Monsieur enjoyed pomp and circumstance. Despite his inability to ride, he kept one of the largest stables in France and his regiment of Carabineers was superbly mounted. As Grand Master of the Knights of St Lazarus, he restricted membership of that ancient hospitaller order to great noblemen. Everything about him was designed to enhance his pride and ostentation. Short, fat and swarthy, he overdressed in diamond-studded suits, and adopted a repellently haughty manner. Yet a gouache of Monsieur in his early twenties, by Moitte, shows a surprisingly attractive face, with the Bourbon nose but an amused grin.
The birth of Louis XVI’s first child in 1778, Madame Royale, was a bitter blow to Monsieur. At the christening, when Cardinal Rohan asked what names would be given to the child, he was heard to mutter, ‘But the first thing is to know who are the father and mother’; later, he seems to have tried to imply that the father was Artois. The birth of a Dauphin in 1781 must have been even more galling.
Monsieur had himself married in 1772, when he was only fifteen, but, despite boasting how he would outdo his brother, failed to beget children; it was rumoured that his impotency drove his wife to drink, though in fact he only became impotent much later in life. ‘Madame’ was Maria Giuseppina of Savoy, daughter of the King of Sardinia. She was small, dark, ugly, insignificant, and bad-tempered, coarse-natured, and dirty in her person—Louis XV begged her parents to persuade her to wash her neck and clean her teeth. Mme de Campan says that the only thing worth mentioning about her was a ‘pair of tolerably fine eyes’. Madame’s favourite occupation was catching thrushes in nets and having them made into soup. (Monsieur was fond of food too, but with more elegance—he created a dish which consisted of a partridge stuffed with an ortolan, which in turn was stuffed with foie gras.) Their flat was in the left wing at Versailles on the side near the Orangery, Monsieur and Madame occupying separate floors.
Monsieur became a patron of literature, supporting a whole host of writers at his palace of the Luxembourg. He earned himself a name for wit and bon mots—it was he who coined the aphorism ‘Punctuality is the politeness of Princes’. He wrote elegant light verse, ferocious political satire and libretti for two operas—La Caravane du Caire and Panurge dans l’Ile des Lanternes. Some of his verse he sent under assumed names to the Mercure and other newspapers. He read voraciously, his letters being filled with quotations ranging from Virgil to Voltaire.
When Emperor Joseph II paid his famous visit to Paris in 1778, he reported to his mother that Monsieur was ‘an inscrutable creature, better-looking than the King, but mortally cold’. None the less, Louis-Stanislas got on well enough with Marie Antoinette—his sly jokes made her laugh; Mme de Campan says that the fête which he gave for the Queen at his château of Brunoy was the most magnificent ever given to her, a combination of masque and tournament.
Monsieur constantly intrigued against the government, writing numerous and often savage pamphlets. One described Turgot as ‘a despot’ and Louis XVI as ‘the leading dummy in the kingdom’. He printed and circulated Necker’s secret memorandum, a ruse which led to the minister’s downfall (Necker had incurred his enmity by refusing to pay him a million livres which Louis-Stanislas claimed had been left to him by his parents). During the Assembly of Notables he presided over one of its committees and opposed most of Calonne’s reforms.
Somewhat surprisingly in view of his ugliness, timidity and ill-defined sexuality, Louis-Stanislas acquired a glittering young mistress, the high-spirited Mme de Balbi, who was one of Madame’s ladies. Anne-Jacobé Caumont La Force had been born in 1759, the daughter of a distinguished member of Monsieur’s household. Admired by all for her elegance and dashing appearance, she married the Comte de Balbi, grandson of a Genoese Doge, but he turned out to be insane; in 1780 violent behaviour culminated in his beating his wife with his cane after finding her en galanterie, and he was confined in a madhouse (some said with Monsieur’s connivance). What appealed to Louis-Stanislas about la Balbi was not so much her physical charms, and certainly not her promiscuity, as her literary tastes and mordant wit; though it is likely that they slept together, for at this date he was not yet impotent. He installed her in a flat above his own at Versailles, Madame continuing to live below. In Paris Anne-Jacobé held court at the Petit Luxembourg, where she entertained the literary men whose company her lover enjoyed so much. Her extravagance on clothes, jewellery and gambling reached such heights that Monsieur soon found himself in serious financial difficulty.
Hézecques, who obviously disliked him intensely, gives an unflattering portrait of Monsieur in the late 1780s and early 1790s. ‘Monsieur was very fat, but it was not the fatness which goes with strength and vigour, like Louis XVI. He had an unhealthy constitution and even as a boy took medicine to help his circulation and cure fits of giddiness, and this unhealthiness was made worse by lack of exercise…. No Prince was ever more ungainly than Monsieur; he had the waddle of the Bourbons in its most extreme form and all his fine clothes could not conceal his bad figure.’
Louis-Stanislas’s real calibre first appeared after the decision to summon the States General. He encouraged the King to agree to double the Third Estate; in his brother’s place he would have extracted the maximum popularity from such a concession. He saw no purpose in leaving Paris in 1789 and persuaded Louis XVI not to abandon his capital; only with hindsight does this advice appear disastrous; at the time, it seemed sound sense. Nor was he shaken by the storming of Versailles or by being dragged to the Tuileries in the King’s wake in October 1789.
By 1790, however, Louis-Stanislas was having second thoughts. The Marquis de Favras, a professional adventurer and mercenary soldier, proposed rescuing the King and taking him to Péronne on the frontier; it seems, though there is no proof, that Monsieur borrowed two million livres to finance the operation. But Favras was denounced by a fellow plotter; it was rumoured that he had meant to raise 30,000 men and assassinate Lafayette. He was hanged but luckily incriminated none of the Royal Family.
Monsieur far preferred the idea of being a constitutional monarch to having no throne at all. He would have had no qualms about taking Louis XVI’s place on the throne. However, after Favras, he was too cautious to intrigue during such dangerous times, but he hung on at the Luxembourg till the last possible moment, playing endless whist at the Tuileries with his dear brother (while grumbling about him behind his back; he told Mirabeau that the King’s weakness and indecision were beyond belief, comparing his character to ‘oiled ivory balls which one tries in vain to hold together’). Mirabeau contemplated forming a cabinet in which Monsieur would have been First Minister, but seems to have decided he was too nervous; probably Louis-Stanislas was hedging his bets.
With his usual astuteness he realized when the situation was finally out of control. During the Royal family’s flight to Varennes, while Louis XVI trundled towards disaster, Monsieur, Madame and Mme de Balbi, equipped with false passports, left Paris by the Pont Neuf and drove to Le Bourget, driving from thence to Soissons, Laon and La Capelle, and crossing the Belgian frontier without incident.
Monsieur now set up a government in exile at Coblenz, where Artois and the Prince de Condé had each gathered an army of émigrés. He assumed the title of Regent on the grounds that the King had lost his freedom of action. He kept impressive state, entertaining regally, sent ambassadors to the European sovereigns in the hope of persuading them to invade France, and issued threatening proclamations which gravely embarrassed his brother in Paris. Calonne came over from England to be his Prime Minister.
Mme de Balbi’s sway over Monsieur reached its zenith at Coblenz, where she was known as the ‘Queen of the Emigration’ and aspired to a political rôle. Her promiscuity made Louis-Stanislas a laughing-stock. When he moved to Hamm, she went to Brussels instead, though with every intention of rejoining him later. However, Monsieur then learnt that it was common gossip that she had had twins by a youthful lover, and was so furious that he never saw her again.
After la Balbi’s fall, the f
ocus of Monsieur’s affections was the Captain of his Bodyguard. Antoine-Louis-François de Bestiade, Comte d’Avaray, was thirty-four and a career soldier whose skilful organization of his master’s escape to Coblenz had won him his master’s confidence; later the infatuated Louis-Stanislas gave him the right to bear the royal arms of France on his own with the motto Vicit iter durum pietas (loyalty finds a way over even the stoniest road). Henceforward, until his death, he only left Monsieur when sent on special missions. The two men had no secrets from each other, Avaray’s one fault in Monsieur’s eyes being that he had no Latin. Indeed it is probable, though there is no actual proof, that Monsieur was a repressed homosexual. Significantly, Hézecques compares his character with those of Henri III and Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV (though admittedly he does not speak of common sexual tastes). Undoubtedly, Louis-Stanislas found full emotional satisfaction in male friendships, even if these were platonic because of his low sexual drive. Like Louis XIII, he sought the perfect friend.
During the campaign before Valmy, Monsieur was irritated by the bragging of the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick. ‘Be careful, Duke,’ he warned him, ‘I know that the French will defend their country—they are not always beaten.’ As a result of the ensuing débâcle, by the end of 1792 Monsieur was living in a small wooden house at Hamm in Westphalia, short of food and heating. The exploits of the Chouans raised his hopes, but by the end of 1793, even they had been crushed, only M de La Rochejacquelin holding out in his Breton woods. Monsieur moved to Verona. Here, as King Louis XVIII—he assumed the title on his nephew’s death—he issued what some émigrés termed the ‘criminal’ Proclamation of Verona; this promised that Absolutism would be restored and savage penalties inflicted when the King came home; it even listed those who would be quartered, those who would be broken on the wheel (Talleyrand was among these), those who would be hanged, and those who would be sent to the galleys.
In December 1795 his niece, Madame Royale, was rescued from the Temple. The Austrians exchanged a number of important French prisoners for her and sent her to Vienna, from whence she was brought to the King. She received the warmest welcome of which his cold nature was capable and betrothed to her cousin, Louis d’Angoulême, Artois’s son. Sadly, her experiences had ruined her nature and, ‘The orphan of the Temple’ was a sour bitter woman for the remainder of her long life (she did not die until 1851). Even so, a strong, sentimental attachment sprang up between her and the King; she was undoubtedly his favourite member of the royal family.
It must be remembered that a Bourbon restoration seemed almost inevitable until Napoleon was firmly established. The French people had more than a suspicion that égalité was killing liberté and fraternité, and the newspapers were full of royalist propaganda. Most Frenchmen longed for a return to the rule of law. Unfortunately, Louis, encouraged by reports from his agents in Paris, failed to realize that what France wanted was not the monarchy of 1789 but the constitutional monarchy of 1791. The bourgeoisie had no wish for the return of privilege; the peasants feared the re-introduction of feudal dues; and everyone who had bought émigré land dreaded confiscation. Nevertheless, by 1797 Royalist deputies had almost obtained control of the central government and Louis thought his restoration was imminent. But the army was still republican. On 4 September 1797—18 Fructidor, Year V, in the Revolutionary calendar—General Augereau staged a coup d’état and fifty-three Royalist deputies were condemned to deportation to Cayenne.
Meanwhile, the King was leading an odd, wandering life. He had left Verona for a brief spell with Condé’s army at Blanckenberg in Brunswick, before settling at Mittau in the Baltic Duchy of Courland—now part of Soviet Latvia, a coastal land famed for its beauty. From here he watched General Bonaparte’s rise to power with a mixture of hope and apprehension—was he Cromwell or was he General Monk? Before 18 Fructidor he offered him the Vice-royalty of Corsica and the title of Marshal of France if he would restore him. In 1800, when Bonaparte was First Consul, the King wrote to him: ‘You are taking a long time to give me back my throne; there is a danger that you may miss the opportunity. Without me you cannot make France happy, while without you I can do nothing for France. So be quick and let me know what positions and dignities will satisfy you and your friends.’ Bonaparte replied, ‘I have received Your Royal Highness’s letter. I have always taken a keen interest in your misfortunes and in those of your family. But you must not think of returning to France—you cannot do so without marching over a hundred thousand dead bodies.’ In 1803 Bonaparte sent an envoy to Mittau to propose that Louis and his family should surrender all claims to the French throne in return for independent principalities in Italy. The King wrote in reply, ‘I do not confuse M Bonaparte with those who preceded him. I respect his bravery and military genius…. But he is mistaken if he supposes my rights can be made the subject of bargain or compromise.’
However, Bonaparte gave the French everything which they had thought could only be supplied by a Bourbon restoration. Not only did he bring back the Church and build wonderful roads and schools, but he restored the rule of law (besides introducing the Code Napoléon, one of the world’s outstanding legal codes and one which could be understood by everybody, he even revived some of the courts of the old Parlement of Paris). When Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor in 1804, the King travelled to Sweden to join Artois—whom he had not seen for a decade—and issued a formal protest. But the Empire had a disquietingly permanent appearance.
Louis was forced to leave Mittau by the Tsar in 1807, whereupon he followed Artois’s example and settled in England. Although the British government gave him £ 7,000 a year, they would not let him stay in London, so he established his shabby court at Gosfield Hall in Essex, moving in 1809 to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. The diarist Charles Greville, accompanied by his father, visited Louis at Hartwell the following year. Greville says that there were so many people in the house—nearly 150—that the place resembled ‘a small rising colony’ and that he had never seen so many Dukes in his life. The King received them in his private closet, so small that it seemed like a ship’s cabin; the elder Greville said the way Louis heaved his huge bulk backwards and forwards made him feel seasick. He gave them a very modest dinner, carving himself; the only wines served were port and sherry. They spent the evening playing whist at threepence a point. The atmosphere was a compound of privation, hopelessness and ridiculously pompous etiquette. The diarist noted with amusement that the local yokels referred disrespectfully to their august neighbour as ‘old bungy Louis’.
Louis XVII, by Kucharski
Louis XVIII, by Gerard
The King was in constant touch with the professional adventurers and spies who were the only people in France still to take an active interest in the Bourbon cause. Most were of dubious reliability—one double agent even tried to persuade Louis to make a secret trip to Paris. Savary, Napoleon’s Minister of Police, paid the Duc d’Aumont £ 1,000 a year to send him two letters a month reporting what went on at Hartwell. (At the Restoration the King told Savary with relish, ‘You see, Monsieur, how little one can trust people. He [Aumont] always told me he was only paid £ 500—no doubt he didn’t want to pay me my royalties, as I drafted the letters myself!) However, there was a genuine traitor at Hartwell who has never been identified, probably an émigré courtier; he or she was responsible for the capture and death of many royal agents.
For all his undoubted probity, Avaray, the King’s favourite companion, inspired jealousy and even hatred. He particularly irritated conservative émigrés by speaking English and dressing like an Englishman. In 1808 a Vendéen veteran, General de Puisaye, accused Avaray of trying to have him assassinated. The scandal reached such proportions that Louis issued a public defence of ‘the most feeling of friends’ and appointed a committee of twenty-four noblemen who quickly declared Avaray innocent. The favourite at once challenged Puisaye to a duel, but the King had him arrested by the English authorities to prevent him fighting. As a mark of
his esteem he then made Avaray a Duke. However, the favourite’s health was collapsing—he seems to have been tubercular—and he had to leave England for a warmer climate at the end of 1810.
Louis’s Queen, Maria Giuseppina, who despite their incompatibility had stayed with him, died the same year. The British government gave her a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, after which her body was sent home to Turin. The King was by now in his late fifties, gout-ridden, cripplingly overweight and with a digestion which must have suffered dreadfully from his love of good food. He was prostrate when news came in 1811 that Avaray had died in Madeira.
Luckily, Louis quickly found a new dear friend, one who had been recommended by Avaray himself. Pierre-Louis-Jean-Casimir de Blacas, Comte d’Aulps, had been born in 1771 of an ancient family of Provence. Like his predecessor, he was a career soldier, a former dragoon captain. He had joined Louis’s household at Verona and had stayed with him ever since. A quixotic figure who modelled himself on the heroes of French chivalry, he insisted on regarding his gouty master as the reincarnation of Saint Louis and Henri IV. He knew Latin, and soon Louis was devoted to him. As Blacas said later, ‘You don’t know the King—he must have a favourite and he might as well have me as anyone else.’
After the débâcle of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Louis was optimistic enough to send an envoy to Charles XIV of Sweden (the former Marshal Bernadotte) and the Tsar, but the envoy found little encouragement, the Tsar being positively hostile. Then in October 1813 Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig. The King refused to attend a triumphal banquet in London, commenting, ‘I don’t know if the disasters overtaking the French army are a means by which providence intends to restore legitimate authority, but neither I nor the Princes of my family can rejoice at events which are such a sorrow to our country.’ None the less, Leipzig had transformed his situation. On 13 March 1814 Bordeaux hoisted the white flag of the Bourbons. To his amusement, Louis was invited by the Prince Regent to attend a ball at Carlton House for the first time; the walls were hung with draperies covered in fleurs-de-lis and the rooms filled with émigrés in hired court dress.
The Bourbon Kings of France Page 27