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

by Antonia Fraser

  * The real fantasy was the Protestant belief that the Queen was unable to conceive: four years later, she did in fact give birth to another healthy child who survived to maturity, Princess Louisa Maria, known for good reasons as ‘the Consoler'. James of course had had numerous illegitimate children by other women.

  * Today at Versailles only the original shutters remain in place in the former Appartement des Bains of Athénaïs: dolphins spouting water, shells and seaweed can be discerned (the marble bath, as already noted, is now in the Orangery, having had an exciting period when it was given to Madame de Pompadour).

  * Apart from his gambling skills, Dangeau was a licensed jester, able to impersonate Louis XIV, to whom he bore a strong physical resemblance.

  * Marly today is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, still sign-posted as Demeure champêtre du Roi (the King's Rustic Retreat), although the buildings were destroyed at the time of the French Revolution. The verdant site is on a gentle slope looking down towards Paris and up to where there were once cascades; the surviving reservoir is a reminder of the centrality of water in the vision of Louis XIV.

  CHAPTER 13

  Becoming a Child Again

  Everyone at court is becoming a child again.

  – Liselotte, Duchesse d'Orléans, November 1696

  The betrothal of Marie Adelaide, Princess of Savoy, and Louis, Duc de Bourgogne, was announced in June 1696. This union of two young people – ten and a half and just under fourteen respectively – personified the Treaty of Turin by which the opportunist Duke of Savoy abandoned the Grand Alliance for the winning force of Louis XIV. It was a Treaty which marked an important step in the direction of general European pacification.

  The hostilities which had cost France (and others) so much in men and money in the War of the League of Augsburg were not finally ended until the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697. Nevertheless in 1696 it was already possible to regard the little Savoyard bride as a harbinger of peace – as the Spanish Marie-Thérèse had once been. ‘Is she a princess? Is she an angel?' ran one welcoming poem. ‘Don't you see the vital difference? / The angel simply announces peace. / She herself gives it to us.'1 Furthermore, it was part of the deal that the peace-bringing princess should be educated in France. She was young enough, it was felt, to be moulded into the ways of Versailles even before the actual wedding took place. So Adelaide set out for her glorious destiny in the autumn of 1696, her tiny person conveyed by a huge carriage draped in purple velvet (royal mourning for a deceased cousin of Louis XIV).

  The circumstances of Adelaide's childhood conspired to prepare her for what she would find at Versailles. First of all, her mother, Anne-Marie d'Orléans, had taught her of the superior nature of all things French, like many another expatriate French princess before her. Adelaide spoke French well, and with a proper accent (although she could adopt an exaggerated Italian accent when she wanted to tease); in any case the court of Savoy has been described as ‘polyglot’, German as well as Italian competing with French.2

  Quite apart from her upbringing, much of Adelaide's blood was actually French. She had two great-grandmothers who were French princesses, daughters of Henri IV: Henrietta Maria and Christine de France, Duchess of Savoy. Her grandfather, Monsieur, was French and her grandmother Henriette-Anne was half French. Her father's mother (a strong influence upon her), Jeanne-Baptiste de Savoie-Nemours, known as Madame Royale, was partly French; she had been born in Paris and descended from Henri IV via one of his bastards, César, Duc de Vendôme.

  Duchess Anne-Marie had left the court at which she was raised twelve years earlier but had forgotten none of the details. As a result Louis XIV himself would comment much later that Adelaide had been taught in advance ‘the only way she could be happy with us'. For example there was to be no foolish snobbery about Madame de Maintenon such as the late Dauphine had once evinced, since her influence was already palpable when Anne-Marie left for Savoy. In a brilliant move, little Adelaide would address her by the honorific title of aunt; ‘Tante' was respectful and intimate but also delightfully vague. In Adelaide's attitude towards Françoise, obedient and very affectionate, the hand of her powerful grandmother Madame Royale, once Regent of Savoy, can be detected: ‘I have carried out what you ordered me to do,' she wrote to Madame Royale on one occasion in the course of their continuing correspondence.3

  In quite a different way Adelaide was prepared for life at Versailles by her early experiences. For example, her father Victor Amadeus, known – to her anyway – as le Grand, was the strong male figure who was the centre of her world; he was also blatantly unfaithful to her mother. Adelaide grew up understanding that men had mistresses and that mistresses bore them children (Victor Amadeus's maâtresse en titre the Comtesse de Verrue had two that he acknowledged).4 Then, much of her childhood had been spent in the country, the Vigna di Madama, a favourite haunt of Duchess Anne-Marie, having something of the French style. Here Adelaide made cheese and milked cows; here she learned to love flowers, gardening and animals – all the things in short that Louis XIV loved.5

  It was not however a childhood that had been totally without trauma. Victor Amadeus's earlier rupture with France, which he deserted for the League of Augsburg, had led to depredations by French invaders and the destruction of Savoyard buildings: although that experience carried with it the connotation of France's immense strength as a power. Then the winter of 1693, shortly after Adelaide's eighth birthday on 6 December, had been no better in Savoy than in France, with vineyards and orchards destroyed, and starvation threatening the poor.

  By nature Adelaide was kind, exceptionally so, hating to cause pain to anyone in the world, and she was gentle. Her manners were superb. Her greeting of the exiled Queen Mary Beatrice, for example, was perfectly judged, the young woman on the verge of a great destiny showing the greatest respect and tenderness for one whose fortunes were so markedly in decline. In other ways Adelaide was shrewd as the children of troubled marriages are shrewd – for such her own parents' marriage certainly was, give or take Victor Amadeus's sporadic sleeping with his wife in the hopes of begetting a male heir. (A healthy prince had however not yet arrived before Adelaide's departure for France, only another daughter known as Louison, born in 1688.)

  Ill-educated as she might be by the standards of Saint-Cyr, Adelaide was naturally intelligent, quick, amusing and very, very lively. In fact she might have been specially designed to divert the ageing Louis XIV – Adelaide arrived at Versailles when Louis was in his fifty-ninth year – a man with a pious older governess of a wife, troublesome daughters both spoilt and dissipated, and the cares of Europe (as he saw it) on his shoulders. This was the man who had gloomily warned his son that ‘the grandeurs of the world' would all turn to dust, King, Dauphin not excluded. Six years later this sweet little monkey of a girl took Versailles by storm and in the process captured the heart of Louis XIV.

  The King seems to have had some premonition of the emotional importance Adelaide would have in his life. He insisted from the first – that is, before her marriage – that she should have proper precedence as the First Lady of Versailles. This gave her parity with Queen Mary Beatrice, whose rank Louis had hitherto jealously guarded. Since it was not planned for Adelaide and Bourgogne to marry yet awhile, the King ordained that she should be known simply as ‘the Princess' – a single title, like all the grandest titles in Versailles. The proud sisters Françoise-Marie and Madame la Duchesse were indignant: a mere ‘Princess of Savoy' to step ahead of them!6

  Liselotte, however, demoted from the position she had occupied for the last six years, did not particularly mind. She was more concerned to have a swipe at Madame de Maintenon: at least she would not have to hold the chemise for ‘the old whore' if she was officially acknowledged as Queen (a familiar obsession): that would be for Adelaide as senior royal lady. Liselotte was in a particularly grumpy mood towards Françoise these days over the marriage prospects of her only daughter, the hoydenish and rather plain Élisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléa
ns, born in 1676. Liselotte blamed Françoise for denying her daughter the position of the Dauphin's second wife out of ‘spite'; Liselotte had also thought of Élisabeth-Charlotte for Bourgogne, despite her six years seniority.7

  At least Liselotte was spared the horror of another bastard polluting her pure family when the Duc du Maine was married off to a member of the Bourbon-Condé family, Bénédicte, the midget sister of Louise-Françoise's husband Monsieur le Duc. Known to Liselotte as ‘the little toad', Bénédicte was however quite proud enough for Liselotte's liking: although she accepted Maine, she had originally twitted his sisters on their illegitimate birth when they tried to mock her diminutive appearance ‘like a ten-year-old child'. As for Athénaïs's second royal son, the Comte de Toulouse, ‘We have given the little stinker the slip,' Liselotte reported proudly.8 In the end Élisabeth-Charlotte had to make do with Duke Leopold Joseph of Lorraine: a legitimate princeling and occupying a geographically debatable area on the fringes of France. It was not the great marriage Liselotte had envisaged. (She was also annoyed that Élisabeth-Charlotte's half-sisters, Henriette-Anne's daughters, had made superior matches to the King of Spain and Duke of Savoy respectively.)

  The King's premonition about ‘the Princess' took a further form when he insisted on riding to greet her at Montargis, twenty-odd miles south of Fontainebleau, instead of waiting there with the whole court. There he stood on a balcony, watching the road like the King in a fairy story for the dust of the Princess's cortège to signal her approach. There had been considerable fuss about the arrangements for her arrival the French Ambassador reporting tersely: ‘We want the Princess naked,' that is to say, there were to be no inferior Savoyard clothes … only her shoes were allowed to come from Turin. Otherwise Adelaide's trousseau was modest indeed, a few chemises and gowns, some lace lingerie, while she awaited the full panoply of French fashion which would be bestowed upon her on arrival. Her ‘body', that is to say a corselet built around her actual shape, had been sent to France before her, including a ribbon to indicate her minute waist. Nor for that matter were there to be presumptuous Savoyard servants to encourage homesickness.

  Victor Amadeus minded less about the clothes – which after all were saving him expense – than he did about the servants. It was understood that a great Princess should have a great household chosen from the great ladies of her adopted country. In fact the French had been squabbling over these appointments since the betrothal was announced: there had not after all been such a prominent royal household since the death of the Dauphine in 1690. The winners, including the Duchesse de Lude as Dame d'Honneur, owed much to the influence of Françoise and Nanon, her famous confidential servant. A genuine feeling of pity for his little daughter seems to have gripped Victor Amadeus. Was not this mere child to have a familiar servant looking after her chamber-pot, for example? The Duke worried that Adelaide might forget herself unless ‘some intimate woman' was present to calm her ‘in her moments of weakness'. In the end there was a mild effort at compromise on the part of France: Adelaide was allowed to bring one woman with her, Madame Marquet, on condition she returned to Savoy at once although in reality Madame Marquet managed to stay for two years. Fortunately Adelaide's First Equerry was the Comte de Tessé, who had acted as Ambassador Extraordinary to Savoy during the negotiations for the marriage, a middle-aged man she trusted and who acted as a kind of father figure.

  France's ruthless attitude – that of the King, who as usual supervised every detail – was based on the principle of being cruel to be kind. Louis wanted all her tears to be shed before Adelaide reached her new country (he was of course being kind to himself rather than the child). So it was that the Handover took place, a symbolic event whenever a foreign princess left her own country for a glorious marriage. In this case the Princess was installed in her carriage on a hump-backed bridge which joined the two countries, back wheels in Savoy, horse and front wheels in France. She got into the carriage in one country and out in another.

  Certainly all tears had been shed before the momentous meeting between King and Princess at Montargis at six o'clock on 4 November 1696. (She had spent the previous three days at La Charité-sur-Loire for the Feast of All Saints.) Adelaide, like the star she was, rose superbly to the occasion, despite her tender age. Understandably she showed signs of nerves when the King held a flambeau to her face. But when he declared: ‘Madame, I have been waiting impatiently to greet you,' Adelaide replied: ‘This, Sire, is the greatest moment of my life’.9 Whoever coached her in these words – Madame Royale? – had taught her well. And as she tried to kneel before the King he lifted her up ‘like a feather'. Then Adelaide put her hand in his. But there was – there had to be – one moment of kerfuffle over a matter of etiquette, when Monsieur, her biological grandfather, bustled forward to greet the Princess only to find that the Dauphin, as her future father-in-law, took precedence.

  What did the King see? Fortunately his letter back to Madame de Maintenon, waiting with the rest of the royal family (including the fiancé Bourgogne) at Fontainebleau, has survived. The new Princess, he reported, had ‘the greatest charm and the prettiest little figure I have ever seen … the more I see her, the more I am satisfied'. She was in fact doll-sized, and when the King first appeared with her, the impression was given, wrote Saint-Simon in a memorable phrase, that he actually had her in his pocket. Louis's description was of course written to the woman who was going to take charge of this little doll, and he therefore dwelled on her faults. She had ‘very irregular teeth' (and teeth generally would always be a problem for Adelaide). Her lips were very red but also rather thick. On the other hand her pink-and-white complexion was superb. Despite a natural grace Adelaide curtsied badly ‘in the Italian manner' – never a term of praise in France – and altogether there was ‘something slightly Italian' about her appearance. Yet Françoise would be enchanted, as he had been, by her modesty.10

  Adelaide's ‘Italianate' look was partly Duc to that Médicis strain which her tragic aunt Marie-Louise of Spain, for example, had shared. Her eyes were huge and black, her notably long eyelashes also very black. But it was partly Duc to the fact that her hair seems to have been sprayed darker for the meeting, to make her skin look whiter. Liselotte described her as having ‘pretty blonde' hair, while taking the opportunity to sneer at Adelaide's ‘real Austrian mouth and chin’.11 From the portraits the answer seems to be that Adelaide's hair was a kind of bright chestnut which darkened later – she was after all only ten years old at this point. Certainly everyone agreed that her hair was wonderfully thick and lustrous.

  What the King did not mention in his letter to Françoise was the measure of his enchantment with this little ‘doll or plaything' – the term often used by observers – but a walking, talking doll with the prettiest ways imaginable and a plaything who had been educated to respect his wishes in every single matter. No wonder Françoise told Adelaide's mother that the little girl had ‘all the graces of eleven years and all the perfections of a more advanced age'. For when Françoise tried to ‘deny the caresses' Adelaide gave her, saying she was too old, the girl replied charmingly: ‘Not at all too old.' (Although it is true that Françoise was ageing well; at sixty-one she had hardly a grey hair; her eyes were still ‘very fine', as an English visitor wrote, and there was about ‘her whole person' an indefinable charm which old age could not destroy.) After this bit of childish blarney, Adelaide sat on Françoise's lap and uttered the perfect expression of her training: ‘Teach me well, I beg you, what I have to do to please the King’.12

  It is plausible to argue that Louis XIV loved Adelaide of Savoy more than he loved anyone in his life, with the possible exception of the strong love he felt for his mother. It is more difficult to get at Adelaide's feelings for this kindly, all-powerful grandfather-figure. Marguerite de Caylus, who observed the scene, did not doubt that she genuinely loved him, but added the rider that Adelaide was by nature ‘coquettish’ and easily influenced by those around her.13 What is remarkable about Ad
elaide's correspondence with her father, mother and grandmother is the prominence it gives to Louis XIV and the scarcity of mentions of the Duc de Bourgogne. She reiterates her love for the King, his kindness to her – but of Bourgogne there is hardly a trace.

  Perhaps this was hardly surprising, since the two young fiancés were being carefully kept apart, with meetings not only strictly chaperoned but rationed to one a fortnight (his brothers, Anjou and Berry, could meet Adelaide once a month). Bourgogne himself was hardly a glamorous figure. His misanthropic temperament had led to the nickname of ‘Alceste’, and with strong religious convictions he would probably have been happier as a younger son who could have become a Cardinal Prince of the Church, as in bygone days. His pious austerities were notorious as when he refused to attend a ball at Marly because it was the Feast of the Epiphany. Even the holy Fénelon had to reason with him that ‘a great Prince should not serve God in the same way as a recluse'. The counterpoint to this piety was a violent temper which Bourgogne was unable to control: he was, wrote Saint-Simon, ‘born furious'. A favourite method of relief was smashing clocks.14

  Nor was his physical appearance prepossessing. Bourgogne was quite short, with a raised shoulder that gradually turned to a hump. His face was dominated by a beaklike nose, which together with his receding chin and pronounced upper jaw made him look positively odd. As against that, Bourgogne enjoyed music, the opera and the theatre. He was insecure but he was not mean-spirited. And of course, like his grandfather, he fell madly in love with Adelaide, despite the strict prohibitions which would not let him kiss so much as the tips of her fingers.

  The general enchantment of the population, King downwards, by ‘the Princess' had a curious effect on what had become a somewhat stultified society. Of course she was an object of intense interest from the start, not only in terms of lucrative appointments to her household. There was such a crush on her first arrival at court that there was a danger of the whole company collapsing ‘like a pack of cards' as grand ladies such as the Duchesse de Nemours and the Maréchale de La Motte pushed their way relentlessly to the front; according to Liselotte, Maintenon herself would have been felled if she had not personally held ‘the old woman's' arms upright.15 Quite apart from Bourgogne, there was trouble about who might and who might not kiss ‘the Princess', with the Duchesse de Lude like an eagle of etiquette, ever on the watch against an unlawful buss.