The new Marble Trianon was the venue for occasional, very select gatherings—the duc de Saint-Simon sulked for years at never being invited, and took his revenge in his famous memoirs in diatribes against Françoise and the King—but most court gatherings in these years were held in the palace itself, in the apartments of one or other wealthy courtier, or in Louis’s own splendid rooms. In the wintertime, three evenings every week were devoted to appartements, private parties with entertainment, generally a concert or a single scene from a new play or opera. The appartements had been recently instituted by the King in a fit of homesickness for the royal court of his youth, where his stately mother had held regular cultural and social evenings for her favoured courtiers. On Queen Anne’s demise, the mantle of hostess-royal had passed to Louis’s wife, Marie-Thérèse, but, lacking the grace to carry it, she had felt it slipping at once from her rounded shoulders. Now there was Françoise, who would undoubtedly have managed it all superbly: “She was so charming and witty, she was really made for the delights of society,” as her niece said. But Françoise was only an uncrowned queen, and though the King might have allowed a new precedent to emerge, he chose instead to assign his wife a supporting role, and play the host himself.
The thrice-weekly appartements were wildly popular, with every courtier striving to be at the centre of attention—apart from Liselotte, who found them “unbearable.” On three further evenings of the week, a fully staged theatrical performance was given, either a comedy or an opera with ballet. Liselotte found these no more enjoyable than the appartements. “It’s the same stuff all the time,” she huffed. “Nothing but bits of old Lully operas. It’s all I can do to stay awake.” Better by far, she felt, were the Lutheran songs of her girlhood, “and I can still sing them out good and loud, the way we used to do, driving along in the coach.” Every Saturday evening the King gave a ball, often in the grande galerie, the magnificent Hall of Mirrors, first illuminated in all its candlelit glory in November 1684. “Add to that the brilliance of the court in full dress and the sparkle of the precious stones…” But this spectacular evening brought Liselotte no pleasure, either. “I don’t like these French dances,” she grumbled. “These interminable minuets are unbearable…Don’t they do German dances in Germany any more…?”
Not built for dancing, her ear attuned only to simple hymns or country tunes, Liselotte could not even console herself with the extravagant suppers provided at every court entertainment, since the dishes, though wonderfully varied, were simply not to her taste. “I much prefer English food to French,” she insisted, unaccountably. “I just can’t get along with this stuff here. I don’t like ragoûts, and I don’t eat broths or bouillons, so there’s only a little bit that I can eat: leg of lamb, for example, roast chicken, medallions of veal, beef, salads. In Holland I also ate gulls’ eggs, in fact I ate so many of them that I made myself sick, so now I can’t even eat those…” The King’s appartement suppers were generally served in the fashionable ambigu-style, with all the dishes, sweet and savoury, provided at the same time. Each guest took what he fancied with his own knife and spoon. Those who considered themselves très à la mode would use a fork as well, though Louis himself disdained this newfangled Italian implement.
The French were meat-eaters of the first order. “In any other country,” wrote an astonished German visitor, “if they ate the same number of capons and hens and chickens in a year that they eat here in a day, the species would just about die out.” This might have pleased the carnivorous Liselotte, had it not been that in France, “roast or fried meat is never cooked through, and as for duck and other river birds, they are eaten quite bloody.” Elegant dishes of the day included capon (evidently not yet died out), with oysters and capers, pigeons in fennel, roast rabbit stuffed with cheese and truffles (“but I don’t like rabbit”), goat roasted in cloves, and lamb’s tongue fritters in citrus marinade, the tongues skinned “in the usual way.” Frogs were on the menu, too, though only the legs and the base of the spine, “skinned and washed thoroughly,” boiled into a broth (“but I don’t like broths”), or fricasseed with chicken, or dipped in batter and fried, this last served under the misleading name of “frogs in cherries,” the “cherry” being the little button of bone that was all that remained of the wide, flapping foot.
Salads (“I can eat salads”) contained not only the usual lettuce or cucumber or celery, but also chicory, spring violets, bellflowers, parsley stalks, or beetroot and anchovies (“but I can’t stand fish”). They were served along with the roasts, as were the sauces, now fashionably buttery where they had once been full of vinegar, with the new Italian chilli-pepper tomato sauce in discreet little pots on the side. And of course there were fresh peas, petits pois, recently introduced from Italy via the King’s indispensable valet, Bontemps, and now the absolute rage at every elegant table. Served with cucumber, asparagus tips, artichoke bottoms, or, classically, cooked in a pan with butter and lard and seasoned with salt and spices, “but lightly, so as not to overwhelm their natural taste,” and mixed with cream just before serving, petits pois were becoming “the emblematic vegetable dish of the age.” Ten years later Françoise could write, “The saga of the peas is still going strong. People talk about nothing but their impatience to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them, the anticipation of eating more of them. There are ladies here who finish their supper with the King, and a very good supper, too, and their bowl of peas is waiting for them to eat before they go to bed. How on earth their digestion survives it…! I don’t know how I’m going to stand it. I’m getting depressed for lack of rational conversation.”
Desserts at the King’s suppers were either traditional—fresh or preserved fruits, including a selection from four hundred varieties of pear, now mostly lost—or the new Italian sorbets and ice-creams, made of fruit, sugar, and snow kept cold in underground ice rooms.
Warm drinks included coffee from Venice, which the King didn’t care for at all. “But coffee will go out of fashion, like Racine’s plays,” remarked Madame de Sévigné, mistaken, as it transpired, on both counts. There was tea purchased from Holland and, controversially, hot chocolate, brought from the Americas via Spain. Twenty years before, the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Medicine had approved its use as beneficial to health, particularly for insomniacs, but by now Madame de Sévigné was warning her pregnant daughter not to touch a drop of it. “Last week it gave me colic and kidney pains for sixteen hours at a stretch,” she declared. “Aren’t you afraid it will burn your blood?…The marquise de Coetlogon drank so much chocolate last year when she was expecting, that she gave birth to a little boy as black as the devil…You know, I feel personally aggrieved against chocolate,” she added, “…because I love it.”
For those who preferred cool drinks, there were fruit juices flavoured with flowers or nuts or spices, and, of course, wine. The standard Greek and Cypriot wines had recently fallen from grace, and the preferred accompaniment to the creamed peas and frogs’ legs and bloody duck breasts was now champagne, as yet a reddish still wine, pressed from the black pinot noir grape, which occasionally—and most annoyingly—fizzled.
And there was eau-de-vie, brandy, once used only for medicinal purposes, but so widely drunk now by poorer folk and causing so much havoc among them that it had been rechristened eau-de-mort. In between swigs, workers and streetfolk grabbed for the leftovers of these huge royal suppers at special markets set up on the mornings thereafter, while the fortunate who had attended them hopped into their coaches for a day-trip to Paris to investigate the delights of the newly opened Procope, the city’s first Italian ice-cream parlour.
“The winter has passed in so many delights,” wrote Françoise to Charles in the spring of 1684, after six happy months of married life. “What a cavalcade of ladies after dinner and after the ball this evening…Versailles is astonishingly beautiful, and I’m thrilled to be here. There are all sorts of lovely things planned: balls in the King’s apartments, plays at Monsieur’s, promenades every
where, midnight suppers in my rooms—well, you know, the King wants us to enjoy ourselves.” Confessor Père Gobelin received the leftovers, whatever of piety could be slotted in between social appointments in the life of his lamb gone astray. “I’m really desperate to save my soul,” she assured him at the same time, unconvincingly, “but pride and laziness prevent me. You must tell me how to fight such enemies. I must go. I’d like to write more, but there are people talking to me…”
It was all simply wonderful. France was at the pinnacle of her glory, and Louis le Grand, Françoise’s own husband, revelling in the fullness of his mature manhood, was at the pinnacle of his. In 1686, in Versailles’s dazzling Hall of Mirrors, he received a vast delegation of ambassadors from the kingdom of Siam, each one wearing a pointed headpiece of gold which touched the Savonnerie-carpeted floor as he bowed to the great French monarch, whose splendid name had reached “the extremities of the Universe”—or at least Siam. The ambassadors launched into a prolonged harangue declaring eternal friendship between the Siamese (who were afraid of Dutch encroachment in their region) and the French (who were eager to disrupt Dutch trade there). A handy missionary priest undertook to interpret.
Every last courtier enthused about the gold and silver and the exotic screens and porcelain and the Japanese cabinets, all displayed at the end of the galerie, which the Siamese had presented as gifts to the court—everyone, that is, except lonely Liselotte, and the sulky war minister Louvois, “who never thought much of things he’d had no hand in.”
Apart from the appartements and the balls and banquets, Françoise had a special, private reason for feeling happy and excited in the first months of her marriage. Though she herself was “beyond the age of having children,” her twenty-two-year-old sister-in-law, Geneviève, after seven years of marriage, was finally expecting a baby. Françoise responded to the news with the barrage of fond advice that her brother and his wife had by now come to expect. “You’ll easily believe how delighted I am about Madame d’Aubigné’s pregnancy,” she wrote to Charles. “Women know more about these things than the physicians do, and the less fuss she can make about it, the better. She should wear loose clothing, so that the child can be more comfortable, and she should eat well, so that it’s in good health, and if she has any cravings, let her have what she wants…Adieu, my dear, dear brother. I love you more than my prickliness lets me say.”
“The baby clothes should have arrived by now,” she wrote six months later, “on this first day of March” in 1684. “They’re not very magnificent. You know I’m rather proud of going to the other extreme. I’m very much looking forward to hearing the news of Madame d’Aubigné’s delivery, and I don’t really mind what the baby’s sex is.” After six further weeks, with the baby still to make its appearance, she was sending Charles words of anxious encouragement: “Don’t be concerned about this delay: heroes are always at least ten months in their mothers’ wombs. All the same I’d be glad to see her over this business, which is always dangerous.”
The baby arrived safely on April 15. Despite her insistence on “not really minding” about its sex, when it was pronounced to be a girl, Françoise’s delight bubbled over, and she declared at once her intention to take the child for herself. “I already feel a kind of tenderness towards my niece. Do make sure she’s not an only child, so that I can have her when there’s another one to amuse you.” she instructed, before continuing with her habitual string of advice:
I’ve heard you’re very much occupied with her, and that you go into her room more than once a day. That’s fine, but don’t kill her with too much playing: let her sleep, in her cradle as much as possible. Look after her eyes, and don’t let anything happen to mark her face. I’d rather she died than had any deformity. They tell me she’s well made. You mustn’t hold her more than is necessary; babies are best off in their cradles, they lie straight, especially during the first three months, before they start playing. It’s really the nurse who should be looking after her for now, and you must treat the nurse well, and let her do more or less as she likes…My compliments to the new mother. She can’t look after herself too carefully. Women’s health depends on avoiding difficulties in childbirth. She shouldn’t be in a hurry to get back on her feet too quickly…Tell the nurse it’s my heiress she’s nursing.
In fact, the baby’s arrival seems to have brought more happiness to the excited aunt than to either of the parents. Only six weeks later, Françoise was obliged to send placating words to Charles, who had taken offence at his wife’s difficult new “mood.” “I’m sorry to hear about this,” she wrote. “I had thought a child would bring your wife and you closer together. But the stronger one must support the weaker; your intelligence and your age should make you patient. Give her every honest pleasure, and don’t leave her alone, as I’ve heard you do…” And, once again, the temptation to advise her incapable brother proved too strong for Françoise to resist:
If you don’t mind my saying so, men are a bit tyrannical. They like every sort of liberty, and don’t allow any at all to their wives. A man locks up his wife while he’s running about, and thinks she’s only too happy to see him when he feels like coming home. This is dangerous with most wives, and unwise with all of them. Men find their wives in a bad mood, when they’ve simply been bored all day. Personally, I wouldn’t dream of entertaining a man who paid no attention to my own pleasure…I’ve seen how several families live, and I know very well how people should live together to keep the peace.
But she could not keep her attention turned for long from the newborn baby itself:
Mademoiselle [Marthe-Marguerite] de Mursay here is turning out quite pretty, and she’ll be a very good dancer. Her brothers are very good fellows, but despite everything I do for them, I feel there’s a certain little girl, two months old, who’s more important to me, and I very often think of the pleasure I’ll have in finding her a husband, if my life, and my favour, last another twelve years. Since I can’t do anything else for her, I’ve done something for her nurse’s husband, and you can assure the nurse that I regard her as the nurse of my own daughter. Let her enjoy every comfort, so that her milk will be good.
Geneviève remained moody, Charles remained uncomforted, and Françoise remained principally interested in the baby. “Don’t give in to your natural melancholy,” she urged her brother three weeks later. “You live in comfort and ease, that’s the best thing in the world; we’re often envious of positions that we wouldn’t like if we had them…If you or Madame d’Aubigné need anything, or want anything, feel free to ask me, and let me know when the first tooth comes through, so that I can send the nurse a present. You’ve said nothing about your daughter’s baptism; have you given her a name? Who were the godparents? What’s her name? She should have a pretty name.”
As was customary in this age of frequent infant deaths, the baby, though already three months old, had not yet been given a name, but the aunt’s urging now prodded the parents into making a decision. Charles and Geneviève had the child baptized and named her, unsurprisingly, Françoise. They could hardly have done otherwise for “my heiress.”
The King has agreed that the ladies at court should establish a charity at Versailles, to take care of the poor as they do in the Paris parishes. Madame la duchesse de Richelieu will be the superior…There are a number of people we don’t know what to do with: some cripples, who can’t earn their own living…and there are also some innocent girls selling themselves on the streets.
Thus Françoise to Père Gobelin in the early months of her marriage. The Versailles charity was a new initiative, a response to the too-rapid growth of a quiet village backwater into an unruly, overcrowded town servicing the expanding court. Though Françoise was to play a subordinate role here, she was by no means a beginner as far as charity work was concerned. In particular, for more than twenty years already, she had been sponsoring scores of boys and girls, orphans or simply children from poor families, feeding them, clothing and housing them, an
d always providing some kind of training so that, in the longer term, they would be able to fend for themselves in life. Her letters are replete with references to donations and alms and pensions, not only for children but also for older people fallen on hard times, though her kindly gaze was sometimes tempered by a sceptical glint: “It often happens that in the very same places where people are crying misery, you can hardly find anyone who wants to work,” she observed to her friend Marie de Brinon. “However, the able-bodied can be helped simply by giving them a means of earning their living…” Many of these “able-bodied” she had been employing on her own estate at Maintenon, where, as well as a farm, there was a large linen “manufactory.” And the stream of smaller kindnesses she had undertaken for those without means was more or less never-ending: “Please give the curé five hundred francs for the parish elderly” “I’m sending you sixty louis for that little adopted girl” “I’ve bought one woollen gown for young Jeanneton, and ordered another.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 33