair, white skin and her slanting brown eyes. ‘La belle Florice', as she was known to her friends, maintained her beauty by a strict diet, surprising for her time, of chicken and salad, fruit, some milky foods and water only occasionally tinctured with wine. A devoted wife, still very young, at this stage she probably did reject the advances of the gallant King in favour of a flirtatious friendship.

  Olympe Mancini, now Comtesse de Soissons and Superintendent of the Queen's Household (her husband's family, the Carignans, were Savoyard royalty), was another candidate. Whether their youthful affair had been consummated or not, there was nothing to stop Olympe and Louis now, and she should surely be included among his periodic mistresses. Amusing and lively company, which was very much to Louis's taste, time would show that Olympe had an Italian taste for intrigue, which was not. Then there were the younger girls propelled forward by those who believed it would be advantageous all round to supplant Louise: Charlotte-Eléanore de La Motte Houdancourt, another maid-of-honour, was one of these, although the incipient romance was nipped in the bud by the sternly virtuous Duchesse de Navailles, Marie-Thérèse's Dame d'Honneur, who had special grilles put over the windows of the maids-of-honour to eliminate late-night junketings.

  It was to the King's discredit that, furious with the distinguished Duchesse, who was after all only doing her duty of protection, he banished her and her husband from court, despite pleas on their behalf by Queen Anne. His treatment of the Duc de Mazarin, granted the title because he was married to Hortense Mancini, was more in keeping with the high standards of a great monarch. When Mazarin impertinently remonstrated with Louis over his conduct, the King merely tapped his forehead: ‘I always thought you were mad,’ he said, ‘and now I know it.’29

  More important than these variegated philanderings was the first death in the royal family: not, as expected, that of Queen Anne but of her brother Philip IV. The Spanish King died at the age of sixty on 17 September. He left a troubled legacy. The four-year-old child who now became King Carlos II was, as has been mentioned, a dismal prospect for a long life. Since Marie-Thérèse had renounced her rights to succession, Philip in his will designated as heiress presumptive his other daughter, Margarita Teresa. Long promised in marriage to her Habsburg cousin the Emperor Leopold, she would wed him at the end of the following year.

  Louis broke the news of Philip's death personally to Marie-Thérèse, and he did so gently; wherever possible he treated his betrayed wife with the greatest courtesy and tenderness, as he sympathised with her sorrow over the death of her third child Marie-Anne, born in November and dead by Christmas. He knew that Marie-Thérèse had loved her father; he also knew that she disliked her stepmother, the new Regent Marianna, and had no feeling about the brother Carlos born after she left Spain. Marie-Thérèse might be sequestered but she had a fine Castilian sense of what was Duc to her.

  Louis's own preoccupation was also with his wife's rights. There were two points here: the non-payment of her dowry which might render the whole renunciation void, and the so-called Law of Brabant by which children of the first marriage, such as Marie-Thérèse, preceded those of the second, Carlos and Margarita Teresa. Here was an opportunity to increase French security in its northern borders by grabbing certain territories of the Spanish Netherlands under the guise of law.

  As his mother's health suddenly deteriorated at the beginning of January 1666 Louis was still undecided on the direction of his future foreign policy. He had in fact been bound since 1662 in a defensive alliance with the Dutch, already at war with England over naval supremacy and maritime trade. As he recounted his cogitations in his memoirs, the King initially held back from the prospect of engaging two great powers, Spain and England, at the same time. In the end he decided to use fighting the English as a smokescreen for his real intentions: the Dutch, who wanted his assistance against England, would in the future be fervent in their support against the Spaniards. ‘But while I prepared my arms against England, I did not forget to work against the House of Austria [Louis equated Spain and Austria] by all the means that negotiation favoured.’30

  Queen Anne survived until late in the month of January. Madame de Motteveille wrote loyally that she had never been so beautiful as when on her deathbed. Even when the unfortunate woman had been subjected earlier to that public cutting of the tumour, the faithful lady-in-waiting still found something to admire in her breast, lacerated as it was. In spite of her sufferings, the Queen Mother attempted even now to retain some of the lightness of touch in desperate situations which had endeared her for so long and over so many crises to her household.

  ‘I am not crying, this is just water coming out of my eyes,' she said to the Duchess of Molina. ‘In truth Your Majesty is very red,' the Duchess replied, also in Spanish. ‘Well, Molina, I've got a good big fever’, said the Queen, still trying to speak lightly.31

  It could not last for ever, this frightful ordeal in a room where even a profusion of perfumed sachets could not altogether conceal the smell of illness. The Queen's beautiful hands of which she had once been so proud were swollen beyond endurance. (After her death, she was found to possess over four hundred pairs of gloves: none of them now wearable or bearable.) Looking at them, the long white fingers now unrecognisable, she said at last: ‘So it is time to go.' At this point even Madame de Mottevi
lle had to admit that her adored mistress, by now more alabaster than flesh, looked old rather than beautiful. The relics of Sainte-Geneviéve, the patron saint of Paris, once used to solace her in childbed, were brought to her aid yet again, but in vain. The Grande Mademoiselle, seeing the crystal cross and candlesticks, brought from the chapel as a kind of comfort, contrasted the brilliance of the crystal with the approaching darkness of death.32

  Quite apart from the grief of the onlookers, a deathbed was, in the religious sense, the most serious moment of a seventeenth-century Catholic life. It was considered crucial for a person to face the fact of their impending death in order to repent fully and ensure that salvation on which the Queen herself placed such emphasis. The ideal frame of mind was to be ‘neither fearing nor desiring' the end, in a line of the poet François Maynard quoted with approval by Madame de Sévigné.33 The Last Sacrament was to be administered and Extreme Unction applied. (Hence the contemporary horror of sudden death, which gave no such opportunity.) In theory the living lay people no longer had any role to play, only the clergy, intermediaries with the next world. But when were the doctors to announce that the end was coming? It was a fine call to make for those – everyone – in awe of the King. Louis, who once again had a bed installed in his mother's room, was enraged when he felt that she was being denied her Duc out of servility.

  ‘What!' he exclaimed. ‘They would flatter her and let her die without the sacraments, after months of sickness. I will not have this on my conscience.' He made the point again, strongly: ‘We have no more time for flattery.'

  Queen Anne finally expired just after six o'clock in the morning on 20 January 1666. Monsieur was with her; the King was in the next room with the Grande Mademoiselle, where he had been taken, ‘half fainting', in the course of the night. As his mother's hand had slipped from his own for the last time he gave a great cry. In the Queen's last audible words, she asked for a crucifix to hold.

  Anne of Austria was in her sixty-fifth year. Her example, the prudence, dignity and virtue of her conduct, would leave an indelible mark on Louis XIV, whether he followed it or not. In his affliction, he paid his mother an unparalleled tribute from a son to one who had also ruled the country: Queen Anne was to be numbered, he said, among the great kings of France. The years had slipped away and as happens with the death of a parent, his memories went back to his youth, when ‘the vigour of the princess' had preserved him on his throne. It was fitting that an inventory of the Queen's belongings after her death included, among the list of brilliant many-coloured gems, a bracelet containing the hair of the infant Louis.34

  ‘I never disobeyed her in anything of consequence,' he said. Whether of consequence or not, at some date very close to the deathbed of the Queen Mother, Louise de La Vallière conceived her third child. With the dark cloud of Anne's disapproval dissipated for ever, there was no reason for Louis not to yield to ‘the sweet violence' of love when and where he wished. Its only rival was that other violence, the violence of war, or as Louis would have it: the glory of the martial contest. On 26 January, less than a week after his mother's death, Louis XIV declared war on England allegedly in support of the Dutch. In the words of Racine, he went in search of ‘the glory and the joy / That a first victory brings to a young man's heart’.35

  * In 1683 a huge altar was erected there by Lieutaud, a pupil of Bernini; iron grills featured the emblems of France and suitably enough the arms of Louis XIV; in the crypt a nineteenth-century casket is said to preserve the relics of Mary Magdalen.

  * Molière's Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (Don Juan or the Stone Banquet) was first performed on 15 February 1665; the play became the basis for Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in the next century, although the original source of the story was Spanish.

  * Jasmine – the name was Arabic in origin – had been brought to Spain by the Moors, and so to France in the last century by Spanish sailors.

  * It is possible to imagine that the trees one sees at Versailles today in the Orangery, some very gnarled but still fruiting, include specimens which belonged to the Sun King; in 1966 Nancy Mitford recorded that there were eight such still at Versailles.15

  * The site of the Basin of Apollo in present-day Versailles.

  * The Princesse spitefully marked her failure to establish something more permanent by describing the King's ‘sceptre’ as ‘very small’ – or so she said.28

  PART TWO

  Summer

  CHAPTER 6

  The Rise of Another

  In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.

  – La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

  There is a rumour going round the court that the King is dreaming a little of Madame de Montespan': this was the Duc d'Enghien writing to the French-born Queen of Poland on 2 November 1666 with the gossip about her native country. Nine months later, the Comte de Saint-Maurice, the Ambassador of Savoy, reported that Louis could think of little else except the scintillating Marquise. By September 1667, Saint-Maurice was convinced that wherever the King happened to be, he made three (long) visits to the Marquise every day.1 Thus far had Athénaïs, born into the Mortemart family, travelled in the affections of the King, regardless of the fact that she was now very much a married woman, and the mother of two young children by her husband, the Marquis de Montespan.

  Louise de La Vallière's third child, Marie-Anne, had been born on 2 October at the royal château of Vincennes (was it tenderness, tactlessness or sheer indifference that gave the baby the same name as the Queen's daughter who had died at Christmas the previous year?). The circumstances of the birth still had to be discreet, so far as was possible in the ritual intimacy of court arrangements. Henriette-Anne happened to be passing through her maid-of-honour's chamber on her way to the chapel just as Louise was experiencing the first pangs of childbirth.

  ‘Colic, Madame, an attack of colic,' Louise managed to gasp out. Keeping up the required fiction, Louise urged Dr Boucher, the accoucheur, to make sure the birth was successfully accomplished before Madame's return. Her room was filled with tuberoses so that their delicious, dominating perfume would cover up anything else in what had now become a delivery room. The doctor, who was by now after all a veteran of these natural–unnatural crises, succeeded. Louise, pale and exhausted, even managed to make that midnight court supper known under the Italian name of medianoche.2

  Nevertheless, Marie-Anne's life was to be very different from that of the brothers who had been spirited away. Cared for at first by Madame Colbert, she grew up to be petted and adored; gifted with exceptionally pretty looks from childhood, graceful like her mother, she bade fair to be her father's favourite child. The little girl's status as the child of the King by his acknowledged mistress was made possible by the death of Queen Anne. Her mother's fortunes on the other hand were improving only in theory, not in practice. No semi-official rank could atone for the pain Louise felt and continued to feel at the King's ‘infidelities', which mocked the holy love she had believed they enjoyed (and paradoxically kept her in a state of sin). At least fatherhood was a claim that the King honoured: thus Louise rapidly conceived her fourth child after the birth of Marie-Anne. Unfortunately this also meant that Louise spent the vital year during which Athénaïs developed her ascendancy, yet again in a physically burdened state.

  Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart was born on 5 October 1640.* She was thus about twenty-six when the King's eye first lit upon her in any context except that of an attendant on his wife. This was not the first flush of youth in a society where looks were supposed to decline after twenty. Athénaïs however was made to be different. She was astonishingly beautiful. She had long, thick, corn-coloured hair which curled artlessly about her shoulders when she was in a state of deshabille. Her eyes were huge, blue and very slightly exophthalmic; she had a pouting mouth. There was something at once sexy and imperious about her appearance that ravished the eye while her lusciously curved figur
e appealed to contemporary taste in contrast to that of slender Louise. This voluptuousness makes plausible at least one story by which Louis plotted to spy on her at her bath disguised as a servant; awestruck, he gave away his presence, at which Athénaïs laughingly dropped her towel.4

  But Athénaïs was far, far more than a mere beauty, of whom there were, after all, large numbers at Versailles. She was high-spirited and amusing, with a special kind of drollery known as ‘the wit of the Mortemarts' which her family made famous. There were catchwords which baffled the uninitiated: Bourguignon for example stood for everything dull and dreary, Duc to one sister's dislike of her husband's Burgundian estates. A judgement would be delivered by a Mortemart with seeming innocence, even naïvety, what Saint-Simon called a ‘witty languishing manner', and yet in its own way it would be quite devastating.5 And certainly where Athénaïs was concerned, this lovely rose had thorns: later courtiers would dread passing under her windows at Versailles for fear of the comments she might make. Madeleine de Scudéry had commended elegant mockery as the consummate social weapon in an essay ‘Of Raillery'. ‘To mock well,' she wrote in 1653, ‘you must have a fiery intelligence, delicate judgement and a memory full of a thousand different things to use on different occasions.' All this was possessed by Athénaïs.6