The King had changed a good deal from the hesitant lover of half a dozen years before, relying on a courtier to write his love letters for him. In that same year of 1661, his prime minister Cardinal Mazarin had died, croakily bewailing his imminent separation from an embezzled fortune of thirty-five million livres. As Louis admitted, “Only then did it seem to me that I was King: born to be King.” Though he had formally attained his majority at the age of thirteen, Mazarin and the Queen Mother together had continued their joint regency long beyond this time, effectively governing France for almost eighteen years.
The Cardinal’s death had given twenty-two-year-old Louis a free ruling hand at last, and he had immediately asserted what he saw as an unequivocal personal authority. Perhaps recalling tales of his father sending his regent grandmother Marie de’ Medici off to her Loire valley château, he had swiftly banished his regent mother, Anne of Austria, to her own political exile. He had then announced his intention to rule the country on his own, without a prime minister, an intention “to which everyone swore absolute loyalty,” as one of his courtiers recorded, “and which no one believed he would be able to carry out.”
Louis had more confidence in himself, as he made all too clear in his Mémoires, written for the eventual guidance of the little dauphin. “The ministers of kings should learn to moderate their ambition,” Louis declared. “The higher they elevate themselves above their proper sphere, the greater the danger that they will fall.” Before long, surintendant Nicolas Fouquet, Mazarin’s expected successor as prime minister, had been arrested on trumped-up charges of corruption, and escorted, by the legendary musketeer d’Artagnan, to an effective show-trial, where he was condemned to life imprisonment.
Though searches revealed an extraordinarily large number of letters from court ladies thanking him for the regular monies he had been sending to them, Fouquet’s only real crime was to have presented the young King, unwittingly, with a challenge to his new sense of himself as the country’s absolute ruler. A man of great power, Fouquet was also deeply cultured and a noted patron of the arts—Françoise’s husband, Scarron, had been one of his many beneficiaries. His magnificent château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, thirty miles from Paris, had overflowed with every treasure that talent or influence could provide: beautiful furniture, paintings and sculptures, rare manuscripts, even the finest food, for his chef was the famous François Vatel, toast of every dining table in the land (later to skewer himself in shame at the late arrival of the oysters for a banquet chez the prince de Condé). To embellish his château, Fouquet had employed the best of the very best: architect Louis Le Vau, painter Charles Le Brun, and André Le Nôtre, garden designer extraordinaire.
In August 1661, five months after Mazarin’s death, Fouquet had staged a fabulous fête at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and everyone at court, including the King, had attended. The gardens, the music, the lighting, the banquets, and, not least, the première performance of Molière’s comedy Les Fâcheux (The Nuisances)—all the delights and splendours of the evening had sealed Louis’s attitude, jealous and vindictive, towards his surintendant. Newly come into his own, the egocentric King had no intention of being upstaged, politically or socially, by anyone, least of all by one of his own ministers. “He had come to work with me as usual,” Louis wrote to his mother soon after the fête, “and I chatted with him over one thing and another, pretending to look for various papers until, through the window of my room, I saw d’Artagnan in the château courtyard…I dismissed Fouquet, and he went out at just the moment that poor d’Artagnan stopped to greet Monsieur Le Tellier, so he missed him. He thought he’d been given a hint to get away, but he caught him in the square by the church…” Fouquet was condemned, his too-marvellous château was placed under sequestration, and his lovely young wife, Marie-Madeleine, Françoise’s friend, swiftly disappeared from court and city circles.
Louis’s determination to have no rivals is perhaps mitigated by his youth and the novelty of power to him, though it does suggest a meanness of spirit not found in any truly great prince. Less excusable is the behaviour of the intendant des finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert, whose unscrupulous ambition had been a driving force behind his superior’s fall from grace. Colbert was “brilliant,” though not altogether “amiable,” which should have given Louis pause for thought. Taking advantage of the King’s inexperience, forty-two-year-old Colbert had been able to dazzle him with an array of fabricated accounts, supposedly proving malfeasance on Fouquet’s part. “I left him to investigate the things I hadn’t leisure to look into fully,” Louis wrote, naïvely. Colbert had been Mazarin’s foremost protégé, and despite Louis’s determination to rule alone as an absolute monarch, there is no doubt that, with Mazarin dead and Fouquet condemned to life imprisonment, Colbert quickly became prime minister in all but name.
From the very beginning of Louis’s “personal reign” in this year of 1661, Colbert made himself indispensable to the King, and from this followed a swift accrual of power over the finances of the kingdom, its trade, its law and administration, to a large extent its armed forces, and, not least, the royal household, arbiter par excellence of the nation’s influence and wealth. Never presenting himself as more than the King’s loyal servant, within a handful of years Colbert had become, in effect, the real ruler of France. Louis, young, inexperienced, superbly proud, sensed the truth uneasily: “Colbert had his own interests at stake,” wrote the abbé de Choisy. “He wanted Fouquet’s place, and he did whatever he could to discredit him among all the men of business.” “Colbert’s ferociously active on the King’s behalf,” added Primi Visconti. “You’d think the treasury was his personal property…Once he told the King off about his own spending.”
In that same month of May 1667, having demoted Louise de la Vallière from mistress to duchess, the King of France sent an unfriendly letter to his mother-in-law, the recently widowed Regent Queen of Spain. He informed her that, with her husband dead and with full payment of her daughter’s dowry still outstanding, parts of the Spanish Netherlands had now been “devoluted” to Marie-Thérèse—effectively, to himself. Without waiting for a reply, he then declared the peace between France and Spain, the eight-year-old Peace of the Pyrenees, sealed by his own marriage, to be at an end.
Louis’s supporters portrayed this as necessary to keep France safe from invasion from the north via the Spanish Netherlands, but others saw it as his first step in a determined enterprise of national and personal aggrandizement. Diplomacy had its uses, but for Louis, as for most of his contemporaries, force of arms, under more or less any circumstances, was a legitimate assertion of political authority: in other words, might was right. Besides, as he recorded for the benefit of his little son, “When you act in contravention of a treaty, it isn’t really contravening it, because no one’s taken it literally. If I hadn’t broken the Peace of the Pyrenees, I would have been negligent in my duty to the state: the Spanish would have been first to break it if I hadn’t.”
Thanks to his capable war ministers, Le Tellier and his son Louvois, and to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, now contrôleur-général (de facto prime minister), Louis currently had at his command a fully functioning Ministry of War, “perhaps the first genuine one in any European state,” and a newly expanded army of 80,000 men. A fortnight after his letter to the Queen of Spain, they were marched off to Flanders under the leadership of the veteran Maréchal Turenne, friend of Scarron in the old yellow salon days, to wage their “War of Devolution.” With the towns of the Spanish Netherlands weakly defended, and the Spanish themselves, with their empire in terminal decline, unable to pay for reinforcements, the French troops encountered so little resistance that they laughingly dubbed the campaign la promenade militaire.
The King himself had gone along for the stroll, as had Marie-Thérèse and Athénaïs. Though la belle Montespan had set off on the journey as the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, she returned to court in the middle of August with a higher, if secret, honour: though the King retained a place in his heart fo
r his former maîtresse déclarée, by now Athénaïs had definitely pushed Louise into second place. Surprisingly, the normally bashful Louise had declined to shrink away into oblivion, returning from Paris to Saint-Germain without waiting for Louis’s permission. “Madame de la Vallière is quite reestablished at court,” Madame de Sévigné reported to her daughter in Provence. “The King received her with tears of joy, and Madame de Montespan received her with tears…guess why? One has held tender conversations with each of them. It’s all very difficult to understand. We must hold our tongues.”
In October 1667, the half-wanted Louise gave birth to a half-wanted son. Pathetically, she named him Louis, and in recognition, his father declared him comte de Vermandois. Lawyers and parlementary counsellors began to dig and delve to construct a legal precedent, and in February 1669 the little boy was legitimized. In November of the same year, at the age of just two years, he was named Admiral of France—with contrôleur-général Colbert, now Secretary of State for the Navy as well, assigned to assist him temporarily in his duties.
Eight
City of Light
Françoise, meanwhile, had been enjoying what she herself declared to be the happiest time of her life. Apart from day trips into the surrounding forests and summer sojourns in the country, she had spent these years in Paris, where she had rented a house in the rue des Trois-Pavillons in her familiar quarter of the Marais. This had ensured an easy continuation of her social life, with Ninon, the d’Albrets, Madeleine de Scudéry, the duchesse de Richelieu, and Madame de Sévigné all her neighbours. Though her house was small, she lived comfortably there with a handful of servants, including her lady’s maid, Nanon Balbien, a capable and trusted girl who was to remain with her all her life.
Françoise was now thirty-three years old, still dark-haired and lovely, an established and popular figure in the brightest Paris circles. After the sartorial blooming of her early widowhood, she had settled into a quiet elegance of dress, her preferred colours a discreet green or blue, and her chosen luxuries characteristically tasteful. She wore particularly beautiful linen, always perfectly matched and snow-white, a clear mark of social standing in a time of dirty streets and rudimentary laundering. Her shoes were of the best quality, and her gowns of fine muslin, “a very fashionable fabric at that time for persons of middling fortune.” At home, she burned wax candles rather than the cheaper and less fragrant tallow, “and that wasn’t very common in those days.” With these indulgences, and her usual “good big fire,” and toys for the Montchevreuil children, and a modest charity, she had still something left at the end of each year from the two thousand livres of her royal pension.
In 1666 or thereabouts, around the age of thirty-one, she had taken a personal “confessor,” according to the custom of the Catholic nobility and gentry. She chose the abbé François Gobelin, a former soldier and Sorbonne doctor of theology, apparently “highly esteemed,” but all the same a limited man, more of a stickler for pious detail than a leading light of intellect or spirituality. Françoise’s engaging of Père Gobelin may suggest a twitch of devout feeling on her part, but in the main he seems to have fulfilled a social obligation for her, without needing to be taken too seriously on the religious front. Certainly his steady advice, sounding away on page or in person, did nothing to change her behaviour where she had not already decided to change it herself. Throughout their relationship, which was to last a quarter of a century, it was Françoise, not the reverend père, who was to keep the upper hand.
In these early days at the rue des Trois-Pavillons, he had attempted to persuade his “appetizing little Christian” to adopt a less tempting attire. Françoise was not an elaborate or coquettish dresser in the way of most women of her circle, but her beauty and a natural sense of style ensured her attractiveness, whatever she wore. She seldom went décolletée, except on days of exceptional heat: “Why, you have a really beautiful bust,” exclaimed the surprised duchesse de Richelieu on just such a summer’s day. “You’ve always covered it up so very carefully, I’d always assumed there must have been something wrong with it.” Père Gobelin complained of the luxuriance of her gowns. “But, monsieur,” she protested, “I always wear the most ordinary fabrics.” “Perhaps,” he replied, “but, my dear lady, when you kneel down, there’s such a vast expanse of gown at my feet, spreading out so very gracefully, I really have to say it’s excessive.” But Françoise’s fashionable muslin gowns became no less luxurious.
Having failed where her dress was concerned, Père Gobelin had then attempted to change her social behaviour. Observing how entertaining she was, and how much she enjoyed the attention this brought her, the abbé, himself no doubt a master of the art, instructed her “to try to bore everyone” instead. Françoise responded wickedly by adopting a complete silence when in company, restraining herself so determinedly that “it quite turned her off piety.” So little did Père Gobelin succeed that “I’ve heard her say that if people hadn’t been likely to talk about it, she wouldn’t have bothered even going to mass on a Sunday.”
She is not likely to have been much prompted towards piety by the second priestly presence in her Marais life, the eccentric abbé Jacques Testu. Lanky, garrulous, given to tipping jugs of water over his head to clarify his thinking, the forty-year-old abbé was a notorious womanizer—and an optimist, placing his hopes of a bishopric on Ninon’s conversion from courtesan to Carmelite. “The diocese would have to be full of young women, of course,” Ninon remarked laconically. Abbé Testu was aghast at the strictures being placed on Françoise by the earnest Père Gobelin, and he turned up at her house to protest. “Really, Madame,” he told her, “you’re dealing with a fanatic.” But she kept Père Gobelin on; at base he was a good man, and his limitations, paradoxically, were an advantage: she could follow his advice or ignore it, according to her mood. In consequence, her attempts at a more devout life were half-hearted and short-lived, and she spent her days, not at church or in private prayer, but dining in congenial company, or driving about in the fashionable quarters, or going to plays and operas in “excessive” muslin gowns.
For most people in Paris, these years of the 1660s were a golden time, despite their harsh beginning. A bad harvest in 1661 was soon forgotten in a cornucopia of cheap bread for the poor and new entertainments for those with money to spare. The city itself was changing, building and regulating its way to a confident, modern livability.
In his capacity as surintendant of the King’s Buildings—one of his many lucrative posts—Colbert had initiated a massive programme of royal and public construction. The huge old medieval gates of Paris, and its ancient walls, already crumbling at the time of Françoise’s arrival fifteen years before, had finally been demolished to make way for wide new streets and even more houses. New churches and, for the rich, grand hôtels particuliers, city versions of their country châteaux, were replacing the sombre dwellings of an earlier age—the new high gateways, allowing the family coach to drive in directly from the street, were an especially prized contemporary feature. With some twenty-two million people, France could already boast the largest population of any country in Europe; now, with an estimated 600,000 inhabitants, France’s capital had become Europe’s largest city.
In 1666, the King himself went for a walk in the streets of Paris to observe the city at first hand, and subsequently ordered a bevy of swans to be brought from abroad to grace the river Seine—anyone caught trying to steal their eggs was to be fined three hundred livres. Trudging the streets in the King’s wake, Colbert and his protégé, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, reached a different decision, equally aesthetic in its practical way, about beautifying their burgeoning city: they instituted a set of tough regulations to clean it up.
Residents and business proprietors found themselves liable to a new “mud tax,” payable twice yearly on fixed days; those failing to pay saw their furniture seized by the city bailiffs the very next day. The new post of rubbish collector was added to the city payroll, and Parisians w
ere obliged to make their own pragmatic contribution to public cleanliness: apart from the mud tax and a fine, newly instigated, should they be caught throwing anything out of their windows into the street, they were now required to appear on their doorsteps “every morning at seven o’clock in summer and at eight o’clock in winter, carrying out their household refuse as the church bells ring; and all the mud and dirt on the pavement in front of their houses is to be swept into a pile at the end of the building for official collection”—by the new rubbish men, who were themselves fined if they failed to do the job properly.
A new regulation was applied to the city watchmen, whose carts full of human excrement were thenceforth required to be closed when in motion—with the result that the streets “are now so clean, the horses are almost slipping on them.” A new police force, the first of its kind in Europe, was formed to combat crime and vice: police archers rounded up the destitute and locked them away in workhouses and convents; “bohemians and gypsies” were sentenced to the galleys; and, apparently crucially, students were confined to colleges at all but a handful of specified hours. In an attempt to prevent murders and thefts, even the wearing of masks was forbidden, with a few fashionable ladies, occasionally including Françoise, continuing to defy the new law.
Within a handful of years, Paris had shaken off its thick medieval crust of filth and disorder, and was setting the tone in modernism and elegance for the whole of Europe. There was even street lighting. In other French towns, those who ventured out in the dark were obliged to rely on flickering hand-held lanterns, or the candlelight from an occasional tavern, or that most ancient help of travellers by night, the moon. But in Paris, with a new “light tax” to complement the mud tax, street lanterns burned until late into the night, so that “up till two or three in the morning, it’s almost as light as day.” The King had a medal struck with the device Securitas et Nitor (Safety and Light), and Paris, la ville lumière, was born.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 16