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

by Antonia Fraser

  Louis made altogether three farewells to Madame de Maintenon as his life still lingered on, causing her to return from Saint-Cyr. His alter ego, the giant Enceladus, the silent Titan in the fountain of Versailles, with tormented staring eyes, had still some way to go before his release. The first took place on the day after the discovery of gangrene was confirmed. This exchange was more realistic than gallant and referred to her three years' seniority: considering her age, they would soon be reunited, said the King. Françoise then took refuge at Saint-Cyr.

  The second time he apologised to her for not making her happy; lastly he worried about her future: ‘You have nothing, Madame’. It was true: Françoise had never taken any steps to build up a fortune, and exulted in giving away most of her money in charities; she also took pride in the fact that she cost the King very little compared to his other mistresses, as she frequently told Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale: they received more in three months than she got in a year, and anyway she gave it all to the poor … ‘I am nothing,’ she now replied, ‘and I only think of God’. All the same Louis did speak to the future Regent on the subject, a crucial conversation given the ill feeling between Philippe and Françoise. ‘She only gave me good advice,’ said Louis XIV regarding Madame de Maintenon. ‘She was useful in every way, but above all for my salvation’.

  Françoise departed for the last time on 30 August, when she was assured by her confessor: ‘You can go, you are no longer necessary to him’. She was not there at the end and did not plan to be. Later Madame de Maintenon was criticised for this, by the standards of another century. The tradition of the time of Louis XIV was different: a deathbed was more for the clergy than the courtier. As Louis had exclaimed over his dying mother half a century earlier: ‘we have no more time for flattery’.

  The memoirs of Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale, who was present, are an important source for these last days.12 When Louis reached into the little pouch where he kept his private possessions it was to Marie-Jeanne he gave a little tortoiseshell sweet-box. To Françoise, however, he gave a rosary from the same pouch ‘as a souvenir not a relic’. In keeping with Saint-Évremond's maxim – ‘when we grow old, it reanimates us to have a number of living creatures about us’ – the dogs were ever present.13 For a long time Louis continued to feed tit-bits to a favourite little dog, and when he could no longer do so, he told Marie-Jeanne: ‘Do it yourself. It was Marie-Jeanne who with Françoise helped the King destroy his papers and recorded him laughing at the emergence of a guest-list for Marly: ‘You can certainly burn that’.

  On the subject of her departure Françoise told Marie-Jeanne that on the one hand she dreaded not being able to control her sorrow in the presence of the King; on the other hand she lived in genuine dread of Philippe's behaviour towards her once he had assumed power. And there was a question of public insult to her carriage on the road to Saint-Cyr: Françoise, an old woman still concerned by her reputation, feared that too.14

  By 31 August the King was unconscious, and he died at eight o'clock in the morning of Sunday 1 September 1715. His last spoken words were: ‘O my God! help me, hasten to succour me’. Louis XIV was four days away from his seventy-seventh birthday and had reigned over France for seventy-two years. ‘He died,’ wrote Dangeau, ‘without any effort, like a candle going out’.* The very next day Louis Blouin, who had succeeded Bontemps as the King's chief valet de chambre and served him altogether for thirty-seven years, sold his position for fifty thousand livres. Blouin's wish was to indicate publicly that he could never serve anyone else in place of the incomparable Sun King. But it was in keeping with the other spirit of Versailles, the materialistic one, that Blouin, who had already built a fine country house on the proceeds of his job, now profited from the end of it.15

  The funeral of Louis XIV took place at Saint-Denis on 28 October. Lalande's beautiful and sombre De Profundis, first heard in 1689, was transformed with extended solos such as De Iniquitatis – ‘If Thou, O Lord, did keep account of our sins, who would survive?’ It ended on the awesome Requiem Aeternum, a pinnacle of French baroque music: ‘Grant eternal rest to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them’. The ceremony was deeply spiritual, although demonstrations of hostility at the funeral procession as it passed indicated how far the esteem for the old King had sunk in the popular imagination.

  Father François Massillon, the eloquent priest who had spoken at the death of the Dauphin, gave a resounding oration which began with the words: ‘God alone is great, my brothers, and in these last moments above all where he presides over the death of kings’. Louis XIV was saluted for his acknowledgement of the truth: ‘This king, the terror of his neighbours, the wonder of the universe, the father of kings, greater than all his ancestors, more magnificent than Solomon in all his glory, has recognised himself that all is vanity’.16

  Nor was the sermon one of unadulterated praise. The Catholic Church had not entirely forgotten those early battles to save the King from ‘the fire of Voluptuousness’. There was an allusion to the time of his youth as ‘a perilous season when the passions begin to enjoy the same authority as the sovereign and mount the very throne with him’.

  But Louis was praised for his generosity to James II and ‘a pious Queen’ (Mary Beatrice). And the royal deaths were mentioned, including that of Adelaide, ‘who relaxed Louis from the cares of monarchy’. Most touching of all was the invocation: ‘Go to rejoin Marie-Thérèse, Louis [his son the Dauphin] and Adelaide who are waiting for you. Together with them for all eternity, dry the tears that you have shed over their deaths’. It is a pleasant thought that Adelaide was waiting on the other side, for ever young, to greet the King.

  *

  Despite the King's deathbed expectation, Madame de Maintenon lived on for several years after him. She spent her time in seclusion at Saint-Cyr, where she was known simply as ‘Madame’. It was here that Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale came to her on 1 September and told her that everyone at Saint-Cyr had gone to the chapel to pray; from this delicate intimation, Françoise understood that Louis was dead. Marie-Jeanne, in her memoirs, described the sobbing procession of Demoiselles who now passed in front of Madame de Maintenon on this, ‘the saddest day in the world’. Françoise also wept, she told Madame de Glapion proudly: ‘It is a fine thing, dear girl, to weep for a king’. This was a man she had seen die ‘like a Saint and a Hero’. Five days later her worries about her future were allayed when the Regent Philippe paid her a visit of courtesy and assured her of a lifelong pension of forty-eight thousand livres (nearly two hundred thousand pounds in today's money). When Madame de Maintenon tried to thank him, Philippe replied that he was ‘only doing his duty’ – which was true enough.17

  The new Regent certainly had nothing to fear from the ‘old woman’. The will of Louis XIV concerning Maine's position was quickly set aside and his functions towards the young King Louis XV much diminished. (There was a precedent for this cavalier ignoring of the late King's wishes: the will of Louis XIII had also been set aside, and it has been suggested that the ageing Louis XI V, helpless but not stupid, may even have anticipated this.)18 The bastards, by a second edict, were removed from the royal succession: if the reigning house died out ‘it is for the nation itself that the right goes to repair the danger by the wisdom of its choice’. That demotion made Saint-Simon, for one, an extremely happy duke.

  After the death of the King, Madame de Maintenon received letters of condolence from foreign dignitaries which might have been sent to a queen.19 For example Marie Casimir, the Queen of Poland, referred to her ‘extreme affliction’ and ‘great loss': she hoped that God would give Madame de Maintenon the fortitude she needed to support it. The great and good at the French court wrote to her – cardinals, bishops and duchesses – generally addressing their letters to Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale for fear of disturbing her mistress in her ‘sorrow and retreat’. All mentioned Madame de Maintenon's ‘special loss’ following the death of ‘the greatest and best of the Louis who were kings’. The Archbishop of Strasbourg d
ispatched one of the late King's rosaries: ‘it could not be in better hands'; he sacrificed it so that she should remember him in her prayers. Chamillart, one of Louis's ministers, quoted St John Chrysostom on the subject of an affliction which ‘gives us a new glory’.

  In future, memorial services for the late King would be held not only all over the French dominions but also in the Spanish empire, including Mexico, where a sermon was preached in the cathedral: Louis was after all the grandfather of Philip V. Once again, as at Saint-Denis, Louis's help to James II and Mary Beatrice was stressed as part of his ‘apostolic’ work for the true Faith, carried out ‘with enthusiasm and with spending worthy of his royal magnificence’. He had maintained the exiled Stuarts in the same grand style as they used to live in London: doing what could be done to reestablish them in the peaceful possession of their crown so that the Catholic religion could flourish in that realm.20

  As for Françoise, she had after all been the visible companion of Louis XIV for twenty-two years – from that moment after the death of Marie-Thérèse when the Duc de La Rochefoucauld urged her to go to the King because he needed her. There can have been few who doubted at the time that some discreet ceremony of marriage, acceptable to the Catholic Church, had taken place. Françoise herself however remained resolute in her refusal either to confirm or deny the fact. ‘She didn't want us to speak about that,’ wrote Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale. If ‘a child or simple person’ questioned her on the subject, her reply was merely: ‘Who told you that?’ When Marie-Jeanne read to her from her own Secret Notebooks, she was stopped before she reached any passage which might concern the King. Much later came the real moment when Madame de Maintenon was ‘treated like a queen’, in the words of her great-nephew the Duc de Noailles: her ashes were disinterred at the French Revolution as a protest against the Ancien Régime, just like those of the official royals in Saint-Denis.21*

  To the court of France however the woman that Saint-Simon called ‘that eighty-year-old witch’ was ‘forgotten and already as good as dead’. Living quietly at Saint-Cyr and wearing the plainest clothes, Françoise herself put it more elegantly: ‘I have left the world I did not like’. Yet she retained her agreeable appearance until the end. Ironically, this was true of Françoise, who had never depended on her beauty to make her fortune, rather than the gorgeous Athénaïs, who had lost her looks entirely by middle age. Even Liselotte admitted in 1711 when Françoise was in her mid-seventies that her enemy ‘didn't look her age in the slightest'; to the last she had little if any white hair, according to her relatives.23

  It took an intrepid character like the Russian Tsar Peter the Great to penetrate the seclusion. On a visit to France in the summer of 1717, he announced his firm intention of seeing this celebrated relic of the previous reign. According to one account, he first flung open the window, and then pulled back the bed curtains in order to peer in at the old lady lurking within. ‘Are you ill?’ the Tsar was said to have asked, and when she said she was, ‘What's wrong?’ ‘A great age,’ replied Madame de Maintenon. It is a bizarre scene, not made less so by the fact that their dialogue had to be conveyed through an interpreter, the Tsar's minister Kourakin.24

  Apart from calls from her beloved Maine, Françoise was solaced by the continuing friendship with Mary Beatrice, which was important to them both. In 1715 James Edward launched another fruitless effort to gain the British throne: the Regent Philippe took care that the French did not support it. The former English Queen was left to pay a weekly visit to Saint-Cyr. Here the two women, sitting in similar armchairs, were served by the young ladies, with a handbell at Françoise's side to speed things along. After coffee, the Demoiselles withdrew. Françoise and Mary Beatrice, the Queen that never was and the Queen that was once, communed alone for two or three hours.

  Mary Beatrice had become the heroine of the Jacobite cause: a heroine who was also a saint. She died in 1718 at the age of sixty, her battle with cancer finally lost. Poets saluted her in Gaelic as well as English. Sometimes the language was so hagiographic as to suggest another grieving mother, the Virgin Mary. An Irish lament for ‘the wife of James II’ was entitled ‘The Grievous Occasion of My Tears’. It began: ‘The Gaels are left in gloom’ at the loss of ‘A woman generous with alms / A beauty, pious, generous and just …’ and went on: ‘This was the greatest Mary / That has yet to come … This was the never-lying Mary / Who died for my life.25

  By the early spring of 1719 Françoise was clearly failing: on 13 March she told a Demoiselle: ‘It's all over, dear girl, I'm on my way’. She died on 15 April 1719. She was in her eighty-fourth year. The court paid little attention, but at least Liselotte had achieved her long-held ambition of surviving the woman she resented so much. When she learned the news, Liselotte reacted with characteristic zest: ‘I just learned that old Maintenon croaked last night,’ she wrote triumphantly (die alte Schump ist verreckt – a word usually used for the miserable death of an animal). ‘If only it had happened thirty years earlier!’ In the next world, she suggested, Françoise would have to choose between Paul Scarron and Louis XIV. Nor did Liselotte let herself down when her turn came to die in 1722: ‘You may kiss me properly,’ she said to an attendant. ‘I am going to the land where all are equal’.26

  The princesses of the next generation, Marie-Anne Princesse de Conti, Louise-Françoise Madame la Duchesse and Françoise-Marie Duchesse d'Orléans, all lived until their seventies, dying in 1739, 1743 and 1749 respectively.* Bénédicte, Duchesse du Maine, with her agreeable and sophisticated lifestyle at Sceaux, outlived all three sisters-in-law whose bastard birth she had been wont to compare unfavourably with her own: she died in 1753 at the age of seventy-seven. Her imperturbable royal self-confidence caused Madame de Staël to write that the Duchesse du Maine ‘believed in herself in the same way as she believed in God and Descartes, without explanation or discussion’. It was a confidence which extended towards her own acting abilities: none of the professionals who acted with her dared mention the fact that the tiny Duchesse was a remarkably bad if enthusiastic actress. Voltaire wrote his first poetry during his five years at Sceaux as a young man and paid a second visit towards the end of the Duchesse's long life, from 1746 to 1750. He hailed Bénédicte as the ‘Spirit of the Grand Condé’ (her grandfather the great soldier) and saw in her with admiration a true representative of the grand siècle. Yet since Voltaire considered that a fine piece of theatre would do the dying Duchesse more good than Extreme Unction, it is obvious that Bénédicte was in fact far closer to the secular spirit of the Enlightenment.27

  There was an exception to these long lives. The widowed Marie-Élisabeth Duchesse de Berry continued her rackety existence, at once immoderate and immoral, into the next reign, to the despair of her father the Regent. She gave birth to a still-born daughter in the spring of 1719 by her lover Rions. Her health, already weakened by excess, never fully recovered; Marie-Élisabeth died in July on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday.

  Louise de La Vallière's descendants died childless; Madame de Maintenon left none. It was the fertile marriage of Françoise-Marie and Philippe d'Orléans – six daughters and one son – which spread the blood of Louis XIV and Athénaïs into all the Catholic royal families of Europe. The legitimate blood of Louis XIV, in the direct male French line from his marriage to Marie-Thérèse, died out in 1883 with the Comte de Chambord (although there were and are Spanish Bourbons). But his descendants by Athénaïs flourished, a tribute to the vigour of her stock. They included the so-called Philippe Égalité, Duc d'Orléans in the French Revolutionary era, and – a little more to the Grand Monarch's taste one must suppose – Louis Philippe the King of the French. Thus the present claimant to the French throne, the Comte de Paris, descends from Louis XIV and Athénaïs: a victory of a sort for the supreme mistress.

  * Although Athénaïs had been legally separated from Montespan before the birth of Toulouse in 1678.

  * The order of the first seven ran as follows: the little Duc d'Anjou; Philippe Duc d'Orl�
�ans and his son the Duc de Chartres; three Bourbon-Condé princes, sons of Monsieur le Duc du Bourbon; the Prince de Conti.

  * And is for ever associated with his name, despite the many internal alterations during the eighteenth century, Duc in part to the fact that Louis XV had a large family of legitimate children, needing suitable accommodation.9

  * Long reigns produce such simple but effective analogies. Queen Elizabeth I was described as dropping like a ripe apple from a tree and Queen Victoria was compared to a great liner going out to sea.

  * Since 1969 the mortal remains of Madame de Maintenon have been placed in the chapel of Saint-Cyr, now the Lycée Militaire, after some journeyings in times of revolution and war.22

  * Marie-Anne's monument in Paris in the church of Saint-Roch, rue Saint-Honoré, refers to her as the daughter of Louis XIV, and her birth at Vincennes in 1666 is recorded; but there is no mention of her mother Louise de La Vallière.

  CHAPTER 17

  Never Forget

  Never forget that kings have a severe judge placed over them in heaven.

  – Joad the High Priest, Athaie

  Louis XIV was lucky in love. His tumultuous private life even added to his personal glory, the concept that was so important to him, in the eyes of the world, at any rate when he was in his prime. It certainly makes for a more congenial spectacle than that other major part of his concept of glory, his lust for military conquest. Fénelon wrote in his didactic story of 1695 Tèlèmaque that ‘great conquerors’ are like ‘overflowing rivers’, which destroy the very countryside they are supposed to be watering. At home things were different. ‘There never was a court which was so gallant as that of Louis le Grand,’ wrote Bussy-Rabutin with undoubted admiration. ‘As he was of an amorous complexion, everyone found it a pleasure to follow that prince.’1