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

by Antonia Fraser

  It was Victor Amadeus of Savoy who had supplied the French-born Philip V with his wife, none other than Adelaide's sister Louison, now transformed into Queen Maria Luisa of Spain. Louis XIV had approved the choice for his grandson of this girl who was ‘past her twelfth birthday' and supposed to have a body as beautiful as Adelaide's: ‘important for a woman and for the children one expects'. Two daughters who were or would be on two great thrones were however not enough to keep the mercurial Victor Amadeus on board the French (and Bourbon-Spanish) ship. First he allied in secret with his cousin Prince Eugene of Savoy, the brilliant general in the employ of Austria, in early 1702. His treachery was suspected at Versailles where, as Tessé put it, everyone was aware of Victor Amadeus's characteristic desire to have ‘a foot in both boots’. But it was not known for sure12 In 1703 however Victor Amadeus announced publicly that he had joined the (new) Grand Alliance which consisted of England, Holland and the Austrian Empire. His motive was palpably opportunistic: he did not believe any longer that the War of the Spanish Succession would lead to a quick French victory.

  Now it was Adelaide's turn to endure the agonies of a foreign-born princess caught on the wrong side of the hostilities – ‘my unhappy destiny’ – much as Liselotte had done.13 In Adelaide's case she suffered not only for her father but for the future of her mother and the two young brothers born to her after Adelaide's departure, as also for her grandmother. Unlike those of Liselotte, however, Adelaide's sensibilities were treated with great tenderness by Louis XIV. The subject of her father was not discussed between them, this bland disdain for the situation being symbolised when the King went ahead with the full carnival festivals of February 1704, with Adelaide the central attraction, as though the war with Savoy was simply not taking place.

  It was Madame de Maintenon who had to deal with Adelaide's increasing misery. Françoise had become involved – encouraged by the King – in a correspondence with a remarkable lady known in France as the Princesse des Ursins (from the Italian Orsini, the princely name of her second husband). This imposing, brilliant woman, born into the French Frondeur aristocracy, had been put in charge of Adelaide's sister, the young Queen of Spain. As camerera-major, in the Spanish phrase, or senior lady, the Princesse des Ursins performed every known function for Maria Luisa and Philip V, down to holding candles, chamber-pots, and even on occasion the King's breeches when he wished to resume them.

  Maintenon and Ursins were now dealing with ‘two incomparable princesses', the daughters of the renegade Victor Amadeus; but their correspondence also provided Louis XIV with an important private link to Spain. A visit to France from the Princesse in 1705 cemented the friendship. Louis had taken the opportunity of Philip's marriage to give one of his little sermons on the need to avoid any feminine influence, as he had done to his son the Dauphin: ‘the dishonour that such feebleness brings … One does not pardon it in individuals. Kings, exposed to the public view, are even more scorned.'14 But it is noticeable that he was quite prepared to use an alliance of two intelligent and discreet women to his advantage, and even to foment it, as he had once employed Henriette-Anne over the Treaty of Dover in 1670.

  To the Princesse des Ursins, Madame de Maintenon confided the tumultuous feelings that were tearing at Adelaide: above all it was the unhappiness of her beloved grandfather which tormented her. Her very seriousness on this subject upset Françoise, although in other ways the ever-present governess in her had been trying to school Adelaide away from frivolity.

  Every now and then her high jinks went too far. A crude practical joke played on the aged Princesse d'Harcourt, whose skirts and sleeves were fastened to her stool before a page put a firework under it, still raised a smile from the King. However, when Adelaide amused herself making faces behind the back of a peculiarly ugly musketeer she got a sharp reproof from Louis. Personally, he said, he found the man one of the best-looking in his kingdom because he was one of the bravest. To counteract this tendency, Françoise suggested to the Marquis de Dangeau that Adelaide should be presented with a picture of some historic princess as a role model: modest and delicate in character for preference. Simply to give her a history book, which might have seemed the obvious solution, was thought to be ‘a risk’.15 (What was feared? The life of Joan of Arc? Catherine de Médicis?)

  Perhaps it was inevitable that this child-woman, the centre of the indulgent attention of the whole court – almost the whole court – should be tempted by the grown-up world of gallantry. She was not in love with Bourgogne, who was in any case dispatched by his grandfather campaigning according to the practice by which royal princes were supposed to prove their leadership qualities in war (supported by more experienced generals). The ambiguity inherent in the whole subject of gallantry has already been noted: the word covered anything from platonic friendship, via mild flirtation to a full-blooded physical affair. The names of three men, very different in character, were linked with Adelaide's at this period. That is, they were linked with her name by Saint-Simon, writing at a safe distance of forty years; Liselotte, writing at the time, remained silent on the subject, which is one cogent reason for doubting the depth of Adelaide's involvement, since Liselotte did not love the King's little favourite. While Marguerite de Caylus, Madame de Maintenon's relation and confidante, thought it was unlikely that there was much in it.16 Adelaide's turning to these three men seems in fact to tell us more about her own feelings of melancholy and frustration at Versailles than about her sexual nature.

  The Marquis de Nangis, born the same year as Bourgogne, had ‘a pleasant enough countenance' and carried himself well, but physically he was nothing out of the ordinary. It was his special gift of intimacy which appealed; he was said to have learned the knack of pleasing the ladies from his mother and grandmother, famous intriguers both, and ‘past mistresses' in the arts of love. As it happened, Nangis had a mistress of his own, the Marquise de La Vrillière, but he certainly seems to have found time to enjoy a delightful flirtation with Adelaide, especially when he returned to court from campaigning as a wounded man, a subject therefore for both pity and admiration.

  The Marquis de Maulévrier was a much more dangerous prospect: coarser than the easygoing Nangis but also cleverer. Ten years older than Adelaide, a nephew of Colbert, he was married to one of the daughters of Tessé, the former Ambassador to Savoy. Maulévrier seems to have been stung to envy by Nangis's ease of access to the Duchesse, and contrived to ‘lose' his voice, thus enabling him to whisper sweet but hoarse nothings in Adelaide's ear. It all ended in tragedy: Maulévrier, an unbalanced character, became violently jealous of Nangis, whom he abused. Angered by rejection, he threatened to tell everything to the King and Madame de Maintenon. In the end he committed suicide at Easter 1706.

  So far Adelaide had had a little crush on Nangis (who was in any case committed emotionally to another woman) and a foolish involvement with Maulévrier which went wrong. The third man in her life, the Abbé Melchior de Polignac, at forty-five was a sophisticated older man with an interest in the sciences and religion. It was notable that Bourgogne liked his company for this reason. He also knew how to be utterly charming to all the world. Famous for his egregious flattery, he was the author of the immortal remark to Louis XIV on the subject of the rain at Marly, when the King feared that the courtier's fine clothes were being drenched: ‘Sire, the rain of Marly does not wet.' It could not last. Polignac was dispatched to Rome, out of harm's way (and Adelaide's); similarly it was discovered that Nangis's wounds were healed, and it was time for the court gallant to become a gallant soldier again. Adelaide wept all day at the departure of Polignac: but she wept on Tante Maintenon's bosom, rather than alone.

  The ever-watchful presence of Françoise, to say nothing of the numerous ladies-in-waiting and at another level the Swiss Guards roaming the King's palaces, is the real reason why Adelaide cannot plausibly be accused of adultery or anything near it: ‘She was too well guarded,' in the words of Marguerite de Caylus.17 Françoise would simply not have give
n her the opportunity. She understood exactly how to handle Adelaide: for example, she took advantage of the young woman's proverbial nosiness to teach her a lesson. Riffling through Françoise's papers, Adelaide was horrified and embarrassed to discover a letter from a certain Madame d'Espernay relating a great deal about her ‘intrigue and imprudence' with Nangis. This discovery can hardly have been the result of pure chance. Certainly it had a salutary effect. As part of the subsequent ticking-off that Adelaide received from Tante, she was told that she must never betray what she had read in the presence of Madame d'Espernay herself.

  As it turned out, it was the lamentable progress of the war, already so grievous a subject for Adelaide, not the lectures of Tante, which brought her to long-delayed adulthood and, in the most painful way, aroused in her proper protective loyalties towards her husband. Such changes, of course, could not help threatening the artificial but effective nature of her relationship with Louis XIV, on whose lap Adelaide was still expected to sit in her mid-twenties.

  A litany of terrible French defeats, with high casualties and vast numbers of wounded, marked this progress. On 13 August 1704 the daring English commander Marlborough snatched a brilliant victory at Blenheim, a Bavarian village on the Danube. He had the assistance of Prince Eugene who, as the son of Olympe Mancini, was regarded at Versailles as some kind of spiritual traitor even if, as a Savoyard, he was not technically one: ‘I hate Prince Eugene in the most Christian way I can,' observed Madame de Maintenon some years later.18 The surviving French were decisively pushed back and Bavaria was out of the war. The next catastrophic defeat was on 23 May 1706 at Ramillies in the Spanish Netherlands, when Marlborough smashed the fifty-thousand-strong French army under Maréchal de Villeroi; the latter was subsequently replaced by the Duc de Vendôme, who had been campaigning against Victor Amadeus in the south. For while nearly all Flanders was now outside French control, things had gone better in Piedmont.

  The French siege of Turin naturally brought agony to Adelaide, although it is noticeable that never at any point did she show sympathy for the Savoyard cause. As she wrote to Duchess Anne-Marie: ‘I confess the truth, my dearest mother, that it would be the greatest pleasure in this life if I could see my father brought back to reason.' To Victor Amadeus himself, she managed more restraint: ‘I own that affection may be somewhat wounded at seeing you arrayed against both your daughters …'19 When the Duchess and her two young sons had to flee from the French threat of invasion, Adelaide suffered for them – but she suffered as a loving daughter who had nevertheless totally identified herself with the French cause.*

  Then Vendôme was ordered to Flanders. On 7 September 1706 the siege of Turin was raised with the help of Prince Eugene and the French were driven out of Italy, leaving Victor Amadeus himself to invade France the following year when he besieged Toulon. Matters were hardly better in Spain, where the English general Lord Peterborough marched on Madrid, so that Philip V and Maria Luisa had to flee to Burgos. There would be a five-year period when the rivals for the Spanish throne, Philip V and the Habsburg Archduke hailed as Charles III by his supporters, contended inconclusively for the throne, with periodic advances and retreats as in some solemn dance.

  Adelaide was by now pregnant once more. In November 1706 she announced the care she was taking in frank terms: ‘I have no wish to lose the fruit of all my pains.' Her child, mercifully another boy, was born on 8 January 1707; the King seems to have had no hesitation in instantly granting him the same title as his dead brother: Duc de Bretagne. But there were to be no lavish celebrations for the successful birth of this great-grandson, as there had been in 1704. The hardship of the times did not permit it, nor did the atmosphere at court, where the rising casualty list meant that family members were beginning to vanish; others returned wounded, often visibly mutilated.

  It would be pleasant to believe that Adelaide found in the intimacy of motherhood some kind of solace for the restrictions and frustrations of her life. Unfortunately, where a great Princess was concerned there was very little possibility of this kind of relationship: a household and a host of servants stood between the Duchesse de Bourgogne and the Duc de Bretagne. Adelaide's letters to her grandmother did dutifully report on the appearance of teeth and so forth, and she boasted of having ‘the most beautiful baby in the world'; but she also criticised the royal governess the Duchesse de Ventadour for spoiling the little boy and making him unnecessarily peevish and ill-behaved. Very rarely did royal mothers in this period break through the apparently unassailable cordon of etiquette which held mother and child apart; Anne of Austria had been one of the few, but Marie-Thérèse and the late Dauphine had definitely not been. A sad letter from Adelaide to Madame Royale made the point: ‘I only go and see my son very rarely in order not to be too attached to him.'20

  Madame de Maintenon, for all her criticisms of Adelaide's behaviour – her gambling, her secret addiction to the bad company of Madame la Duchesse with her drinking and tobacco-smoking – continued to adore her. Increasingly the secret wife depended on female company to sustain her in her own arduous existence as the consoler and supporter of the King. As she told Madame de Glapion, she, Françoise, was the one who had to succour him: ‘When the King returns from hunting, he comes to my room; the door is shut and nobody is allowed to enter.' Alone with Louis, Françoise ‘listened to all his cares and woes' and staunched the tears he sometimes could not control.21

  It was to her confessor however that Françoise confided that another aspect of her duties had not ceased: the King still made sexual demands upon her; she described these occasions as ‘penibles' (burdensome). Perhaps she hoped that the confessor would sympathise with this problem of a woman in her seventies; instead, he told her quite sharply that this was still part of her chosen destiny: ‘It is at the same time an act of patience, of submission, of justice and of charity.' As it was, Françoise was Louis XIV's ‘Madame Solidity': ‘Kings have majesty,' said Louis, ‘and Popes have sanctity but you have solidity.' He sometimes addressed her as such in the presence of his ministers, meeting in her room, when he enquired what ‘Your Solidity’ might think on a certain topic.22

  To the country at large, particularly the soldiers in the French armies, Madame de Maintenon was increasingly regarded as a possible source of help. For example, the soldiers at the new French fortress of Fuenterrabia on the borders of Spain wrote to her in December 1705 under the grandiose title of ‘Protectress of the Realm': they wanted pay and also clothing, jackets and shirts – ‘our sergeants, Madame, are no happier than us', and in general implored her ‘glorious protection’.23

  In all this Madame de Maintenon herself suffered increasingly bad health. Rheumatism beset her, cold increased it (but the King could see nothing wrong with having all the windows open), and her chamber was often so crowded with men on official business that she could hardly retire to bed. She sat in her ‘niche', a covered chair, to ward off drafts. By November 1704 she was describing herself as ‘sick and old'; the following May things were worse: ‘The life we live here kills me, I am no longer made for this world.'

  The flood of petitioners who sought her patronage also caused her pain, as she confided to Marguerite de Caylus. If the King honoured her wishes, he would have less to dispose of elsewhere. If he refused, ‘he will upset me. If he upsets me, he has too much feeling for me not to be annoyed, so I become a sadness in his life. Do you think this was God's plan in bringing me close to him?' Françoise told Madame de Glapion that she felt like someone backstage at the theatre where ‘the enchanted palace' was revealed as mere canvas: in short, ‘I see the world in all its ugliness.' She would even return to America (that is, the West Indies where she was raised) if she was not told that God wanted her to stay.24

  Did it ever occur to Françoise, weary and often racked with pain, that Athénaïs had had the better deal out of life? The Marquise de Montespan had begun with supreme beauty, given and received much sensual pleasure and ended with a life full of good works. At Oiron, a
magnificent Renaissance building Athénaïs bought with money given to her by the King, she created a hospice in 1703 for 100 poor men and women. She died in May 1707 at the spa at Bourbon which she had once visited at the height of her powers as maîtresse en titre, with every royal governor trying to greet her on her way. Athénaïs was sixty-seven. Her will testified to her deep and practical interest in charities; the possessions she left included two pictures of herself as Magdalen, plenty of pious books, some miniatures of the King – and thirty pairs of corsets. Before her death, the King had reduced her pension among his other economies: Athénaïs accepted the deprivation with equanimity on the grounds that all her money went to the poor anyway.

  Montespan, that saturnine and tortured man, had rejected her request for pardon, which had been inspired by Athénaïs's Jansenist-inclined confessor. (Father de La Tour did rather better in persuading her that it was her Christian duty to eat less.) Yet when he died in 1701, from whatever motives, last-minute possessiveness or generosity, he made her executrix of his will. Her own death was, according to d'Antin, her son by Montespan, the only one of her children present, ‘the most firm and Christian death one could witness'. The funeral was delayed by rows between various local clergy and did not take place until July; then Athénaïs was interred in the church of the Cordeliers at Bourbon with a simple square stone plaque in the wall engraved as follows: ‘Here lies the body of Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, marquise de Montespan.'25