At that point, Montrevel,11 senior lieutenant-general, was so incensed that he confronted du Maine, reminding him of Villeroy’s orders, the victory that would have been theirs for the taking, the damage to the duke’s reputation and the risk to the siege, the glories of French success there and the defenselessness of the Low Countries when the only army capable of assisting them had been defeated. Du Maine withstood the onslaught, stammering and procrastinating for so long that any chance of stopping Vaudémont’s escape was lost.
As the officers, and no doubt also the men, cursed and vented their anger on du Maine, Villeroy attempted to salvage the situation by detaching three regiments of dragoons, who attacked the enemy’s rear. One or two flags were captured and the rear guard of Vaudémont’s army was ruffled, but it was little consolation in comparison to the glorious victory it might have been.
Villeroy was too good a soldier and too loyal a courtier to apportion blame to another. He wrote a dispatch to Louis stating simply that Vaudémont had moved too swiftly and had managed to elude him. He gave no further details, but signed and sealed the message and sent it on its way.
At Versailles, Louis waited impatiently for news of the great victory, when he could bristle with fatherly pride at the bravery of his son. When a private gentleman arrived with the dispatches instead of the expected high dignitary, the king was more than a little astonished. His initial reaction turned to concern when he learned that so little action had actually taken place. Louis, meanwhile, moved the court to Marly.
With so little information coming from the front, Louis read all the gazettes he could find from Holland. The first carried a story about the duc du Maine, how he had been wounded and carried off the field on a stretcher, and this is what had allowed Vaudémont to escape. The irony of this irritated Louis, but his annoyance was as nothing compared to how he received the news as written in the next gazette. The duc du Maine, it was announced, had not received so much as a scratch. Louis pondered the contradictory reports, the silence that had followed the battle, Villeroy’s laconic dispatch, and his suspicions were aroused. He finally learned the truth from one of his chief valets, Vienne.12 Louis’s “distress was more than he could bear. He felt the weight of the army’s contempt for that much cherished son, and the mockery of the gazettes taught him what was being said abroad. His chagrin was great.”
Louis rarely lost his temper, and on this occasion, he kept his anger and grief bottled up inside, but his pent-up emotions needed an outlet. He went to dinner as usual with the ladies, and in the presence of the court, he was handed his hat and cane at the end of the meal. Just then, he noticed one of the dessert-waiters placing a sweet biscuit into his pocket. Louis rushed at the man and beat him, abused him, and finally broke his cane across the man’s shoulders. Luckily, the cane was made of bamboo and was brittle, but Louis, still holding its shattered remains in his hand, continued to yell curses after the fleeing waiter. He then crossed the salon and disappeared inside Françoise’s apartments. His anger—unprecedented and uncharacteristic of the king, who was normally so equitable—had still not abated by the time he emerged an hour later, much to the terror of the whole court. On September 1, 1695, William took back Namur.
The following year, Victor Amadeus II de Savoy agreed to France’s offer to give up its ambitions in Italy. Louis, as a gesture of goodwill and a token of his sincerity, returned the fortress of Pignerol to Savoy and gave up Casale to Mantua.13 For the first time it looked as though an end to hostilities was possible, and Louis was optimistic enough to set out his terms for peace with England and Holland in 1697: he would recognize William as the legitimate king of England, concede defeat over the Palatinate, and surrender all the territories he had acquired since 1679. The Dutch and the English found these conditions acceptable. Emperor Leopold, however, resisted for a time, but the threat of being abandoned by his allies left him with little choice but to accept the terms. In return, Louis was allowed to retain Alsace, Strasbourg, and the electorate of Cologne. The subsequent Peace of Ryswick, which was signed in the autumn of 1697, brought to an end the War of the League of Augsburg at a time when French peasants were at their highest level of poverty and the fiscal system had to be propped up by ministers and tax farmers resorting to the abuses of the past.14
Louis attended a fête in the new duchesse de Bourgogne’s apartment shortly after her wedding. As he entered the great gallery, he saw that seats had been set out, and all was beautifully decorated. The duc d’Aumont, however, was frantic. There were simply too many people, and he could not cope. Even Louis found himself overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who crowded the gallery, and the fête was spoiled.15 The rigid etiquette of the court had become stifling even for Louis, whose every waking moment was a matter of public interest. Saint-Simon said that “with a good watch and an almanac, one could know exactly what the king was doing, even if one were a hundred leagues away.”16 Louis needed a retreat.
Some years previously, Louis had demolished the Trianon—the blue-and-white porcelain palace in which he and Athénaïs had shared their love and entertained privileged guests—and built another in its place. Known as the Marble Trianon because of the pink marble panels that adorned the outer façade, it was designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart under Louis’s personal supervision. The new palace was arranged around a central colonnaded gallery, which opened onto a central courtyard on one side and a garden, planted with ten thousand flowers, on the other. Building work had begun in 1687, and although the king held council in the ornate Mirror Room, the Trianon was intended to be a private retreat for Louis and Françoise.17
At Trianon, Louis would offer informal entertainments, sharing his table with the ladies and allowing his guests to recline on soft sofas, a luxury quite unheard of at Versailles. Yet however informal it might have been, Trianon was too close to Versailles. Louis longed for a smaller palace where he and a few selected guests could escape the bustle and prying eyes of the court and relax in peaceful seclusion. He had a general idea of where he wanted his new palace to be, and he focused his search on the land that sloped from Saint-Germain towards the Seine as it wound its way through lush meadows and rich pastures. Someone urged him to consider Luciennes, where the marquis de Cavoye18 had a lovely house, but Louis rejected the idea, saying that the spot had so much potential that it would ruin him. His choice finally fell upon a narrow valley hemmed in by rocky hills that lay behind Luciennes, where a small hamlet called Marly nestled in the shadow of the hills. The ground was marshy, there was no view, and access was difficult. Louis immediately fell in love with it.19
Originally, Louis intended to reserve Marly for special occasions, somewhere to withdraw with his family and a few chosen friends from Wednesday to Saturday two or three times a year, with no more than a dozen servants to carry out necessary duties. Visits were strictly by invitation only, and courtiers would drop not-so-subtle hints as the king went past on his way to mass: “Sire, Marly!” The lucky ones would see their names pasted up by midday.
Life was much less formal than at Versailles. Full court dress was not required, so that “everywhere the King goes walking everyone is covered. Men sit in the presence of the Dauphin and the Duchess of Bourgogne. Some even lie full length on the sofa . . .”20 Louis liked to amuse his courtiers, and occasionally supper parties would end with a food fight. One day, Louis began to throw apples, oranges, and balls of bread at the ladies, and he allowed them to throw similar missiles back at him. Mlle de Viantais, however, got more than she bargained for when she bombarded the king with a bread ball: he took up a plate of salad and hurled it at her.21 Courtiers still fawned, however. One day the Abbé de Polignac went walking in the gardens with Louis. When it began to rain, the king noticed that the abbé’s coat was not suitable for wet weather. “It means nothing, Sire,” the abbé assured him. “The rain at Marly is never wet.”22
As time went by, the estate of Marly inevitably grew larger. The château, or pavillon du roi, was a medium-
sized building flanked by twelve smaller ones, six on either side, so that the whole complex formed the shape of a capital U. Built by Hardouin-Mansart in an Italianate style, the pavillon du roi featured Apollo and Thetis in stucco, while the other buildings were decorated with other Olympian gods, as well as Diana, Hercules, Victory, Fame, and Abundance, and the five known planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.23
The garden at Marly featured tulips, a new innovation for Louis, who had developed a passion for their bright colors. His old favorites were not forgotten, however, and the heavily scented tuberoses, jasmine, and orange also found a place. In the evenings, their scent was sometimes so overpowering that the king and his company were driven indoors to escape it. One of the hills was levelled to provide a view, and a huge set of waterworks was built. Called the Machine de Marly, it comprised an elaborate series of conduits, aqueducts, and reservoirs, which carried water from the Seine to irrigate the gardens and feed the fountains, lakes, waterfalls, and the gilded goldfish pond.
As at Versailles, Louis wanted to look upon full-grown trees when he walked in the garden, so mature trees were taken from Compiègne and elsewhere and replanted at Marly; those that died, and there were many, were immediately replaced with fresh ones. The landscape was changed frequently as dense woodland and dark allées were stripped away to make space for the lakes upon which the courtiers rowed in gondolas; but then the lakes were drained and the woodland returned as dark and dense at it had ever been. In time, visits to Marly would become more and more frequent until, towards the end of the reign, it was almost the permanent residence of the court, but in June 1701, it provided the setting for an event that was to be the prelude to tragedy.
It was Wednesday, June 8, and Philippe came to Marly to dine with Louis,24 entering the king’s study as soon as the king’s council meeting ended. It became immediately obvious that all was not well. Louis was angry because the duc de Chartres had been annoying his wife by openly carrying on an affair with a Mlle de Séry,25 one of Liselotte’s maids of honor.
Louis took his anger out on Philippe, who retorted that “fathers who led certain lives could hardly have the grace and the authority to reprove their sons.” This stung Louis to the quick, and he angrily retorted that at least his daughter should be spared the indignity of having to witness her husband’s bad behavior. This was too rich for Philippe, who reminded Louis that he had shown little concern for the queen’s feelings “when he made his mistresses take journeys with her in the same carriage.” As the quarrel heated, the brothers began to yell at the top of their voices.
Marly was organized so that the king’s room opened onto a small salon, which at this hour was always filled with courtiers waiting to see Louis pass by on his way to dinner. The door to this cabinet always stood open, except when council was sitting. The entrance was concealed by a curtain, which was drawn back by the usher whenever anyone wished to enter. As a result of this arrangement, the raised voices of Louis and Philippe could be distinctly heard, and the usher was obliged to enter and warn them that the courtiers could hear every word they said.
This well-timed warning caused the brothers to lower their voices, but it did nothing to stop the quarrel. Philippe, “off his hinges,” reminded Louis of the promises he had made to the duc de Chartres to induce him to marry Françoise-Marie de Blois, none of which had been fulfilled. All the duc wanted, Philippe continued, was some form of service, but since Louis would not oblige, it was not for Philippe to prevent his son from consoling himself by finding amusement elsewhere. As it was, he now saw the truth in the predictions that had been made at the time of the marriage—that the duc would get no profit from the match but only shame and dishonor. Louis now played his ace: the war would soon oblige him to “make certain retrenchments, and that, as Monsieur showed himself so little complying, he should begin by cutting off his pensions before retrenching on himself.”
At this moment, dinner was announced. Louis and Philippe sat down to table, but Philippe’s face was “flaming scarlet, his eyes sparkling with anger.” Several ladies at the table and the courtiers who stood behind them thought that the prince ought to be bled. Still, Philippe ate a hearty dinner, and, when the meal was finished, he took his daughter-in-law, whom he had brought to eat with the king, to Saint-Germain before they returned to Saint-Cloud.
That evening, Louis was working in his cabinet with the dauphin and the princesses when a messenger arrived from Saint-Cloud asking to speak to the king on behalf of the duc de Chartres. He told Louis that Philippe had been seized with faintness during supper. He had been bled and was feeling better, but he had also been given an emetic as a precaution. The message did not quite relate the truth. In fact, Philippe had been taking supper as usual with the ladies, but towards the end of the meal, as he was pouring a glass of liqueur for Mme de Bouillon, he began to stammer and pointed to something with his hand. It was not unusual for Philippe to speak in Spanish, so some of the ladies asked him what he had said; others cried out in alarm. It all happened very quickly, and he fell onto his son in a fit of apoplexy. They carried him to his room, shook him, walked him about, bled him, and administered an emetic, “but without his showing more than a faint sign of life.”
Under ordinary circumstances, Louis would have rushed to his brother’s side “for mere nothings.” On this occasion, he had not been told of the seriousness of his brother’s illness and he went instead to Françoise’s apartment and woke her up. After a quarter of an hour, he returned and ordered his carriages to be made ready, and then sent the marquis de Gesvres to Saint-Cloud with orders to return and wake him if Philippe’s condition worsened. He then went to bed. In Saint-Simon’s opinion, Louis thought some ruse was afoot to resolve the difficult position the brothers were in. He had gone to Françoise to seek her opinion: “He would rather, I think, offend all propriety than run the risk of becoming a dupe.”
Louis had been in bed for an hour and a half when another messenger arrived from the duc de Chartres. The king was roused from his sleep to be told that the emetic Philippe had been given had taken no effect, and that he was very ill indeed. Louis started out for Saint-Cloud, meeting Gesvres on the way. “No one can imagine the excitement and disorder of that night at Marly, or the horror at Saint-Cloud, that palace of delights,” wrote Saint-Simon. Courtiers piled into carriages and flocked to Saint-Cloud, ignoring all ceremony. Louis arrived at three in the morning to find that Philippe had not regained consciousness.
Louis was devastated, and his sadness renewed the love he had always had for his brother. How could this have happened? Philippe was two years younger than he and had always been in good health, better even than the king’s. He reproached himself for having hastened his brother’s death by their recent quarrel. Naturally given to weeping, he now dissolved in tears. He heard mass at Saint-Cloud, but as the clock struck eight, all hope for Philippe’s recovery was lost. Françoise and Marie-Adélaïde begged Louis to return with them to Marly. There was nothing more that Louis could do for his brother in this world. Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be led away. As he turned to leave, he spoke some kind words to the duc de Chartres, both men weeping bitter tears. The young duc asked, “Ah, Sire! What will become of me? I lose Monsieur, and I know that you do not like me.” Louis was taken aback. Very touched by his nephew’s words, he spoke to him tenderly. As Louis left Saint-Cloud, the crowd of courtiers melted away so that, little by little, the dying Philippe was left on his sofa in his cabinet, surrounded only by weeping scullions and servants.
TWENTY-SIX
The Spanish Succession
Louis’s hopes that his niece Marie-Louise, Queen of Spain, would produce an heir to the Spanish throne—or at least persuade the crown to be passed on to a Bourbon prince following the death of King Carlos—failed when she died childless in 1689. Carlos remarried, but his new queen, unsurprisingly, had so far also failed to produce an heir. The problem of the Spanish succession, therefore, remained unsolved, but there we
re possible solutions.
The nonpayment of Queen Marie-Thérèse’s dowry could be used to annul her renunciation of the Spanish throne. In this case, the dauphin would be the legal heir to the throne of Spain, although it was understood that he would pass his claim to his second son, Philippe, duc d’Anjou. If, on the other hand, the French claim was not accepted, the Spanish succession would rightfully go to Marie Antonia, the daughter of Leopold I and Margarita Teresa, princess of Spain and electress of Bavaria. Leopold, however, had forced Margarita Teresa to renounce her claim so that he could propose his second son by a subsequent marriage, Archduke Charles. This, then, was the dilemma that faced Louis as he contemplated the problem of the Spanish succession.
Louis did not want another war, and his desire for peace was shared by William III; and so the months between spring and autumn of 1698 were taken up with negotiations that sought to establish the best way forward in the event of the death of Carlos II of Spain. The agreement they reached proposed that the main part of the Spanish inheritance should go to Joseph Ferdinand of Wittelsbach, elector of Bavaria. The Italian possessions would be divided between the dauphin and Archduke Charles, the second son of Emperor Leopold.1
The partition treaties agreed between Louis and William would preserve the balance of power in Europe. Although Austria would receive the largest share of the Spanish inheritance, neither the emperor nor Louis would become more powerful than any league that might be formed against them. Moreover, the choice of Joseph Ferdinand was inspired, since he was neither a Bourbon prince nor an Austrian Habsburg. His succession, as both Louis and William recognized, provided the best hope for a peaceful solution to a problem that had threatened for many years. Nevertheless, the proposal was unacceptable to Spain and Austria, but they acquiesced when Carlos made his will in accordance with the treaty. Unfortunately, the elector died suddenly in 1699 at the age of six, and the prospect of war loomed once again.2
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