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

by Antonia Fraser

  At a stroke the map of the court at Versailles was altered for ever. The Duc de Bourgogne, aged twenty-eight, was now the direct heir to the throne, the Dauphin with his two sons following him.* (But the special title of ‘Monseigneur’, created for his father, was not to be used for him: it was felt to be too painful.)15 Louis XIV in his grief solaced himself by indicating that Adelaide, now ‘Madame la Dauphine’, was to have all the rights Duc to a queen, including control of her own household. Her royal escort was doubled to twenty-four, and there were two Swiss guards outside her door, hitherto a privilege reserved for the monarch. Not for nearly thirty years – since the death of Marie-Thérèse – had there been such a female position of power. And of course at a stroke, too, the wasps of the Cabal in the nest at Meudon lost their power to sting. At least poor Mademoiselle de Choin was treated decently by Louis XIV: she received a pension and a house in Paris.

  The great loser – in her own opinion – was the Duchesse de Berry. Her position and that of Adelaide had not been so different in the lifetime of the Dauphin. As the Second Lady at Versailles she was now according to etiquette compelled to hand the chemise to Adelaide at her ritual dressing.16 Marie-Élisabeth, with her usual lack of control, went over the top in complaining about this ‘valetage’, which had after all been routinely performed at Versailles in the past by ladies as great as if not greater than herself, including her grandmother (who had only made a fuss at the phantasmagorical prospect of handing the chemise to Françoise …). When Marie-Élisabeth was at last obliged to give in, she performed the ceremonial functions extremely slowly and with an ill grace. Adelaide kept her cool, pretending not to notice the delay which had left her virtually naked. In her great desire to have ‘a happy relationship’ with her sister-in-law, she was willing to overlook ‘this latest prank’, according to Saint-Simon.

  Adelaide, as Dauphine, did not lose sight of all her own monkey tricks, the ways which had so entranced the King. Perhaps one of her little games was not quite so entrancing: Adelaide loved to get the confidential servant Nanon to give her a lavement (enema) before a theatrical performance; she then spent the whole performance in a state of wicked glee at the thought of her secret condition before Nanon attended to her relief.* More beguiling was her treatment of Madame la Duchesse and Marie-Anne de Conti when they were rolling their eyes at her childish conduct on one occasion at Fontainebleau. Adelaide had been ‘diverting’ the King by pretending to chatter in a dozen different languages and other such nonsense while the two princesses eyed each other and scornfully shrugged their shoulders. As soon as Louis had gone into his special cabinet to feed his dogs, Adelaide grabbed the hands of Saint-Simon's wife and another lady; pointing at the scornful princesses she said: ‘Did you see them? I know as well as they do that I behave absurdly and must seem very silly, but he [the King] needs to have a bustle about him and that kind of thing amuses him.’18

  Adelaide went further than that. Swinging on the arms of the two ladies, in the words of Saint-Simon ‘she began to laugh and sing: “Ha-Ha! I can laugh at them because I will be their queen. I need not mind them now or ever, but they will have to reckon with me, for I shall be their queen,” and she shouted and sang and hopped and laughed as high as loud as she dared.’ When the two ladies tried to hush her, in case the princesses heard, ‘she only skipped and sang the more: “What do I care for them? I'm going to be their queen.”’ Yet who was to say that Adelaide would not one day make an excellent caring queen? The chattering girl was beginning to have serious reflections on the nature of royal duty: ‘France is in such a pitiable state … we must try by our charity to help the poor.’ They are after all ‘our brothers and sisters, exactly like ourselves’, but since it is to us God has given riches, ‘so we are all the more obliged to help others.’19

  Louis XIV continued to think of Adelaide as more or less perfect with one exception – a sloppiness in her dress and a frank indifference to the subject which irritated him even more now that she was Dauphine. Adelaide's lack of interest in matters such as bonnets, muffs, gloves and even jewellery is engaging at a distance in contrast to the avidity of most ladies at that time. But it struck at Louis's sense of order, still so strong. In vain Adelaide made it clear that she preferred lounging about in casual clothes, as they would now be called, when she was pregnant; Bourgogne backed her choice not to wear her corset for comfort's sake. Tante's reaction was that such a style was not becoming to the new Dauphine – nor to her rank. She gave Adelaide one of her reprimands: Your untidiness displeases the King.’20 As to wearing jewellery, the gems would draw proper attention to her beautiful complexion and neat figure. Adelaide shrugged her pretty shoulders and compromised by storing her prodigious collection of jewellery in Tante's room, so that they could be assumed before her visits to the King and discarded afterwards.

  Adelaide personally was not entirely at fault in this. Her Mistress of the Wardrobe, the Comtesse de Mailly, another Maintenon protégée who had begun life as a poor and virtuous girl, was at best ‘indolent’ and at worst was misappropriating the large funds set aside to dress her employer. Thus when the King decided to make Adelaide ‘absolute mistress of her own Household’ one of Adelaide's first moves was to replace the Comtesse de Mailly with the altogether more satisfactory Madame Quentin.

  In late 1711 there were general ‘appearances’ of peace, as Adelaide wrote to her grandmother in Turin, which she hoped were well founded. Although it would take a couple of years to achieve, no one much doubted that in the end peace would break out. The death of the Emperor Joseph I on 11 April 1711 had led to the accession of the Archduke Charles, hitherto the rival candidate for the Spanish throne, in his place. If the new Emperor Charles VI also acquired Spain, he would join Vienna to Madrid – quite as unpopular a prospect for his allies as the union of France and Spain. The possibility of peace with Queen Anne of England led to another of Adelaide's artless aphorisms after which she pretended to be taken aback by what she had just said. ‘Tante, it cannot be denied that England is better governed under a queen than under a king,’ she said, ‘and do you know why? Because under a king, a country is really ruled by women, and under a queen by men.’21 Adelaide did not know that the public nostalgia for Queen Elizabeth in England which grew in the later years of Charles II was based on exactly the same premise.

  In the meantime the advent of a Tory government in place of the Whigs in England meant that the solid support for the audacious general ‘Milord Marlboroug’ had vanished, just as Sarah Duchess of Marlborough had been displaced in the affections of Queen Anne. Englishmen, like Frenchmen, were tired of the war. In the so-called Preliminaries of London of September 1711, the possibilities of a settlement, including an Anglo-French commercial treaty, were explored.

  In the meantime, in her private correspondence Adelaide began to make glancing references to toothaches. Her teeth had been one of her imperfections on her arrival, and thereafter Adelaide, who had no false pride, admitted that they were frankly black. Now she was plagued with pains in her mouth. In late January 1712 the problem flared up once more, and her face was so swollen when she reached Marly that she had to play cards with the King with her face enveloped in a hood. From evidence later, it seems that Adelaide was also in the very early stages of pregnancy. At all events, her constitution, weakened by much child-bearing and child-losing over the last ten years, to say nothing of the perpetual draining caused by rotten teeth, was already frail when Adelaide fell ill with a fever on 5 February. At the time an Italian-style stew that she loved was blamed (once again ‘Italian’ was a term of abuse). Then there was a kind of cheesecake full of sugar and spice which she had been making at her Menagerie as she loved to do, with memories of her childhood at the Vigna di Madama; had Adelaide eaten too much of it?

  If only greed had been the culprit! By Sunday 7 February Adelaide was again ill, although she tried valiantly to go to Mass.22 A piercing pain, worse than anything she had ever endured, then laid her low and continued for t
wenty-four hours despite the best (or worst) efforts of the doctors, their usual bleedings, both from arm and foot, and the emetics which made hideous so many sickbeds of the time. She was given opium to relieve the pain and even allowed to inhale the dreaded tobacco, which was regarded as a satisfactory prophylactic, if hateful social practice. Nothing worked. The fever and the opiates meant that she was often quite confused when the King visited her.

  At last some spots emerged and measles was announced; hope was felt that she would recover when the rash had broken completely. It did not happen. On the morning of Wednesday 10 February the distraught King found his Princess sufficiently lucid to hear some of the details of the peace-making process which had started at Utrecht. ‘I have an idea that peace will come,’ said Adelaide sadly, ‘and I shall not be there to see it'; it was a pathetic testimony to how much the fraught situation between France and her native Savoy had weighed upon her. That night Adelaide was visibly worse to the watchers at her bedside. Madame de Maintenon was there all the time, except when the King was visiting, and Bourgogne most of the time despite his own growing feverishness – but they put that down to exhaustion.

  On Thursday 11 February the King felt desperate enough to ask publicly for the aid of St Geneviève, patron saint of Paris (she who had been so prominent in the appeals over his own birth so long ago). The coffer containing the saint's remains was to be uncovered at daybreak for the faithful to implore her protection. It was an action which, intended for times of national emergency, could only be taken with the consent of Parlement, but the assembly eagerly endorsed it. Alas, by daybreak on Friday 12 February the Princess was in extremis.

  The night before it had been judged time to bring in the last sacraments and the matter of her last confession was raised. By her silence Adelaide politely rejected the offer of the Jesuit Father de La Rue, although they had always been on excellent terms. In fact Adelaide had never really wanted a Jesuit confessor in the first place, but had accepted the Jesuit because he was the King's choice – her usual obedient stance. Now she felt she had a right to her own way. Father de La Rue dealt with the situation with calm understanding and established that she preferred Father Bailly, a parish priest of Versailles with Jansenist tendencies, favoured by the more devout ladies of the court. (Adelaide had probably always leaned in that direction.) When Father Bailly proved to be away – and Father de la Rue had to tell her there was no time to lose – Adelaide settled for a Franciscan Father Nöel. At the time nothing was seen as particularly odd about this, it was the privilege of a dying woman: in fact Adelaide's sister, Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, who died two years later, also asked for a change of priest.

  Adelaide's confession, which she made alone, took some time. Afterwards, when Madame de Maintenon returned, Adelaide told her: ‘Tante, I feel quite different, as though I were entirely changed.’ ‘That is because you have come close to God,’ said Françoise.

  Later, when Adelaide asked for the prayers for the dying, she was told the time had not yet come. Meanwhile Louis and Françoise desperately convened a conference of doctors, seven of them altogether, including some brought down from Paris. The verdict as ever was more bleeding, and a further emetic if the bleeding had no effect, beyond of course weakening the patient. Poor Adelaide now began to worry obsessionally about her gambling debts: ‘Tante, I have one big anxiety …’ She really wanted to see her husband and explain, but when this was banned on the grounds of infection, Adelaide asked for her writing-case, managed to open it, and tried to leaf through her papers. The task was beyond her (what a sad parody of the lively Adelaide who had burrowed through the King's and Madame de Maintenon's papers with such energy!). Maintenon continued to assure her on the matter of the debts: Bourgogne would take care of them ‘out of his love for you.’

  It was pathetic how, even in her agonies, Adelaide's childhood training in trying at all times to please the King still held up. When asked why she did not speak to Louis, she replied that she was afraid of crying: as though anything now could upset the King further. At various points Adelaide recognised the Duchesse de Guiche – ‘My beautiful Duchesse, I am dying’ – and then murmured some words, unbearably sad to her listeners: ‘Princess today, tomorrow nothing, and in two days forgotten.’

  In spite of the doctors – who bled the poor dying Princess for the fifth time from the foot, so that she actually fainted under their care – in spite of the prayers, in spite of the penance, Adelaide's fever continued to rise. By now she was virtually unconscious, violent emetics simply weakening her still further without bringing her to her senses. Françoise went to the chapel to pray. The King refused to leave Adelaide's bedside. Some kind of strong powder produced by a gentleman-in-waiting was tried as a desperate measure; Adelaide did manage to comment how bitter it was. Hearing that the Dauphine was conscious, Madame de Maintenon came back. And it was she who gently acknowledged to the girl that the end was coming. ‘Madame, you go to God,’ she said. ‘Yes, Tante,’ repeated Adelaide obedient to the last. ‘I go to God.’ A few moments later Adelaide, Princess of Savoy, Duchesse de Bourgogne and Dauphine of France, was dead.

  Louis XIV had left the dying girl's chamber a few minutes earlier according to the tradition by which a monarch was never in the presence of death (except his own). ‘We must submit,’ he had told Lalande over the death of his son, pointing to the sky. But he could not have imagined how much more submission was going to be required of him. Adelaide had once mocked her husband's excessive piety: she told her ladies that she would like to die first and then he could marry a nun. But poor broken-hearted Bourgogne survived a mere six days after the death of his wife, his Draco to whom he had been a willing slave. He had been fatally infected by the measles which killed her in his early devoted and dogged visits to her bedside. In this atmosphere of tragedy, sometimes the tiny things were the most poignant. Liselotte was reduced to tears by the sight of Bourgogne's little dog searching for him in the chapel because he had last seen him kneeling there: ‘The poor beast sadly looked at everyone as though to ask where his master had gone.’23

  And still the need for submission was not past: the little Duc de Bretagne, five years old, was also fatally infected, and died on 8 March while the doctors were in the act of bleeding him from the arm. He had lived just long enough to be appointed Dauphin in his father's place, according to the King's wish.24 Louis XI V had now lost his son, grandson, great-grandson – three Dauphins – and, worst of all, his beloved granddaughter-in-law in a span of eleven months. Adelaide's surviving young son, Louis Duc d'Anjou, was saved only by the revolutionary and defiant action of the governess of the Children of France, the Duchesse de Ventadour. The doctors wanted to bleed him also. But this splendid woman, who could see what no one dared acknowledge, that the doctors were killing their enfeebled patients with their ministrations more effectively than any disease, simply barricaded herself and the two-year-old Prince into her apartments and would not allow the doctors access.*

  So Louis XIV was left with a tiny great-grandson, still in leading-strings, who would presumably in the course of time succeed him, and a grandson in the shape of the Duc de Berry, next heir if little Anjou died (as so many children had died). After that came Philippe Duc d'Orléans. It was part of the nastiness as well as the grief of the times that it was actually suggested Philippe had poisoned the princes. It has been seen that most sudden deaths of prominent people were accompanied by these lamentable charges. Not only did Liselotte strongly rebut them, saying she would put her hand in the fire to prove Philippe's innocence – a natural defence of her son, perhaps – but Madame de Maintenon, who detested Philippe, thought there was nothing in it either. Nor did Louis XIV show any signs of believing these charges. There was in fact no need to look for the lurid explanation of poison to explain these deaths: there was a virulent plague of measles at the time, and as many as five hundred died in Paris and Versailles alone; but they were not royal.

  While some fingers pointed at Philippe (just
because he had moved up two places in the succession), others took a more vengeful line. The deaths of the royal family, said Frederick I of Prussia, were ‘God's judgement’ on Louis XIV for sacking Heidelberg fifteen years earlier, when so many deceased Palatine Electors and Electresses had been ‘dragged from their tombs.’25 The judgement of heaven was harder for Louis to rebut: for the rest of his life he had to submit to it.

  As Louis XIV had surely loved Adelaide more than anyone in his life, so her death caused him the greatest sorrow. Saint-Simon for one thought it was ‘the only real grief he ever experienced.’26 Liselotte was equally convinced of the personal tragedy for Louis. Adelaide's loss was irreparable, as ‘she had been brought up entirely to his liking.’ She was ‘his comfort and joy, and had such gay spirits that she could always find something to cheer him up.’ Liselotte also quoted the usual horoscope predicting the event which is always cited (as with Henriette-Anne) when someone dies young – ignoring all the other horoscopes which did not predict it. Adelaide was supposed to have been told in Turin that she would die in her twenty-seventh year and cried out: ‘I must enjoy myself because it won't be for long …!'27 This however is contradicted by her saucy admonitions to her aunts: ‘I'm to be Queen …’ which one must believe was the true Adelaide.