Thereafter the military situation became ever more difficult for the French, and victory ever more unlikely, though the King was loath to accept the truth. The young Prince of Orange, now declared Stadthouder (governor) of the United Provinces, agreed to peace negotiations. Louis’s response was outrageous: all the territories the French had conquered, regardless of their retreats forced by the flooding, were to be confirmed as France’s possessions; all Dutch fortified garrisons were to be replaced by French garrisons; Dutch tariffs on French wines were to be rescinded and a huge indemnity paid; Frenchmen were to be permitted to travel at will in the United Provinces, subject not to Dutch law but to French; the Protestant burghers were to pay for the upkeep of Catholic priests in their own land; and, as a final slap in the republican Dutch face, an embassy must be sent each year to the French court, bearing a medallion expressing “the depth of their contrition, their subjection to [Louis’s] royal authority and their eternal gratitude for his gracious clemency”—terms “as brutal and uncompromisingly vindictive as any that European powers have inflicted on each other in the course of their history as nation states.” The proud and prosperous United Provinces of the Netherlands were to become, in effect, a vassal state of France.
Unsurprisingly, Louis’s terms were rejected, and the fight went on. In September 1672 a combined preliminary imperial and Prussian force of 40,000 men, under the command of the great generalissimo of the Thirty Years War, Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, advanced into the Rhineland. The French armies, separated and discouraged, with increasing supply problems for their frequent sieges, gradually found themselves on the defensive. By November, the Regent Queen of impoverished Spain had even managed to send more reinforcements—“men for the Dutch and money for the Germans”—which at last gave Louis pause for thought, though an honourable retreat, much less an admission of defeat, remained for him impossible.
After seven further months of effort on both sides, months of hunger and disease and destruction, the French achieved one major victory at Maastricht, an important town in the Spanish Netherlands, which capitulated on June 29, 1673, after thirteen days of siege masterminded by the brilliant Captain Vauban. The following day, Louis entered the city in triumph. “What do you think of the conquest of Maastricht?” wrote a breathless Madame de Sévigné to her cousin. “The King alone had all the glory of it.” But the capture of Maastricht was not enough to revive France’s military fortunes. In September, pressed hard by the coalition, the French were forced to retreat from the United Provinces, retaining, of all their vanquished towns, only the lately captured Maastricht.
It had not been an entirely happy year for France’s military reputation, as Louis was forced to reflect from the safety of Saint-Germain. The Dutch war was becoming a general war. A few weeks after the New Year of 1674, his cousin Charles II, King of England, signed a separate peace with the United Provinces, thereby withdrawing from France his crucial naval help. With Louis’s own Marine still pitifully small, this was heavy news indeed. Behind the scenes, the astute young Prince of Orange had been working to detach Protestant England from Catholic France, and though the quietly Catholic Charles II had wished to continue supporting his French cousin at the expense of his Dutch nephew, his staunchly Protestant parliament had refused to vote him the means to do so. Charles was powerless within the confines of his constitutional monarchy, as Louis was disdainfully aware. His own monarchy, by contrast, was absolute, and his toothless parlement, since the defeat of the Fronde, nothing but a waste of good commercial time for its busy bourgeois members.
France’s autumn withdrawal from the Spanish Netherlands, with only Maastricht to show for sixteen months of fighting, was a clear defeat, though Louis chose not to see it in that light. By the middle of the winter, in a tacit admission of the strength of resistance in the Netherlands itself, his troops were on the march to the east, to the region of the Franche-Comté, still held, if only just, by the failing Spanish Habsburgs.
The Franche-Comté, the former “Free County” of Burgundy, which bordered Switzerland and the Alsace, belonged, in Louis’s view, within France’s own natural frontiers. The prince de Condé had in fact captured the region already, during the War of Devolution in 1668, but the terms of the treaty concluding that war had obliged the French to return it to Spain. Now Louis was determined to get hold of the Franche-Comté for good, and he wanted to be recognized as having captured it in person. Accordingly, he sent Condé north to hold the Dutch at bay, Turenne to the east to confront the Emperor’s forces, and two other generals to the south to deflect any possible Swiss reinforcements for the coalition. This left him with only the troops of the Franche-Comté itself to deal with—5,000 mercenary soldiers, plus a scratch band of 5,000 barely trained local militiamen. Louis himself led an army of 25,000 experienced men, including elite troops, and he took the precaution of sending the duc de Navailles ahead with a smaller force to carry out the preliminary work of invasion: scouting the terrain, establishing supply lines, bribing or executing local leaders, and terrorizing everyone else. This accomplished, Navailles was packed off to join the prince de Condé, leaving the way clear for Louis himself to take the credit for the region’s capture.
On May 2, 1674, the King set up camp outside the town of Besançon, in the centre of the Franche-Comté region. The plan was simple: the unfortunate town was to be besieged, with as much noise and smoke as possible, after which it was to make an abject capitulation, opening its portals to the triumphant King of France. Captain Vauban was on hand to manage the siege itself. Queen Marie-Thérèse was on hand as well, and Athénaïs, and scores of courtiers from Saint-Germain, all in attendance to watch the spectacle and gasp in amazement at the explosions and the collapsing city walls.
Louis was an experienced entertainer. In his frequent ballets at court, he had often appeared as Alexander the Great and any number of other military heroes. Now he was to appear, in this “most theatrical form of warfare,” in his own personal role of Louis le Grand. As always, his magnificent metteur en scène rose to the occasion: “[U]nder Vauban’s direction, siege warfare came to look ever more like a ballet choreographed down to the last detail, or a stage tragedy with a foregone conclusion.” As at Saint-Germain, as at Versailles, so now at Besançon. Throughout the siege, the King was constantly visible, “encouraging the troops.” The town held out for thirteen days, then capitulated to Louis as cued, to the applause of half his court. He then went home, leaving the other towns of the Franche-Comté to be captured less theatrically by his generals. The last one fell on July 4: little Faucogney, defended by just thirty soldiers and two hundred townsmen, who declared to the French envoy inviting them to surrender that they were all “resolved to die for the King of Spain.” They did.
On July 13, 1674, a week of festivities began at Versailles, to celebrate the capture of the Franche-Comté at last. The last magnificent banquet was held in one of the château’s interior courtyards, where, “on a parterre strewn with flowers, an octagonal table had been built around an immense triumphal column.” “Kings should enjoy giving pleasure,” wrote Louis.
Eleven
The Course of True Loves
No place at the octagonal table had been set for Louise de la Vallière, nor was she to be seen anywhere at Versailles on that splendid July evening. After seven years of alternating hope and humiliation, she had given up at last. To keep the courtiers guessing, as the King had been anxious to do, she had been permitted to remain his acknowledged maîtresse déclarée, while enduring a steady demotion in her real standing at court. She had even been foolish enough to receive the King privately during the later stages of Athénaïs’s three pregnancies, when Louis routinely sought to console himself with casual affairs. But by the beginning of 1674, even desperate Louise had accepted that the King’s heart would never again be hers. Religious by temperament, she made up her mind to put a belated end to her shameful situation in the classic way of the discarded royal mistress: she decided to enter t
he convent.
No one was surprised at the decision in itself, and Louise’s friends can only have been pleased at this long-delayed step towards personal dignity. But the court on the whole was shocked by the choice of convent she had made. Far from a genteel refuge stocked with comforts, as the Ursuline convent might have been, the Carmelite convent which Louise had chosen was the most doctrinally rigid and the most austere of all. Its regime of absolute self-abnegation—endless hours of prayer, unheated stone cells, bare feet, minimal food and sleep, even self-flagellation—was regarded by most at court as only for the perversely religious. Even Louise herself seems to have quavered at the brink, using various weak excuses to postpone her departure: “Her chambermaid threw herself at her feet and begged her not to do it. How could anyone resist that?” asked Madame de Sévigné, with a rhetorical smirk.
Behind the scenes, the pliable Louise had been prodded along the path of repentance by two ambitious and powerful courtiers: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, bishop, religious orator extraordinaire, and harsh tutor to the young dauphin; and the marquis de Bellefonds, maréchal de France and premier maître d’hôtel of the King’s household. Both were known dévots, staunch Catholics of the most unyielding kind, born again, as it were, to lives of absolute commitment to God’s will, or at least to their own understanding of it. Committed to the “conversion”—the religious rebirth—of France, they viewed the court as their most vital field of operation. From the court flowed half the power in the land, and Bossuet was determined that, sooner or later, that half would be increased to the whole. He was a fanatical proponent of absolute monarchy, ordained by God: the divine right of a king to rule, challenged by no one—though advised, of course, by the wisest and most righteous men in the kingdom. The “conversion” of the King was thus Bossuet’s worldly and otherworldly goal; through him, the whole of France could be regained for God, and Bossuet would one day lead to the heavenly gates a repentant nation of twenty-two million souls.
Louis’s late mother, devoutly Catholic, “who had great influence on the King” and “whom he respected so much,” had set the first torch aflame, but since her death, in 1666, it had had no obvious bearer. Her expected successor, pious Marie-Thérèse, had proved sadly unfit for the task, with no attractions to draw the King into her orbit, and no intelligence to draw anyone else. Now timid little Louise was to raise the heavy torch aloft. After so many years of tacit accommodation to the King’s desires, this sacrifice of herself, of her life at court, of all pleasure and all comfort, even of her two young children, was to jolt the King into a reconsideration of his own sinful way of life—his uncontainable, adulterous sex life.
Athénaïs, at least, saw the stratagem for what it was. Louis, an instinctive if unreflecting Christian, had been periodically rattled by doubts of his own salvation. At thirty-five, in superb health, he could still brush aside his fear of the final reckoning, but Bossuet’s influence was nonetheless strong, and every day his cabale des dévots grew more determined. The King was already inclined towards him because of his support for the still contentious principle of absolute monarchy, in which he himself, naturally enough, believed unequivocally. Apart from anything else, the idea of it suited Louis’s egocentric temperament: he had even admired the despotic rule of the Turkish sultans, until he had been reminded that several of them had quite recently been strangled.
The King needed no one, wanted no one, to tell him what to do, least of all his mistress. “I command you all,” he had told his ministers, “if you should see that any woman, whoever she is, is getting the upper hand and dictating to me, even in the slightest way, you are to alert me at once, and I’ll have got rid of her within twenty-four hours.” If Bossuet were to convince the King, if the King were to be “converted,” it would mean the end of Athénaïs’s own reign; she might herself be locked away in some convent, dead to the world. The Carmelite idea was altogether too dangerous: Louise would have to be stopped. Athénaïs dispatched Françoise, rational, unintriguing, unaligned with any party, to persuade her to change her mind.
It was too late. Too many people had been informed for Louise to retract her decision now; she would only look foolish, as if she had been threatening the King in some impotent way. Françoise remonstrated. There were other convents, less harsh, less lonely, where she could continue to see her friends and her children—she must think of her children as well. Louise brushed it all aside. She had taken steps already along her new path of piety: beneath her silk court gowns, she was wearing rough and scratchy pieces of hair shirt. As for her children, they were the fruit of sin; her suffering at the separation, and theirs too, would serve as some expiation of the wickedness of their engendering. Neither Madame Scarron nor anyone else was going to deter her. She had lived a life of fornication, and now she had repented, like that greatest of all repentant fornicators, Mary Magdalene; like her, Louise hoped, she would one day attain forgiveness. To that end, she had determined to pass what remained of her life in penitence, beginning with an act of self-humiliation—a public apology to Queen Marie-Thérèse.
Françoise was aghast. “A public apology?” she exclaimed. “How unseemly!” But Louise insisted that, as her sin had been public, so her repentance should be, too; and indeed it was, with Louise kneeling at the Queen’s feet, asking her pardon, watched by a crowd of scandalized or gleeful courtiers, the King tactically absent. The Queen raised Louise to her feet and kissed her. Athénaïs coolly invited her to supper the same evening.
The following morning, Louise bade farewell to the King—he shed a few tears, “but she’s dead to me now”—and to her two young children, whose bewilderment and distress are best left undescribed. She was followed to Paris by dozens of courtiers, and for more than a year they continued to visit the Carmelite convent, watching through the grille as she knelt at prayer or took Communion, or merely walked from one place to the next with the lowered eyes and contained movements of a chaste bride of Christ. Though the dévots had pushed her further than she might otherwise have gone, Louise’s conversion was nonetheless sincere; she wanted to live her life of penitence, undisturbed by pointing and staring people from a world she had rejected. But she had become a celebrity. At court, the dévot marquis de Bellefonds circulated her private letters, relaying her daily struggle to subdue the last remnants of her will. Louise asked permission to move to an isolated convent in the country, but this was denied. “She’s too useful an example,” replied the mother superior.
When the fuss had subsided and Louise had finally made her profession of vows, she continued to receive occasional visits from a very forgiving Marie-Thérèse, permitted, as the Queen, to penetrate beyond the convent grille with a few accompanying ladies. Athénaïs came along once, determined to prove Louise’s misery in her cold and hungry reformed life. She spoke at length and loudly of “Monsieur’s brother” (the King), insisting that Sister Louise must surely have some message for him—“I’ll be sure to pass it on for you”—and maliciously sent out for the ingredients of a favourite sauce, forbidden to Louise, which she made herself, then ate “with an admirable appetite.” “Are you sure you’re comfortable here?” she asked Louise, disingenuously. “I’m not at all comfortable,” Louise replied with dignity, “but I am content.”
Françoise, by contrast, while comfortable enough in her little apartment at Saint-Germain, was not content at all. With Louise out of the picture at last, Louis had begun to turn his attention towards his children’s quiet governess. His passion for Athénaïs had not lessened, but her volatile temperament and her many pregnancies had encouraged him to engage in a series of casual affairs. Surrounded by willing maidens and matrons who “would have given themselves to the devil to have the King’s love,” he had found it only too easy, and with the gorgeous Athénaïs long and securely captured, Louis the passionate hunter-King was now training his sights on a more elusive prey. At almost forty, three years older than the King himself, Françoise remained a definite beauty, and, though not ov
ertly voluptuous in the way of Athénaïs, she still possessed the contained sensuality of her young womanhood, with her reluctance to join the troupe of would-be royal mistresses only increasing her appeal.
Françoise did not want to become Louis’s mistress. She did not want to be blown hither and thither in a gale of honours and emotions, only to be pushed out at last, discarded and humiliated, into a cold convent cell. She was doing very well with her 6,000 livres per year; her position was not grand, but it was reasonably secure, as secure, at least, as any servant’s position at court could be. Naturally, she did not want to risk offending Athénaïs, on whose goodwill that position largely rested. And above all, Françoise was proud; though modest in her demeanour and careful to make no claims for herself, nonetheless, in her heart she felt herself to be superior to the overdressed, overpainted cat-fighters jostling daily for the King’s attention.
For six months or more, since her January arrival at court, Françoise had been battling to resist his advances, but the battle had been as much with herself as with the handsome, persuasive Louis, at thirty-five a man at the peak of his powers, not least physically. “The Queen must have gone to bed last night very happy with the husband she’s chosen,” she had written suggestively after seeing him for the first time, and though that had been in 1660, in the intervening fourteen years Louis had lost none of his appeal for her. Tall among his contemporaries, strongly built and with a natural grace of movement, a fine horseman and an exceptionally good dancer, his presence majestic, his face manly and framed by a virile abundance of curly dark hair, he was, in appearance at least, the very model of a modern monarch. He spoke little, often wittily, never in anger, and always to the point. A great admirer of “the ladies,” he also enjoyed female company even without the promise of sex. And although indifferently educated and not especially clever, he had an instinct for talent and sincerity in both women and men, believing firmly, at the same time, that women should confine themselves to family and religious activities (and illicit sex where required) and should above all refrain from meddling in anything remotely political.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 21