The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  Beauvilliers was called the Good Duke. He was always on the side of the poor and one of the few people who could speak to the King about their condition with impunity. He was politeness itself — he would beg his coachman’s pardon if he kept him waiting a few minutes. As he grew older he became more and more devout, with an underlying silliness which shows in a curious letter he wrote to God when he was sixty. ‘I am old, . . . my end is at hand and I am about to enter the darkness of death.’ He then proceeds to a sort of self-analysis. He wishes Versailles were more like Bethlehem and reproaches himself for loving jokes and gossip, for talking too much about his own ancestors, for not bringing God into every conversation, for eating more than he required, for fussing about cleanliness and for praying to be made a minister of state. His prayer was answered (1692); he was the only member of the old nobility to be admitted to the King’s Conseil during the whole reign. Beauvilliers gave the orders at Versailles when the King was away.

  The Beauvilliers introduced the Abbé de Fénelon into Mme de Maintenon’s little set. This fascinating, ambitious, vain, aristocratic, holy man, disciple of Bossuet, was like a brother to Beauvilliers; they seemed to have but a single soul, so perfectly did they agree on every subject. Fénelon wrote a Treatise on the Education of Girls for Mme de Beauvilliers, to help her with her nine daughters. Mme de Maintenon soon made friends with Fénelon and saw a great deal of him. She met him with the Beauvilliers in their flat at Versailles or at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in Paris where, after dinners at which they helped themselves, to avoid being disturbed by the servants, Fénelon would stand by the fire, one beautiful white hand on the chimney-piece, talking and talking about God.

  Other friends of Mme de Maintenon were the beautiful, pious Marquise de Dangeau, born Löwenstein; Monseigneur, later Cardinal, de Noailles, whom the King appointed Archbishop of Paris only in order to please her (1695); Mme de Montchevreuil, a horrid old person with long, yellow teeth who was the terror of pretty ladies because she used to tell the King what they were up to; and Chamillart, almost the only courtier who could give the King a decent game of billiards. He was a gentleman, a charming fellow who presently became a disastrous minister. These good people were not very stimulating company for Louis XIV who liked les gens d’esprit. In fact, hardly had he assembled his most interesting and important subjects under his roof, than he retired into almost private life with an ageing spouse and her circle of excellent nonentities.

  In 1685 the King committed one of his mistakes: he revoked the Edict of Nantes by which his grandfather Henri IV had ensured freedom of conscience for the Protestant minority in France. For some years Louis XIV had quietly been tormenting them. They were excluded from holding any office under the crown, and from the liberal professions; mixed marriages were forbidden and the children of existing ones declared illegitimate; a Protestant woman could not employ a Roman Catholic midwife; when Protestants were ill they were forcibly taken from their homes and put into state hospitals so that their last moments could be surveyed by a priest. A hardship of a minor but extremely annoying kind was that they were forbidden to employ Roman Catholic servants. (The Protestants were nearly all of the well-to-do bourgeois class, and servants were hard to come by among their co-religionists.) Finally the rich towns of southern France, where the reformed religion thrived, were subjected to the dragonnades; regiments were moved in and the soldiers billeted on Protestant households with permission to make as much of a mess as they liked. Rape and looting, if not exactly encouraged, were never punished.

  All these measures led to a good number of real or pretended conversions; but a hard core of sincere men and women was left and this the King decided to crack. It must be said that he was encouraged to do so by practically every responsible person in the land; by all the great preachers and the bishops, the ministers of state, all the members of the Paris and provincial Parlements, not to speak of society people like Mme de Sévigné. Bossuet, whose opinion the King valued, perhaps, more than any, called him: ‘This Constantine, this Theodore, this Charlemagne’ when he heard of the Revocation; the holy and respected Rancé, founder of the Trappists, said ‘What the King has done is prodigious’. Père de La Chaise, says Spanheim, was very responsible, which seemed odd for such a sweet person, but then he was a Jesuit. Spanheim himself was Protestant, (Brandenburg at this time led the Protestant German States) and it was thought that he was actively engaged in smuggling his co-religionists to Prussia. His daughter married a French refugee.

  The Protestants were deeply unpopular with all sections of the French — for the same reasons as the Jews were unpopular in pre-war Germany. They were too rich, successful and clannish. The King had never been particularly intolerant or bigoted; in fact he once said, when talking about a Catholic mission to Siam, that God had coloured the leaves on the trees in many different shades of green, and perhaps He wanted to be worshipped differently by the various people of the world. The Revocation had nothing to do with Roman influence; Louis XIV differed with Pope Innocent XI over practically everything, including the Revocation which the Pope regarded as a pointless act of folly. The King’s attitude to the Protestants was above all political; he saw them as an obstacle to his cherished ambition of creating a truly united state; the fact that their religion was the same as that of his enemies the Dutch made it seem all the more dangerous. Unfortunately Louvois, whose power and importance depended upon the army, chose to treat the ‘conversions’ as a military operation. The dragonnades became more and more terrifying, the soldiers were soon encouraged to maltreat their unlucky hosts in every possible way; murder and torture became the rule. Those who were caught trying to emigrate went to the galleys.

  Mme de Maintenon has been freely blamed for the Revocation, but never by responsible writers. Voltaire realized that it had nothing to do with her and said so in his Louis XIV, long before her letters on the subject became available to him. When they appeared, he read them anxiously since, if they had proved her to be accountable, his estimate of her would have fallen to pieces; on the contrary they showed how right he had been. From the very beginning she reproved the excesses committed by Louvois, but she was too cowardly to speak up to the King. Indeed it is very likely true, as many French historians have stated, that Louis knew little or nothing of what was going on in the provinces. He thought that thousands of Protestants were being converted and a few villains, who were probably criminals in any case, were being punished. Mme de Maintenon told Fénelon that she groaned at the thought of the vexations the Protestants were enduring, but that if she so much as opened her mouth on the subject her enemies would say that she herself was still a Protestant at heart and all the good she might be able to do would be undone; as it was, the King thought her too tender and wondered whether she had not got leanings towards her old Church. She had converted too many people herself to believe for a single moment in ‘conversions’ by force or by bribery. Mme de Maintenon was a truly religious woman and she could distinguish the truth from falsehood in such matters. Oddly enough, she had several unconverted Protestants in her own household who were never interfered with and who lived quietly with her all through the persecutions.

  At Versailles the King decided to make an example for all to see. Most Protestants belonged to the middle classes. (Indeed one of the reasons why Charles II could never wholeheartedly accept that religion was that, during his young days in Paris, the fashionable world had regarded it as too dowdy and dreary for words.) But one of the great nobles was a Protestant, the fifty-seven year old Duc de La Force. The King sent for him and they had a long talk during which the Duc promised to do his best to be converted. So he was sent to a seminary; but when he had been there some time and the reports on his progress remained undecidedly pessimistic, the King, worried about the state of his soul, sent him to the Bastille (where he arrived on a curious date, 14 July 1689). He was provided with various Catholic books and urged to read them. The old man cried a great deal; he suffered from dropsy brought on b
y lack of exercise. He sent a petition to the King begging to be allowed to go to the Oratorians, or better still Versailles. In the margin of this document somebody has written: Pères de l’Oratoire, non. Versailles, encore moins. Then he disloyally told a visitor that his wife was a far more bigoted Protestant than he was. So the Duchess, also dropsical, was arrested and sent to a fortress. Four years later the La Forces were allowed to go home on condition that they had a priest to live with them. ‘Whenever Père Bordes thinks it better that the Duke should not see the Duchess, this lady must be told to stay in her own room, not for hours but for days on end.’ In 1699 the Duke died, and the Duchess managed to make her way to London, travelling in the suite of the English ambassadress, Lady Jersey. King William gave her a flat in St James’s Palace, but her troubles were not yet over. When she had lived for a while on such jewels as she had managed to bring with her, she ran out of money. So she wrote to Louis XIV asking if it was not shameful that a French duchess should be reduced to beggary in a foreign town? This struck a clever note; the King sent her four thousand livres. She never went back to France. After Louis XIV’s death the more easy-going Regent allowed her to have her fortune. When she died she left it to Greenwich Hospital, with a clause in her will requesting that if any Protestant La Force should ever be exiled to England he should be provided for. The contingency has not arisen. A Duc de La Force did emigrate to England during the French Revolution but he was not a Protestant.

  The results of the Revocation were, as might have been foreseen, a disaster. The thousands of Protestants who managed to get away, to England, Holland and Germany, were valuable citizens whom France could ill spare (William of Orange had over a thousand French officers in his army at the battle of the Boyne), but perhaps the greatest damage was caused by the propaganda which they disseminated, presenting the French as ogres, dangerous to all countries which practised the Reformed faith. Sweden, Holland and various German states banded together to form the League of Augsburg (1686) against Louis XIV, and were soon joined by Spain and the Catholic Empire, his traditional foe.

  A word must be said about the Jansenists who have had so much attention, caused such rivers of ink to flow and bedevilled French religious life for a hundred and fifty years. The doctrine of this gloomy sect, founded by the Dutchman Jansenius, was that of a return to the simplicity and discipline of the early Christians. Jansenism was made fashionable in France by Mère Angélique d’Arnauld and had its head-quarters in two convents, Port-Royal in Paris and Port-Royal-des-Champs which was situated in a romantic valley not far from Versailles. Those of the courtiers who had relations in Port-Royal-des-Champs used often to visit them, and there was much coming and going between the two establishments. The austere Jansenists always managed to seem holier than the Jesuits, the supple adroit men of the world who ruled the King’s conscience, and there was little love lost between them. As usual in those days, politics played their part in the matter; many Jansenists had been Frondeurs; the King hated them more than he hated the Protestants and much more than atheists. His nephew Chartres wanted to take a friend of his campaigning. The King said he could not allow it because he had been told that the friend was a Jansenist. ‘Fonpertuis a Jansenist?’ said the Duke, astonished. ‘I very much doubt if he believes in God!’ The King said in that case he would make no objections. Port-Royal, greatly as the King disliked it and its proximity to Versailles, was tolerated during the life-time of Père de La Chaise.

  The Court is now that described by the Duc de Saint-Simon, who arrived there himself in 1691, in time to note that the King seemed relieved by the death of Louvois. From now on the little Duke peoples the stage for us so that we should not only recognize almost every courtier of note if he should suddenly appear in flesh and blood, but also know what, in Saint-Simon’s opinion, he would be thinking. Saint-Simon’s prejudices were violent. He worshipped the King in spite of himself, while detesting his policy of government through the bourgeois ministers and of abasing the ancient aristocracy. But with all his genius he never fully understood what a secret man the King was, or his capacity for drawing a smoke-cloud over his real feelings. Saint-Simon took him too much at his face value. He hated Mme de Maintenon and all her works. He regarded du Maine as Satan, thus doing that insignificant fellow too much honour, and execrated the royal bastards for no better reason than that they were given precedence over dukes. He took the very lowest view of human nature, and had no aesthetic sense whatever. He loathed the château of Versailles. Ezekiel Spanheim speaks of ‘Saint-Simon: to whom nobody pays any attention’. He made as little impression on his contemporaries as a duke could make — attention has been paid to him since his death, however.

  12. THE FACULTY

  Presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes et non de leurs maladies.

  MOLIÈRE

  Illness and death were very dreadful at Versailles. As soon as the breath had left the body of a member of the royal family, his or her gilded bed-chamber was turned into a butcher’s shop. Lords or ladies-in-waiting, who had spent their lives with the deceased and were often in a sad state of grief, were obliged to stand by the bed while the body was chopped to pieces. The head was sawn open and examined; the liver and lights laid aside, the heart, on a silver salver, was given to one duchess and the entrails, in a big silver bowl, to another. Seven or eight doctors made notes of their gruesome findings and pronounced the causes of death; the only cause which invariably escaped their notice was their own incompetence.

  It is not a very reassuring reflection that in another two hundred and fifty years present day doctors may seem to our descendants as barbarous as Fagon and his colleagues seem to us. The fashionable doctors, as different from the general practitioner as an Abbé de Cour from a Curé de Campagne, stood then as they do now, in admiration of their own science. As now, they talked as if illness and death were mastered. Molière has presented that sort of doctor once and for all; a consultation of big-wigs is ever a scene from one of his plays. The learned, magic, meaningless words, the grave looks at each other, the artful hesitation between one worthless formula and another — all are there. In those days, terrifying in black robes and bonnets, they bled the patients; now, terrifying in white robes and masks, they pump blood into him. The result is the same; the strong live; the weak, after much suffering and expense, both of spirit and of money, die. The ferocious blood-letting which was the fashion killed in two ways — exhaustion from want of blood and blood poisoning. Smallpox patients were regularly bled; they generally died. One doctor got so tired of seeing this happen that he exclaimed ‘Smallpox, I intend to get you used to bleeding’. After being bled the patient always felt much worse, and this was considered an excellent sign. The Comte de Toulouse, having bravely endured the operation for stone, was bled four times in twenty-four hours. Strong and young, he recovered. Twenty-six years later he received the same treatment for the same complaint, and died.

  Laymen were divided on the subject of doctors; those who believed in them disapproved of those who did not — they thought them, as Molière put it, ‘impious in medicine’. But, alas, then as now, the most ardently impious when in pain and terror, were apt to change their minds, deliver themselves up to the self-styled experts, and die according to the rules. Mme de Maintenon and the King were rigidly pious in medicine and insisted on piety among those in their power; the King took it very much amiss if the courtiers did not submit entirely to the orders of Fagon when they were ill. Madame was impenitently impious.

  Descriptions of seventeenth-century diseases read strangely to us. Racine’s twelve-year-old daughter, Fanchon, went to bed with a headache. Presently Racine, who adored his children, went to see how she was getting on. He found her with her head on the floor and her throat full of water, drowning. He picked her up; she was like a wet sack. He and his wife forced salt down her throat and rubbed her with spirits of wine; it still seemed that she must smother. They sent frantically for doctors but all were away from home. Finally sh
e vomited an appalling quantity of water which seemed to have come into her chest from her brain; then she was perfectly all right. Mareschal the surgeon arrived and bled her; Fagon arrived and diagnosed suffocating catarrh; he said it came from not blowing her nose enough. After this she drove everybody mad by blowing her nose noisily all day long.