The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  The other society people involved were acquitted. They all said quite frankly that they had been customers of Mme Voisin but there was no proof that any of them were poisoners — the horrible crew of criminals at Vincennes could not be regarded as reliable witnesses. The unpopular Chambre Ardente was thought by the world in general to have covered itself with ridicule.

  There was a rumour in Paris that the King wanted a general clean-up of morals and to put an end to sodomy, a vice he was known to abhor and which was punishable by the stake. Several times during his reign he was on the verge of taking steps against it; but his advisers seem to have pointed out that it would be difficult to do so, since in that matter all roads led to Monsieur. Indeed, the little man, mincing between Court and Camp and the lowest of the Paris underworld, with his rouge and his scent, and the diamond brooches he gave to boys provided wonderful protection for others of his sort. There was certainly an uncomfortable feeling abroad and many people, not only perverts, slept uneasily at this time. The great Racine himself was under suspicion. He had been a customer of Voisin’s and his mistress had died suddenly (perhaps of an abortion). An order for his arrest was actually written out but never put into effect.

  Suddenly the whole investigation collapsed. The reason for this was that the low-down criminals, who had lived together at Vincennes for many months, had all begun to name Mme de Montespan. Since the death of Mme Voisin and her companions, about a hundred and fifty fortune-tellers, kidnappers, alchemists, counterfeiters, unfrocked priests, abortionists, merchants of poison and love philtres and other sinister creatures of the underworld had been arrested. Among them was a man called Lesage who had been liberated from the galleys by one of Mme Voisin’s powerful friends. Very much against the advice of La Reynie, Louvois offered Lesage his liberty if he would talk, and talk he did. He was the first person to bring Mme de Montespan into the affair, saying he knew that Voisin had taken powders to her at Saint-Germain. The next time her name was mentioned was when Mme Filastre, under torture, said that Mme de Montespan used to buy love philtres and other powders; but when the torturing was over, Filastre took this back. Then, as though by common consent, accusations against Mme de Montespan began to pour in from the prisoners. They affirmed, with a wealth of detail, that Mme Voisin had often been to see Athénaïs both at the Court and at Clagny. The two women had conspired in all sorts of sinister plots. Athénaïs had given the King love philtres over a period of years, and had taken part in one Black Mass. When Mme Voisin recommended two more, Mme de Montespan is supposed to have said (and this gives a certain verisimilitude to the accusation; one can almost hear her high, quavering voice) that she really had not got time. So the others were said in her absence, but on her behalf, and involved the sacrifice of babies. The accusations became more and more lurid. Mme Voisin was to have handed the King a poisoned petition the very day she was arrested and she was said to have given Mlle de Fontanges a pair of poisoned gloves.

  Deeply embarrassed, La Reynie was obliged to report this turn of events to the King, after which the council of ministers, presided over by the King, sat almost continuously for days, trying to decide what had better be done. Mme de Montespan had been like a second wife to Louis; she was the mother of his favourite child; in spite of all her tiresomeness he was still fond of her and she lived in his house. There could be no question of her going before the tribunal. If she did so, however innocent she might be, she would be branded for evermore as a probable murderess and black magician. Nor was it pleasant to think of the jokes there would be in Paris if the story of the love philtres got about. So, supported by the ministers, he said the case must be stopped and the existing dossiers burnt. Single-handed, La Reynie stood out against this decision on the grounds that poisoning must be put an end to in France and also that to pack up the tribunal at this point was unfair. ‘Different punishment for the same crimes would tarnish the King’s glory and dishonour his justice.’ Besides, some of the depositions which would be lost if the dossiers were destroyed contained statements exonerating certain prisoners. The King said the trials could go on so long as all evidence relative to Mme de Montespan was suppressed. But as the dossiers were full of such evidence, that would be a travesty of justice. La Reynie then said there was only one thing they could do in the circumstances. A lettre de cachet (a letter sealed by the King directing detention, without trial, of the person named in it) must be taken out against all the prisoners. This meant that a hundred and forty seven people who mostly seemed to have committed atrocious crimes, and who, if found guilty, would have been tortured and then burnt to death, would escape all punishment except imprisonment; and that those few who may have been innocent, would be unable to prove it and also be shut up for life. Guibourg, the unfrocked priest who pretended to have said Black Masses for Mme de Montespan and who may have helped her with sacrilegious prayers, Trianon, abominable poisoner, Chapelin who taught Filastre her dreadful art (abortion), Galet himself, would all benefit from this amazing stroke of luck. If Voison, Bosse and Vigoureux were not already dead, they too would have escaped. However, there seemed to be no other solution.

  The Chambre Ardente closed its doors in 1682. The total results of its judgments were: thirty-six burnt to death after torture; four sent to the galleys; thirty-six banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and thirty acquitted. All the others who, so luckily for them, benefited by lettres de cachet, were chained up in dungeons all over France for the rest of their lives, in solitary confinement. If they spoke to their gaolers they were whipped — Mme de Montespan’s name must not be bandied about the French prisons. Thirty-seven years later some of these people were still alive.

  The Affair of the Poisons had various repercussions, the most serious of which was that the King, furious with Olympe de Soissons, refused to take Prince Eugène into the French army. He had no use for the boy, who looked at him, he thought, like an insolent cock sparrow; and he suspected him of being a sodomite; in any case his bad reputation was undoubtedly justified. But as Eugène was the King’s own relation and the child of such a great friend, it would have been difficult for the King to have refused if Madame la Comtesse had been there to support her son. Throwing Eugène into the enemy camp proved to be one of Louis XIV’s greatest mistakes. The prestige of Colbert suffered from the Affair, as all the gentlefolk involved, including Mme de Montespan, were his special friends. He died in 1683, harassed, overworked and sad. In spite of the precautions against publicity, the whole case had been so widely discussed (indeed there was a time when nothing else was talked about in France) that people became more suspicious of poison than ever, and all mysterious deaths were put down to it. However, there was one good result: henceforward the sale of poison in France was strictly controlled (31 August 1682). Private laboratories were forbidden, and so were all the occult arts and superstitious practices.

  And Mme de Montespan — was she guilty? M. Georges Mongrédien whose book on the Affair is by far the best (most of the foregoing facts, which are only like the visible part of the iceberg, have been shamelessly culled from it) thinks she was innocent of the criminal charges, that is, of attempting to poison the King and Mlle de Fontanges and conniving at the sacrifice of infants during Black Mass. La Reynie seems on the whole to have been of this opinion; the King and Mme de Maintenon, who knew her by heart, certainly were. The witnesses against her were men and women of tbe vilest sort; they had unwisely been allowed to foregather while at Vincennes and had most probably leagued together there to accuse her, with the idea that, if she was thought to be involved, they would never be brought to trial — and indeed this was the case. M. Mongrédien also points out that Mme de Montespan was never given the chance of defending herself. But there was no doubt she had played with fire. All the poisoners and unfrocked priests who were the most vociferous in accusing her said they had had dealings with her maid, Mlle des Oeillets. Interrogated by La Reynie, des Oeillets denied ever having seen any of them and demanded to be confronted with them. Ho
wever, when La Reynie took her down to Vincennes they all, most disconcertingly, recognized and named her. So she remained under a shadow of suspicion, though nothing happened to her. Athénaïs had certainly tried spells, with the excellent results we have noted; and the King still remembered the awful headaches he had had at the time when he now knew that she had been giving him Galet’s powders.

  All this was bad enough, but it was not criminal. Luckily for her, the King found it easy to forgive women, whom he regarded as charming, irresponsible, inferior creatures. Mme de Montespan was not only the mother of his children but an ornament of his court. She dazzled the ambassadors. When she did not exasperate, she amused him. He burnt all the papers relevant to the affair, not realizing that La Reynie’s notes were kept in the police archives (they are to this day at the Bibliothèque Nationale) and put the whole thing behind him. He may well have thought that, had Athénaïs been a poisoner, at least one of her rivals would have died or been taken ill in a mysterious way, and that she would long since have poisoned Mme de Maintenon, whom she loathed from the bottom of her soul. Mme de Maintenon, indeed, wrote jokingly to a friend ‘I am just off to Clagny which Nanon thinks very dangerous’. The proof of the King’s belief in Athénaïs’ innocence is that he kept her on at Versailles for another ten years. Nothing could have been easier than for him to have sent her to a convent, the usual fate of the discarded mistress. Those historians who attribute the end of their love affair to the part she played in the poison case have not examined the evidence; he had completely cooled after the birth of Toulouse, nearly a year before the arrest of Mme Voisin. Voltaire, with his great knowledge of human nature, put the matter in a nutshell: ‘the King had reproached himself for his liaison with a married woman and when he was no longer in love, his conscience made itself felt more keenly.’

  Poor little Fontanges’s day was soon done; Athénaïs had been right in thinking that she was too stupid to hold a man who only liked intelligent people, after his physical desire for her had gone. This happened sooner than might have been expected because she lost her health. A year after the liaison began, she had a baby which died. She was messed about by the doctors; never stopped losing blood; became sickly and plaintive and cried all the time. The King, who could not bear ill people, packed her off to a convent where her sister, appointed by him, was abbess. She took no possessions except a little Venetian lace to remind her of her few months of glory. The King visited her, when hunting in the neighbourhood; and when he saw what he had done to her, he had the grace to cry. Soon after that, in March 1681, she died, saying she was happy to go since she had seen the King in tears on her account. She was twenty. Perhaps rumours of poison had reached the convent, for her sister said there must be a post-mortem, and though the King was not anxious for one, it was finally held by seven doctors. It showed that her death was natural: her liver was diseased and her lungs in a bad way but the intestines, stomach and womb were quite healthy. The doctors said she had died of pneumonia brought on by loss of blood. She was the last of the King’s pretty ladies from the household of Madame.

  7. A CITY OF THE RICH

  Cette ville de riches aurait beaucoup d’éclat et de pompe mais elle serait sans force et sans fondement assuré . . . et cette ville pompeuse, sans avoir besoin d’autres ennemis tomberait enfin par elle-même, ruinée par son opulence.

  BOSSUET

  While the terrible events described in the last chapter were happening, the King, outwardly calm and unruffled, was settling into his new home. On 6 May 1682, he made the official announcement that from now on the seat of the French government would be at Versailles, and arrived there with some pomp, accompanied by his family, his ministers and the whole Court. The Court of France for ever in the country! The fashionable world was filled with dismay now that the long-expected blow had fallen. Not all the criticism was frivolous, however. For years Colbert had begged his master to abandon the project, for the obvious administrative reasons; Bossuet said that a City of the Rich needed no enemy — it carried the seeds of its own destruction. Versailles was indeed a city and the forerunner of Le Corbusier’s self-contained Unité.

  The house was still far from being ready, but the King thought he would never get the workmen out unless he moved in himself. As he was always adding to it and improving it, he probably never saw it without any scaffolding at all. Vast additions had been made to Le Vau’s envelope. He had died in 1670; for some years after that his work was carried on by subordinates, but in 1679, Mansart, who had made himself a solid reputation with Clagny, became the King’s architect and took over Versailles. He was now finishing the Galerie des Glaces where Le Vau’s first floor terrace had been — the proportions of that façade sacrificed to the King’s need for a vast reception room. However, what the house lost outside it gained inside, for this gallery is still one of the beauties of the western world. Seen at night soon after its completion, the painting and the gilding fresh and new, lit by thousands of candles in silver chandeliers and candelabra, furnished with solid silver consoles and orange tubs, crowded with beauties of both sexes, dressed in satin and lace, embroidered, re-embroidered, over-embroidered with real gold thread, and covered with jewels, it must have been like Aladdin’s Cave or some other fable of the Orient. By day it had a different aspect, serving as the main street or market place of that City of the Rich. It was packed with people; servants hurrying to and fro with messages, courtiers button-holing each other for a chat, or dashing at top speed from one ceremony to the next; cows and asses on their way to provide fresh milk for little princes — all this was occasionally pushed aside so that some royal sedan chair could get by, like the ministers’ motor cars in a modern capital. Here, too, could be seen foreign visitors and tourists, easily recognizable by their strange clothes and aimless gait, looking round them in wonder. Versailles was more truly open to the public then than nowadays; anybody could wander in at any hour. There were seldom fewer than two hundred fiacres waiting outside, where the car-park is now. Hardly any of the rooms were banned to the ordinary citizen, but if by accident he should stray into one that was, a servant would quietly follow him, pretending that it was to draw a curtain or make up the fire, and point out his mistake in a low voice so that he would not feel humiliated. The kings at Versailles, almost unguarded, lived in a perpetual crowd, and yet, in a hundred years there was only one half-hearted attempt at assassination.

  The two vast wings which flank Le Vau’s envelope were finished. The one to the south was for the Princes of the Blood, the King’s illegitimate children and their households; it contained fifteen flats, with another fourteen in the attics complete with shops and offices. Between this Princes’ wing and the town, there was a building (now a military hospital), with kitchen, pantries and lodging for fifteen hundred servants. The stables which so beautifully join the château to the town were being built. They housed the King’s horses, his Master of the Horse and the pages, and were a sort of public school for the sons of the nobility. These pages, generally out of hand, plagued the Versailles bourgeoisie for a hundred years. Stables, kennels and other dependencies of the hunt occupied more space than the accommodation of the ministries. In 1701 there were six packs of hounds at Versailles, altogether five hundred couples, belonging to the King, his sons, the Dauphin, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse and his cousin the Duc de Bourbon — they hunted the stag, the boar and the wolf. The king always kept a few hounds in his own rooms, and fed them himself, so that they would know him as their master — the hound-work interested him — out hunting.

  Hundreds of courtiers were crammed into the Nobles’ or north wing of the château. It was a maze of corridors, where strangers lost their way hopelessly. People could live here for years, forgotten by everybody. Madame was once in need of a lady-in-waiting who had to be a single duchess, either a widow or deserted by her husband. This sad duchess seemed not to exist until somebody remembered that Mme de Brancas, separated from the brutal, spendthrift Duke, was quietl
y starving to death in a garret of the Nobles’ wing. Madame liked her, engaged her and treated her respectfully; the courtiers followed suit and she had a happy life thereafter.

  The sedan chairs which carried people from one part of the château to another belonged to a company, like hackney cabs; none but the royal family were allowed to have their own. They were not allowed to go further into the King’s part of the house than the guard-rooms and never allowed in the Cour de Marbre. They made tremendous traffic blocks in the Nobles’ wing. One of the corridors there was called the rue de Noailles, as its whole length gave on to flats occupied by that powerful but unpopular family. Such as they lived in splendour, but more humble folk could not be said to be well or comfortably lodged — in many cases the rooms they lived in had been chopped into tiny units with no regard for the façade — some had no windows at all, or gave on to dismal little interior wells. All the same, a lodging, however squalid, in the château, came to be more sought after than almost anything, as it was a sign of having succeeded in life. Those who could afford to also had houses or flats in the town of Versailles; and the very rich began building themselves seats in the surrounding country. The Ile de France is still dotted with wonderful houses built while the kings were at Versailles, although many disappeared during the Revolution and many others were destroyed by Germans.