The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  In 1700 the pathetic King of Spain died, in the thirty-sixth year of his life, and of his reign, with all Europe hanging on his will. Charles II was simple but not, as has so often been said, actually idiotic. He knew perfectly well that foreign potentates were consulting together, without any reference to him, to divide the Spanish empire after his death and was, naturally, displeased. Capable of a certain amount of reasoning, he had noticed that whenever news came from the front (a vague place in the Netherlands, dotted with towns whose names he never could learn) it was always of a French victory; from this he deduced that it would be better for Spain to have France as an ally than an enemy. His French wife, Marie-Louise d’Orléans, had given him the only joy he had ever known; and the greatest sorrow of his whole sad life was her death without children. His second wife ruled him like a strict governess; he trembled before her and made faces behind her back. She was a Bavarian, a first cousin of the Grand Dauphin’s children but also sister of the Empress and she was doing all she could to further the Imperial cause. She was unpopular in Spain, and the Germans she brought with her were loathed.

  Now the most outstanding personage at Madrid was the French ambassador, the Marquis d’Harcourt who, by his charm and intelligence, had overcome apparently insurmountable obstacles there. At the beginning of his mission the Queen had made it impossible for him even to have an audience with Charles. D’Harcourt was not discouraged; he kept a magnificent embassy; little by little, he won over the grandees, the clergy, the toreros, the King and even the Queen herself: his task was made easier by the miserliness and tactlessness of his Austrian colleague. D’Harcourt’s diplomatic activities were cleverly backed up by neighbourly help to the Spanish king such as French convoys for his ships bringing gold from America and assistance in his running warfare with the Barbary pirates. During the last months of his life Charles II rebelled against his Queen; he only saw her in order to make last, desperate efforts to have a child, and treated secretly with statesmen and ambassadors. He went to Marie-Louise’s grave, had her coffin opened and kissed the poor remains. A pro-French Pope did the rest. Still undecided about his will, pious, desperately ill, Charles II wrote and asked the Holy Father what he ought to do and was told to leave everything to his great-nephew Anjou. And so he did, adding a rider that, should Louis XIV not accept on behalf of his grandson, the messenger who brought the will was to go straight on to Vienna and offer the Spanish empire to the Archduke Charles. The whole thing was a triumph for French diplomacy; and d’Harcourt was made a duke, to the annoyance of Tallart who had only been rewarded for his success in London by a marshal’s bâton and the order of the Saint-Esprit.

  Charles II’s will arrived, with the news of his death, at Fontainebleau, 9 November 1700. The King, whose face gave no indication of its contents, put off a day’s shooting and ordered Court mourning. He then called a council in Mme de Maintenon’s room to decide whether his grandson should or should not accept the legacy. It seemed almost certain that to accept would provoke a European war. The Dauphin, who of course was out hunting, hastened back to attend the Council and surprised everybody by speaking up in favour of his son’s rights, using brilliant arguments with an eloquence of which he was not known to be capable. The decision was a foregone conclusion; and indeed it is difficult to see how Louis XIV could have refused, since this would have meant putting his greatest enemy on two French frontiers with only the doubtful Duke of Savoy as a buffer on the third. From the time that Mazarin forced the King to marry Marie-Thérèse, French foreign policy had been based on the hopes that a day would dawn when there would be ‘no more Pyrenees’.

  Louis went back to Versailles, taking the Duchesse de Bourgogne, the Princess de Conti and the Duchesse du Lude in his own coach and eating a picnic without stopping. They left at 9.30 a.m. and arrived at 4 p.m. The following morning he sent for the Spanish ambassador whom he received alone with Anjou, and told him that he might salute his King. The ambassador well on his knee and made a long speech in Spanish which the King understood but the Duke did not (oddly enough he had never been taught the language). Then the double doors of the council chamber were thrown open and the waiting courtiers bidden to enter, a thing which had never happened before. Louis XIV, having with a long, piercing, majestic look seen exactly who was there, said: ‘Gentlemen, here is the King of Spain.’ It was a memorable scene.

  They went to Mass, Louis taking the new King into the box where he always worshipped alone. He offered the only hassock to the boy who refused it, so they both knelt on bare boards. The King of Spain was given the state bedroom in the Grand Appartement — the only person to sleep there in all the history of Versailles. The Dauphin, delighted at his son’s good fortune, went about saying ‘few people can speak of the King my father and the King my son!’ He seems not to have known a prophecy, made at his birth, son of a King, father of a King, never a King; but the courtiers all knew it and gave each other significant looks.

  By a lucky chance this King, Philip V, had more of the Spaniard than the Frenchman. Had the crown fallen on the head of his brother Berri it would most likely have fallen off again, for Berri was a French boy through and through and could never have endured the twilit gloom of the Spanish Court. Philip had the esteem of all who knew him and very quickly captured that of his subjects. He was handsome, with a strong look of Philip II, proud, brave, truthful and generous, rather melancholy, religious, uxorious. His first wife, Marie-Louise of Savoy, was the sister of Marie-Adélaïde. Human beings outside his family meant little to him and after he arrived in Spain the only friend at Versailles he ever enquired for was Mme de Beauvilliers. He tenderly loved his father and two brothers and never got over the death of Bourgogne, perhaps the person he loved most in the world. When he left for Spain the farewell scenes were heartrending: the Dauphin, usually so impassive, was terribly distressed — everybody felt that it was goodbye for ever, although the King said that, when Philip was quite established in Spain and when he had a son, he could pay them a visit on his way to the Spanish Netherlands. It never happened. Philip outlived them all by many years, and founded a dynasty which lasted almost exactly a century longer than his brother’s. His conscience was to trouble him when he remembered, late in the day, that Marie-Thérèse had renounced the Spanish throne for her descendants. He began to see himself as a usurper, and even abdicated for a while. But during the lifetime of Louis XIV he was ruled by him and assumed what God had sent with sober satisfaction.

  After the first shock caused by the will and Louis’ acceptance of it the other European countries seemed disposed to leave things as they were. The Emperor wanted to go to war, but could hardly have done so without the maritime powers and they were in favour of peace. Many English politicians rightly thought that once the old King of France was dead there would be little danger of the Spanish ruler taking his orders from Versailles. William III considered that war was inevitable, but he and his subjects were more at odds every day. At this moment Louis XIV was the most fortunate as well as the most powerful monarch on earth.

  In his annual report for 1683, Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador, said that the King never expressed either joy or grief but remained imperturbable on all occasions. The death of his wife extracted a few polite sighs; those of his mistress [Mlle de Fontawges], his minister [Colbert] and his child [Vermandois] were endured with noble indifference. ‘Whether he would continue in this wonderful tranquillity if fortune went so seriously against him that not only his happiness but also his glory were destroyed can only be known in the event — may it please the Lord God not to put to the proof a Prince who deserves well of the Christian world and especially of our Serenissime state.’ God was about to put Louis XIV to the proof and his demeanour never altered through terrible public and private misfortunes any more than it had under the surgeon’s knife. He was a man of iron.

  17. MOURNING

  Je vais où va toute chose

  Où va la feuille de rose

  Et la feuille de l
aurier.

  A. V. ARNAULT

  In 1701 Monsieur died suddenly of a stroke which was brought on by a quarrel with the King. For some months he had been furious with Louis (and with good reason) over his treatment of the Duc de Chartres. Monsieur was proud of his son and minded the fact that his undoubted intelligence and military gifts were never put to his country’s service. The young man, bored and disillusioned, was fast going to the bad like his cousin Conti. The courtiers thought it was the King’s policy to keep young royal princes away from the army and out of the public eye for fear that they should become too powerful. This is perhaps too much of a simplification: it must be remembered that Louis XIV was a man of violent likes and dislikes. Condé was of royal birth, he had actually committed high treason in his youth, but he was one of those whom the King loved: he had trusted him with military commands and much power. Like many old fellows, however, Louis was irritated by his young male relations; no doubt they were at their worst with him from sheer terror. Chartres and Conti were the leaders of the fashionable younger set at Court, which was universally condemned by its elders. La Bruyère wrote that Versailles was a place where old people were gallant, polite and polished, while the young were hard-hearted and ferocious, without any manners at all. Mme de Maintenon: ‘I find the females of today insupportable with their ridiculous and immodest clothes, their tobacco, their drink, their greed, their vile manners and their idle hands.’ The fact that the two princes outshone du Maine also counted against them. But if by chance the King had taken a fancy to either of them, it is possible that none of these considerations would have weighed with him.

  Chartres was having a wild love affair with one of his mother’s ladies, yet another ‘flower in Madame’s nursery’, in full view of his wife and of the whole Court. He had also put an actress and Mme de Chartres in the family way at the same time; Madame describes him going to Paris to visit his two young mothers, who gave birth simultaneously to a son and a daughter. (Unfortunately the legitimate child was the daughter.) The Duchess de Chartres complained to her father the King and he complained to Monsieur, who answered very boldly. He said the King was hardly the one to blame people for flaunting their mistresses and upsetting their wives — what about the time when he took La Vallière and Montespan to Flanders in the same coach as the Queen? The King was extremely angry at being reminded of those cheerful but sinful days, and the two men began to shout at each other. A servant came into the room, and whispered that a lot of people next door were listening as hard as they could and hearing every word. So Monsieur lowered his voice but continued his attack: he accused the King of having behaved dishonestly to Charters whom he had lured with many a specious promise, none of which had ever been kept, into a wretched marriage. Naturally a brilliant, energetic young man would be restless with nothing to do but kick his heels at Versailles, what did the King expect? Louis, who had never been spoken to like this, was beside himself with rage. Very well, he said, there was soon going to be a war, he would be obliged to make economies and wouldn’t fail to begin by cutting off Monsieur’s allowance.

  Dinner was then announced and the two men sat down, Monsieur crimson in the face. The King said it was quite obvious that he ought to be bled, and he had a good mind to send him to his room and have it done, if necessary by force. However they both calmed down as they ate the usual enormous meal; when it was over Monsieur went back to Saint-Cloud. Late in the evening Chartres sent the King a courrier to say that his father was ill. Normally the King would rush to be with Monsieur if his little finger ached, but he was still in a temper; he took no notice of the message and went to bed. At three in the morning there was another courrier; the King hurriedly dressed and left for Saint-Cloud with Mme de Maintenon; they found Monsieur unconscious. He had collapsed at supper, had just managed to tell Madame, when she came running to him, to go back to her room (where she had been in bed with a cold); and he had then fallen into a coma. There seemed to be no hope, so the King went home again. Some hours later, Fagon, who was in charge of the case, appeared and the King knew that his brother was no more. He was greatly upset and naturally felt remorse. He spoke kindly to Chartres, who was now the Duc d’Orléans, and told him that now he must consider his as his father. He showered him with riches.

  Many people minded this death, the Duchesse de Bourgogne for one: she and her grandfather had the same sense of humour and amused each other. ‘I loved Monsieur very much.’ ‘We all saw her prolonged grief at the death of Monsieur’, Mme de Maintenon wrote to a friend. The courtiers, both at Saint-Cloud and at Versailles, were plunged in gloom. Monsieur arranged parties better than anybody and always kept things in a hum. Athénaïs de Montespan was so sad that she had to go for long walks in fields; he had been a faithful friend since her retirement from the Court. Mme de Maintenon sent her a kind message, saying that old age, with all its memories, would be insupportable if one did not believe in another life without end.

  Madame was in despair. Having detested her husband for years, she had just began to be rather fond of him and was touched that his last thought should have been for her; but above all she was terrified that she would be obliged to leave the Court and go to a convent. As soon as the breath was out of Monsieur’s body she set up shrieks of ‘no convent’. Very loyally, the first thing she did was to look through his private papers, all scented with violet; she burnt hundreds of letters to him from boys; only when that business was dispatched did she get into her coach and go to Versailles. There she pocketed her pride and sent for Mme de Maintenon. How could she have had the face to do so? She knew quite well that for years the King, and presumably his wife, had been reading letters in which she had called Mme de Maintenon every name under the sun; old horror, old ape, witch, whore, manure heap and so on, attributing her every action to the vilest motives. Mme de Maintenon came at once; Madame invited her to sit down for the first time in their lives. Then she humbly asked if she would intercede with the King for Madame to keep her flat at Versailles, Mme de Maintenon, who always looked at Madame with a special expression, raising the corners of her mouth and drooping her lower lip, made no reply, but drew a letter from the bosom of her dress and handed it to Madame who was appalled to see that it was in her own writing — she was even more appalled when she opened it. It was to some German relation and said that nobody really knew for certain whether the old brute was the King’s wife or his concubine. Almost worse, the letter went on to describe the misery of poor people in France, always a sore subject with the King and one he would not care to have bruited about foreign courts. Madame fell into hysterics. However Mme de Maintenon behaved with the greatest magnanimity and arranged for her to stay on at Versailles. Madame continued to write about her benefactress in exactly the same terms as before, but was probably more careful not to send her letters by the public mail.

  In 1699 Racine had died. He had been out of favour for some time; and though he kept his job at the Court and was therefore often at Marly and Versailles the King never looked at him. He suspected him of Jansenism, but — what was more damning — Mme de Maintenon had encouraged him to write down his thoughts about the peasants; she showed them to the King who, as usual, was furious. ‘Because he writes good verse he thinks he’s got the talents of a minister.’ Racine reproached Mme de Maintenon who admitted that his disgrace was her fault and said she would make everything all right. ‘You never will,’ he said, sadly, ‘because my aunt at Port-Royal, who is even more influential with God than you are with the King, is praying night and day that I shall be chastened.’ The aunt won; he was taken back into favour. He left a wish to be buried at Port-Royal — the courtiers said he would never have been brave enough to have been buried there in his life-time.

  Another death, grievous to the King, was that of his body-servant Bontemps at nearly eighty. He had been with him all his life, had been Governor of Versailles for forty years, knew the King’s secrets (and those of everybody else) and had been one of the witnesses at his second ma
rriage. Bontemps, too, had a Mme de Maintenon, a woman he lived with, who may or may not have been his wife. One of the most powerful men in the land, he never gave himself airs; he spoke his mind to the King like a gruff old nanny and used his influence well. He was succeeded by his son.

  Then it was the turn of James II. The King had never shown the nobility of his nature to greater advantage than in his treatment of this sad, charmless cousin during his years of adversity. True, he thought that kings were different from other people, set aside by their anointing, representatives of God on earth. By honouring King James he was proclaiming his faith in the sacrament of coronation. All the same, he was wonderful to him: he lodged him splendidly, clothed and fed him and all his wretched, plotting, bickering followers; sent him in French ships and with a French army to be beaten in Ireland; gave him and his Queen precedence over everybody at Versailles; allowed him to flaunt the fleur-de-lys on his coat of arms and to touch for King’s Evil in his capacity of King of France! Nor did he raise a smile when James clanked into his chapel wearing a sword, drawing it during the Creed, as Defender of the Faith, a post which he said he had inherited from Henry VIII. When Louis XIV had been obliged, for urgent reasons of state, to sign the Peace of Ryswick, which entailed recognizing William of Orange as the English King, he had apologized humbly to James and had more or less said that he had only done so as a matter of form. But his generosity to the ‘poor King’ on his deathbed went far beyond all this, and led him into making perhaps the most expensive and certainly the strangest mistake of his whole career.

  King James had been in church and while the choir was chanting: ‘Our inheritance is turned to strangers; the crown is fallen from our head’, he fell lifeless to the ground. However he was not dead; he had merely had a stroke from which he recovered enough to go to Bourbon for the waters, accompanied by Fagon, with all expenses paid by Louis. Soon after his return to Saint-Germain-en-Laye he had another stroke, which to the despair of his adoring wife was evidently the beginning of the end. He had two children who would be able to claim the English crown, the Old Pretender, now aged thirteen, and Princess Louise, born in France. Many Englishmen were interested in the boy, and would have been glad to see him acknowledged as heir to William III instead of the uninspiring Anne, with her stupid husband and dead and dying children, but only if he could be educated in England as a Protestant and away from his mother’s influence. There was no chance whatever of that.