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

by Antonia Fraser

  Part of this support for the exiles was Duc to Louis's genuine reverence for Mary Beatrice, in every way the dominant character of the pair these days, as ex-King James's conversation, never scintillating at the best of times, centred more and more upon his impending death. But neither he nor any other European could be unaware that the question of the eventual English succession remained unsolved. William and Mary (who died in 1694) had no children. Her sister Anne seemed to be unable to raise a healthy child, the only survivor from infancy of her huge brood, the young Duke of Gloucester, a virtual invalid with a hugely swollen head, was to die at the age of nine in July 1700. Under these circumstances, it would need the certainty of hindsight to rule out the chances of ten-year-old James Edward succeeding. Still styled the Prince of Wales, Mary Beatrice's son was a happy, healthy child, and lived under the protection of France.

  Not the English but the Spanish succession now threatened this lull of European peace. On 1 November 1700 Carlos II of Spain, that monarch whose demise had been predicted since his birth, did actually die at the age of thirty-nine, and of course he died childless. In a bold gesture of contempt for the various rulers who had been notionally sawing up his empire over the years, Carlos left his entire dominions to his half-sister's grandson on condition that they were kept together: this was none other than the Duc d'Anjou, second son of the Dauphin of France. It was perfectly possible to argue that Anjou was Carlos's nearest heir (Anjou's elder brother Bour-gogne, like the Dauphin himself, was ruled out as being a future King of France). Equally the descendants of Carlos's full sister Margarita Teresa, who had married the Emperor, could mount a claim: her grandson Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, a prince but not a threateningly powerful one, was a suitable choice: unfortunately he died in 1699. The next imperial choice was more openly Habsburg: the Emperor's younger son the Archduke Charles (he who had once been proposed as a bridegroom for Adelaide).

  In assessing Louis XIV's decision to accept the throne on behalf of his grandson, once again, as with the fate of James Edward Stuart, one must avoid hindsight. It was not in Louis XIV to reject such a great dynastic prize for his dynasty – and of course deprive the Habsburgs of it at the same time. He did not need the urging of Madame de Maintenon (who in any case did no such thing as urge but merely sided politely with the favourably inclined Dauphin).33 The man who placed the need for glory at the centre of his youthful ambitions was not going to reject it on behalf of Anjou now, even if common sense must have told him that the crown would not be surrendered by the Austrian party without a struggle. Where Louis failed was in not seeing further into the anxieties of Austria: he should, at the same time as accepting on behalf of Anjou, have made it clear that Anjou would never succeed to the French throne himself. (The Bourgognes at this point had no children, so that this was within the bounds of possibility.)

  Who knows? Perhaps secret imperial dreams also excited Louis, and the thought of the two crowns of France and Spain united was not totally inimical to him. As it was, he broke the news of his decision to his grandson as Anjou was playing cards. The boy stood up respectfully, took the news with ‘the gravity and coolness of a king of eighty years' and then sat down at once as though weighed back into his seat by the cares of a heavy crown.34

  ‘I hope Your Majesty will sleep well tonight,' said Louis XIV. Anjou, who was not quite seventeen, was a sober, intelligent lad without the tiresome piety of Bourgone or the mischievous nature of fourteen-year-old Berry. Whether Anjou, now transformed into Philip V, did sleep is not related. Liselotte as usual had something livelier to say. Out hunting with the new monarch, she ostentatiously let him pass: ‘After you, great King,' she said. The Duc de Berry ‘almost died laughing’.35

  But the accession of the French candidate to the throne of Spain was to prove no laughing matter. The War of the Spanish Succession which followed would be described by Winston Churchill in his life of Marlborough as ‘the first world war' because it involved other continents as well as Europe. In the course of it, every kind of ruin would encompass France.

  * A form of clog with a wooden sole and leather upper from which the modern word ‘galosh' derives.

  * Now preserved, appropriately enough, at the château de Maintenon.

  PART FOUR

  Winter

  CHAPTER 14

  Gaiety Begins to Go

  Even my gaiety is a little bit diminished.

  – Adelaide Duchesse de Bourgogne, 1700

  ‘I am no longer a child,’ wrote Adelaide the married woman to her grandmother in Savoy, on 16 November 1700.1 Adelaide was in fact on the brink of her fifteenth birthday. She was not yet a mother: an inspirational Holy Water stoup containing a carved white coral baby sent to her from Savoy by the Princesse de Vaudémont had not yet done its work – or the austere Bourgogne had not yet done his, despite his passionate love for his wife. Or perhaps they were both just too young.

  The Comte de Tessé had accompanied the coral baby with an admonitory letter: ‘I devoutly believe that she sent it so that the coral baby may reawaken you, every evening and morning, to the thought that you owe one to us, and that no other thought, not of your lovely figure, nor of anything else compared with that is of the slightest importance.' He ended: ‘I am your old servant whom you sometimes deign to call old fool.'2 For all the mock-modest salutation, Tessé's message was quite clear: this was Adelaide's prime purpose. At all events she did conceive her first child towards the end of 1702, but suffered a miscarriage. Another miscarriage followed a year later. Her first living child – a son, to the general ecstasy of King and court – was born in July 1704 when Adelaide was eighteen. Instantly created Duc de Bretagne by Louis XIV, this important great-grandson lived only till the following April, when he died very suddenly. Liselotte as usual blamed the doctors. Adelaide on the other hand wrote a correct letter to her mother on the workings of the Divine Will: ‘If we did not receive all the sorrows of this life from God, I do not know what would become of us. I think He [God] wants to draw me to Him.'3

  So Adelaide was still without a family when she reached her twentieth birthday on 6 December 1705. For this and other reasons, she began to show increasing signs of melancholy and tension – ‘even my gaiety is a little bit diminished' – interspersed by bouts of hectic celebration and constant movement. She would parade on her donkey, drive her little cart round the gardens of Versailles, or clamber like a cat over the rocks at Fontainebleau. Adelaide adored riding: a delightful portrait of her in a red riding-dress (a favourite colour) shows off her tiny waist and shapely if slender figure. Like her grandmother Henriette-Anne, Adelaide never seemed to sleep and loved to roam about at night, which she described as ‘one of her greatest joys'. At the same time she had to preserve the ingenuous quality which charmed the King. That was part of the trouble. Adelaide felt that her girlhood was passing – ‘I am no longer young,' she bewailed once again in 1702 in what was becoming a familiar theme – but her childhood was not.4 The King would not let it go.

  On the one hand she struggled to fulfil her most important womanly role and add to the dynasty as was expected. On the other hand she had to maintain that mischievous sweetness which had entranced Louis XIV in the ten-year-old child and captured his heart. She was also capable of feeling jealousy for another sweet little girl (of much less august birth) who teased and entertained the King. Jeannette Pincré was the youngest of eight children who entered the Maintenon household when her widowed mother flung herself on Françoise's charity; the King insisted that Jeannette stay there.

  Of course Adelaide, no fool, did make her childishness work for her. It was not entirely done to please the ageing King. Her inquisitiveness was proverbial at the court (and caused much disgust in observers such as Liselotte). The King's papers, to say nothing of those of Madame de Maintenon, were deemed to be fair game, and a good deal of playful rummaging took place: Adelaide could be a naughty squirrel as well as a mischievous monkey. In this manner she chanced upon a list of men who were about
to be created Maréchaux de France by the King, and was shocked to find that her favourite, the Comte de Tessé, hitherto only a Maréchal de Camp, had been omitted. She ran to her ‘grandfather' in floods of tears. This flagrant nosiness and interference was almost too much for the King – almost but not quite. To prevent his little sweetheart being upset, he decided that he would make no marshals at all on that occasion. (Tessé was made a Maréchal de France in 1703.)

  The sudden death, from a stroke, of Monsieur, Adelaide's biological grandfather, in June 1701 brought her further sadness; it was after all Monsieur not the King who was the connection to her absent mother. Poor Monsieur! It was bizarre that his dramatic end should follow a blazing row with the King over the conduct of his son Philippe. It was true that Philippe at twenty-five was a byword for debauchery, spending all night with the whores of Paris, impregnating his wife Françoise-Marie but also producing children by his mistress at roughly the same time. According to Liselotte, Monsieur's favourites acted as Philippe's pimps. But when the shocked Louis remonstrated, Monsieur chose (unpardonably from Louis's point of view) to remind his brother of bygone days when the King had run Louise and Athénaïs in tandem …

  The great King's reaction to Monsieur's death was that of any human being robbed of a sibling, the irreplaceable connection to distant childhood. ‘I don't know how to accept the fact that I shall never see my brother again.' Liselotte's attitude to her husband's death on the other hand was resolutely unsentimental. She protested strongly at the idea that she might have to retire to a nunnery according to her wedding contract. ‘No! No convent for me!' she was heard to cry in a loud voice. And so she was spared to continue her life at Versailles. Then, in the process of burning Monsieur's numerous love letters from his favourites, she declared herself nauseated by their perfume…5 Liselotte also sneaked into theatrical performances incognito, although conventional mourning dictated a two-year abstinence.

  In the course of the arrangements for Liselotte's widowhood, Françoise was able to taste a sweet revenge. Not all of Liselotte's highly uncomplimentary letters about ‘the old strumpet' and her relationship with the King had escaped attention in an age when international correspondence was routinely intercepted. The King passed the letters to Françoise and asked her to deal with the situation. This she did by accosting Liselotte in her apartments. Rashly the widow complained of the King's recent coolness only to have Françoise blandly display the correspondence. A humiliated Liselotte, in floods of tears, could only apologise profusely. It was Françoise who promised to intervene with the King.

  Thereafter Louis, in his accustomed mode of forgiveness, was graciousness itself. He even laughed when Liselotte, in her own words to her aunt Sophia, ‘artlessly' explained the whole thing as follows: ‘If I hadn't loved you, I shouldn't have hated Madame de Maintenon when I thought she was depriving me of your kindness.'6 (Which was probably the truth.)

  He also showed benevolence towards the dissipated Philippe, now Duc d'Orléans in succession to his father, when his first son by Françoise-Marie, after a string of daughters, was born on 4 August 1703. Philippe asked for the title of Duc de Chartres, which had previously been his, for the baby.* Louis asked if that was all he wanted. Philippe admitted that his household had urged him to press for more ‘but it would be tactless in these hard times'. ‘Then I myself will anticipate your request,' replied the King genially, ‘and grant your son the pension of the first Prince of the Blood.'

  The death of Monsieur and the substitution of Philippe, with a seemingly flourishing house of Orléans around him, was a matter for the rearrangement of the court. It also marked the emergence of a new problem, Duc to the longevity of the present monarch – by 1703 Louis had reigned longer than any previous French King. There was one surviving Child of France, the Dauphin. Then there were Grandchildren of France, in the shape of his three sons, also Philippe Duc d'Orléans and his sister, now Duchess of Lorraine. In each case the use of the word ‘France' signified direct descent from a ruling monarch. Might there now be a new rank of Great-Grandchild of France? In which case that would apply to the infant Duc de Chartres.

  The claims and counterclaims for precedence, the squabbles between dukes, Princes of the Blood and royal princes, would only grow fiercer as the years passed. For example Françoise-Marie was naturally zealous in support of her large brood of daughters who, like their brother Chartres, should surely enjoy the rank of Great-Grandchild of France, and she was anxious that her eldest daughter Marie-Élisabeth should be granted the simple honorific title of ‘Mademoiselle' instead of ‘Mademoiselle d'Orléans'. This was after all a society in which, however farcical to outsiders, the vital distinction between ‘Madame, Duchesse d'Orléans' and ‘Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans' was seen as quite crucial: whereas the former was married to a Child of France, the omission of the comma, the addition of the article, indicated that the latter was married more remotely to a mere Grandchild.7

  The long-anticipated death of the former King of England, James II, from cancer took place three months later on 16 September.* Every article in the royal apartments at Saint-Germain was removed, to be replaced with violet mourning for James Edward, as the new King, grey for Mary Beatrice and Louisa Maria. Furnishings apart, the event had immediate and serious political consequences. In 1697 Louis XIV had tacitly agreed that William III was the de facto King of England, even though he refused to banish James, Mary Beatrice and their children. Unfortunately for the military destinies of France, if fortunately perhaps for Louis's moral character, he now proceeded to acknowledge James Edward as King James III. In England, however, James Edward was ‘the pretended Prince of Wales' or merely ‘the Pretender', guilty of high treason by an act of Parliament of 1702. Under the circumstances, Louis's decision to ignore this was, as Saint-Simon noted, a policy more worthy of the generosity of a Louis XIII and a François I than his [Louis XIV's] wisdom'.8

  It was a question of a deathbed promise given to James himself: the exiled English King could die happy since his son would be acknowledged as his successor. At the time the dying James gave hardly a flicker of recognition of what had just been communicated to him. The real point of the French King's noble gesture was achieved later when he told Queen Mary Beatrice what he had done. After the French naval defeat at La Hogue in 1692 Louis had refused to accept the disastrous consequences for the cause of James II. On the contrary, he had boasted to Mary Beatrice that he would be the one to give her ‘the last embrace' before she boarded the ship which took her back at last to England. Justice and ‘your piety' would ensure Heaven's blessing on the enterprise. Heaven might have been laggard in its blessing, but nine years later the King of France did not waver in his support for the English Queen. Subsequently he announced his decision to the court at Marly and all applauded him (although many shared Saint-Simon's practical doubts).9

  Undoubtedly Louis's tender admiration for Mary Beatrice, and Françoise's similar affection, transformed into a close friendship, was the major factor in this ‘Jacobite' decision. How much simpler from the point of view of French foreign policy to have let the subject rest! Once again, when William died in 1702, Louis could have by default acknowledged James Edward's Protestant half-sister Anne Stuart as Queen: the little girl who had once spent happy times in France with her first cousin Marie Louise d'Orléans. As it was, Louis refused to allow court mourning for the death of William, even for those who were related to him – including Liselotte, who had wanted to marry him.

  It was the pleading of Mary Beatrice which had brought this about: if James Edward was not acknowledged in France, his lack of any proper status would remind the world once more of the malicious slurs concerning his birth in 1688, those ludicrous warming-pan stories so prejudicial (and comical) to Whig ears, so painful to her own. Thus Mary Beatrice continued to enjoy her privileged if fundamentally sad situation at the French court. To Françoise she was ‘this great Queen whose state is so worthy of pity that I can hardly express it'. Celtic poets sang o
f ‘Mary, the ‘languid-eyed / The beautiful branch of the pure palm of Modena / … The alms-giving Queen / Religious and charitable, prudent and sensible'.10 Her intelligence was much respected. The King among others commented on her shrewd judgement, and her dignity in difficult circumstances was equally admired.

  Naturally the satirists sniped at her moral character (Mary Beatrice was still a very beautiful woman in her forties): she was portrayed as Messalina and accused of lovers including the Papal Nuncio the Archbishop of Paris, any passing page and of course Louis XIV himself.11 Most of this list was obviously ridiculous, but the King might have been another matter. However, even Liselotte had to admit that Mary Beatrice's friendship with Françoise made the tempting notion impossible. Indeed, Françoise's support of Mary Beatrice's wishes regarding her son was the most direct example of her political influence so far.

  So the little court-in-exile at Saint-Germain survived and Mary Beatrice formed an important part of Louis and Françoise's intimate circle. James Edward played with Adelaide, three years his senior, and she in turn made friends with the young Princess Louisa Maria. Perhaps the girl might even make a bride for Bourgogne's brother, Berry, currently the most eligible parti at the French court. Queen Mary Beatrice, with a survivor's quality that her appearance belied, even overcame a bout of cancer in 1705. As for James Edward, he was allowed to fight with the French armies, although 1708 brought yet another failed expedition in pursuit of ‘his' throne. With time he adopted the convenient appellation of Chevalier de Saint-George, which called for no particular commitment of loyalty while making his identity clear.