His first doctor, Héroard, kept a journal for twenty-eight years with daily records of everything he ate and everything he did. Héroard reports that even as a child, Louis was hard of heart, even cruel, with little feeling for others. He was whipped twice by the royal hand of Henri IV: once because he’d conceived such hatred for a certain gentleman that he demanded to be given a pistol to kill him with; the second time, because he’d used a mallet to crush a sparrow’s head.
Once, just once, he displayed the determination of one who deserved to be a king. On the day of his coronation, as he was given the scepter of the Kings of France, a weighty object of gold and silver encrusted with jewels, his hand began to tremble. Seeing this, Monsieur de Condé, who in his capacity as first prince of the blood was near the king, reached out to help support the scepter.
Louis frowned and turned away. “No,” he said. “I intend to bear it alone.”
As a child, his chief amusements were coloring printed engravings, making houses of cards, and hunting small birds with his pet shrikes. “In everything he did,” said L’Estoile, “he acted the child.”
His two favorite pursuits were always music and hunting. In Héroard’s journal, largely overlooked by the historians, we find the curious activities that defined his days:
At noon, he played with his dogs, Patelot and Grisette, in the gallery. At one o’clock he returned to his room and went into the corner with Igret, his nurse, to play his lute—because he loved making music, and singing to himself, above all else.
Sometimes, for fun, he wrote poems about trifles, in the form of proverbs or maxims, and when that was his mood he wanted others to be in the same frame of mind. One day he told Doctor Héroard, “Turn this prose into verses: ‘I want those who love me to love me long, while those who love me little should leave me, and soon.’”
And the good doctor, a better courtier than poet, replied with the following couplet:
“Let those who love me linger near,
While those who don’t should disappear.”
Like all those of melancholy disposition, Louis XIII was a habitual liar. He always smiled his warmest upon those he was about to ruin. It was on Monday, the second of March, in the year 1613, that he first used that favorite phrase of François I, “I swear by my honor as a gentleman.”
That same year, etiquette called for Louis to start being treated as an adult monarch, beginning with the practice of a nobleman presenting the young king his shirt every morning. The first to do this was Courtauvaux, one of his earliest companions. (The reader may remember that a later successor, Chalais, was accused of intending to poison the king while passing him his shirt.)
It was at around the same time that Luynes was first brought to the king by Concino Concini, who’d been elevated by the queen to the rank of Maréchal d’Ancre. Previously, the only servant Louis had had to keep his birds was a simple peasant from Saint-Germain named Pierrot. Luynes was named chief falconer, and thereafter Pierrot, who before had mostly obeyed only himself, was forced to recognize the authority of Luynes. The new chief falconer designated all the hawks, falcons, and shrikes as the king’s “Cabinet of Birds.” Louis was delighted by this whimsy, and from then on kept Luynes near him from morning till night—even, according to Héroard, calling out for him while asleep.
If Luynes wasn’t always able to amuse him, at least he managed to distract him by encouraging the young king’s taste for hunting—within the limits allowed such royal children. We’ve already seen Louis chasing birds around his apartment with his pet shrike. Luynes took him hunting rabbits with small greyhounds in the dry moats around the Louvre, and hawking at the Plaine Grenelle. It was there on January 1, 1617 (all dates are important in the life of a king like Louis XIII) that he took his first heron, and on April 18, at Vaugirard, he brought down his first partridge.
This led, eventually, to the Louvre’s Pont Dormant, where he hunted man for the first time, and slew Concino Concini.
Let us consult the page of Héroard’s journal for Monday, April 24, 1617, when Louis XIII first hunted man rather than sparrow, rabbit, heron, or partridge. Its account is curious, for the philosopher as well as the historian.
Here it is, verbatim:
Monday, April 24,1617
His Majesty awoke at half past seven; his pulse was full and steady, face slightly flushed, complexion good, piss yellow. Did his business, combed, dressed, prayed to God; breakfast at half past eight: bread, jelly, a little clear wine, watered.
Between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, the Maréchal d’Ancre was killed on the bridge of the Louvre.
Dined at noon: a dozen asparagus tips in salad, ten spoonfuls of chicken soup, a boiled capon served on asparagus, boiled veal, two roast pigeon wings, two slices of roast grouse with bread and jelly, five figs, fourteen dried cherries, more bread, some full-bodied claret, all tempered with a teaspoon of fennel.
Then there is a gap. Given the significance of the day’s events, the young patient feels a need to escape his doctor for a while. He climbs up onto a pool table to address his courtiers. He receives members of Parliament. He makes pronouncements like a king. But at six, his appetite returns and he falls back into the clutches of his doctor.
Six-thirty, supper: a dozen asparagus tips in salad, bread, a boiled capon served on asparagus, mushrooms in butter on toast, two roast squab wings, bread and jelly, the juice of two oranges, five sweet figs, candied beans, dried cherries, a little more bread, some full-bodied claret, all tempered with a teaspoon of fennel.
Played until half past seven.
Did his business: soft, yellow, copious.
Played until half past nine.
Drank tea, undressed, went to bed. Pulse steady, complexion good. Prayed to God; asleep by ten; slept until seven.
Very reassuring, isn’t it, this account of the royal child’s day? You might be afraid that the murder of his mother’s lover, the man who was most likely the father of his brother Gaston, who bore the title Constable of France—in short, the second man in the kingdom after himself—would cause him to lose his appetite for food and for fun. With blood on his hands for the first time, it might even make him hesitate to pray. But no. It’s true, lunch was delayed an hour, but he couldn’t very well eat lunch at the same time he was peering through the window of the Louvre to watch Vitry assassinate the Maréchal d’Ancre.
He even found time to play, from seven to seven-thirty, and again from nine to nine-thirty—which was contrary to his habits, and in the twenty-eight years that Doctor Héroard chronicled in his journal, occurred just this once.
Moreover, he went to bed with a good complexion and a steady pulse. He prayed to God at ten o’clock, then slept until seven in the morning: nine hours’ rest.
Poor child!
When he awoke, he was king in fact as well as in name. After the manly activities of the day before, his good night’s sleep gave him the strength to behave like a king. The queen mother was not only disgraced, but exiled to Blois. She was forbidden to see her daughters the princesses, or her beloved son Gaston. Her ministers were dismissed, and only the Bishop of Luçon, later to become the great cardinal, was permitted to follow her into exile, where he would try to fill the place in her heart left empty by the murdered Concini.
But if he was king, Louis XIII was not yet a man. Married for two years to the Infanta of Spain, Anne of Austria, he was her husband in name only. Monsieur Durand, the Minister of War Finance, wrote court ballets for Louis in which he appeared as a Demon of Fire who sang tender verses to the queen, gallantry that amounted to no more than:
Beautiful sun, for you I would
Suffer your fires forever,
Just look where you lead me,
And know your power,
In making me what I am.
But though he dressed in ballet clothing like one aflame, when he went to bed and removed his clothes, the flames went with them.
As the simulated passions of The Deliverance
of Renaud had led nowhere, they tried again with The Adventures of Tancrède in the Enchanted Forest. In this ballet, the choreography of Monsieur de Porchère depicted a boy-king who was curious to know what happened between a husband and bride on their wedding night. Monsieur d’Elbeuf and Mademoiselle de Vendôme even gave the king a personal, private reprise of the action of the play on their own wedding night. No good: the king spent two hours in their nuptial chamber, sitting on the edge of the bed, and then retired quietly to his own chamber, still a boy.
Finally, it was Luynes who, tired of being harassed by the Spanish Ambassador and the papal nuncio, undertook to force the consummation of the king’s marriage, despite the risk to his favor and position.
The big day was set for January 25, 1619. We turn once more to Doctor Héroard’s journal for the entry of that date.
On January 25, 1619, the king, unaware of what awaited him at the end of the day, arose in excellent health and good countenance, and was even relatively cheerful. After breakfasting at 9:15, he heard mass at the Chapelle de la Tour, presided over the King’s Council, dined at noon, made a visit to the queen, went to the Tuileries by the river gallery, returned the same way at half past four to meet the Council once more, went to Monsieur de Luynes’s rooms to practice ballet, supped at eight, visited the queen again, leaving her at ten o’clock, returned to his apartments, and went to bed—but he had barely settled in before Luynes entered his room and urged him to get up.
The king looked at Luynes, as astonished as if the man had proposed a trip to China. But Luynes insisted, saying that Europe was beginning to worry about seeing the throne of France without an heir, and it would be a shame for him if his sister, Madame Christine, who had just married Prince Victor-Amadeus of Piedmont, son of the Duke of Savoy, should have a child before the queen had a dauphin. But as these reasons, which appealed only to the head, didn’t seem to move the king, Luynes simply picked him up and carried him to where he didn’t want to go.
If you doubt this little detail because you hear it from a novelist instead of from the historians, read the dispatch of January 30, 1619 of the papal nuncio, in which you will find a sentence that seems conclusive: Luynes took the king against his will and led him almost by force into the queen’s bed.
But if this didn’t lose Luynes his favor—on the contrary, he won the title of Constable of France—he gained little else for his pains. The dauphin, in his race to appear before the first-born of the Princess of Piedmont, failed to win the day, as he wasn’t born until nineteen years later, in 1638—while Luynes, who should have had the pleasure of seeing the tree he’d planted bear fruit, died in 1621 of spotted fever. His death left the way open for the return to Paris of Marie de Médicis, and with the end of her exile she brought Richelieu back to the King’s Council. A year later, he was a cardinal; and the year after that, prime minister.
Thereafter it was Richelieu who ruled, and who, by opposing the policies of Austria and Spain, fell out with both Anne of Austria and Marie de Médicis. From that moment, he earned their hatred and became the object of their plots. Marie de Médicis, like the king, had a cleric presiding over her council, and as with the king, he was a cardinal: Bérulle. But Cardinal Richelieu was a man of genius, while Cardinal Bérulle was a fool. Meanwhile, Monsieur, the king’s brother, for whom Richelieu had arranged a marriage, used the immense fortune he’d gained from Mademoiselle de Montpensier to conspire against the cardinal. A secret council was organized around Doctor Bouvard, who’d replaced the brave Doctor Héroard as the king’s physician.
Monsieur would be successor to Louis XIII should Louis die without an heir, and through Bouvard he had his finger on the pulse of the patient—for Bouvard, a man devoted to the Spanish cause, and who lived for the Church, was the evil genius of the two queens. Everyone knew that this melancholy king, consumed by ennui, wrought by care, who felt loved by none and hated by all, whom the doctors plagued with the lethal medicine of the time, purging relentlessly and bleeding repeatedly, might vanish from one moment to the next, disappearing into the black humors that defined his life.
If the king died, Richelieu would be at the mercy of his enemies and, within twenty-four hours of the death of the king, would be hanged. The Comte de Chalais was disinclined to wait for this event, however, and offered to kill the cardinal. Marie de Médicis seconded the motion, Madame de Conti bought the daggers, but sweet Anne of Austria voiced an objection of only three words: “He’s a priest.”
Thus the king, who since the assassination of Henri IV had hated his mother, since the conspiracy of Chalais had suspected his brother, since the love affair with Buckingham and, especially, since the scandal of the garden of Amiens despised the queen—the king, who abhorred his wife as he loathed all women, lacking the virtues of the Bourbons but with only half the vices of the Valois, became increasingly cold and aloof from his family. He knew that his projected war in Italy, or rather the cardinal’s projected war, was anathema to Marie de Médicis, Gaston d’Orléans, and particularly Anne of Austria, because it was really a war against Ferdinand II and Philip IV, and the queen was half-Austrian and half-Spanish.
So when, under the pretext of a violent headache, the queen declined to attend the ballet being danced that evening in honor of the capture of La Rochelle—that is, in honor of the victory of her husband over her lover—Louis XIII suddenly suspected her of conspiring. Throughout the evening he’d had his eye not on the dancers, but on the queen mother and Gaston d’Orléans, meanwhile sharing in a low voice with the cardinal, who stood beside him in his box, comments that had nothing to do with the choreography. When the ballet ended, instead of returning to his chambers, Louis had the idea of paying a surprise visit to the queen, to see her situation for himself. And that’s why we’ve seen him arrive so unexpectedly, preceded by two pages, accompanied by his two favorites, and followed by Beringhen, appearing in the hall just as the Comte de Moret and his guide disappeared into the closet.
Five minutes after entering the queen’s chambers, Louis XIII left them. Here’s what happened during those five minutes.
Royal etiquette decreed that, when the king slept under the same roof as the queen, it was forbidden to bar the doors of the queen’s chambers. The king thus had no difficulty in passing through the three doors that separated the gallery from the queen’s bedroom.
Upon entering her bedroom, he took a quick look around, peering into all the darkest shadows and farthest corners.
Everything was in perfect order. The queen was sleeping with a calm that spoke only of chastity, breathing smoothly and deeply as Louis XIII, more jealous of his power as king than of his rights as a husband, left the doorway and approached the bed.
But queens are light sleepers, and though thick Flanders carpets muffled the footsteps of her august husband, her breathing fluttered and paused, and a hand of wonderful whiteness and elegance drew aside the bed-curtain. A head, hair adorably disarranged, rose from the pillow, and two large astonished eyes fixed for a moment on the unexpected visitor, as a voice, trembling with surprise, exclaimed, “What, is it you, Sire?”
“Myself, Madame,” the king coldly replied, while taking his hat in his hand, as every gentleman must before a lady.
“And by what happy chance do you favor me with a visit?” continued the queen.
“I heard that you were unwell, Madame. Concerned for your health, I wanted to come myself to say that, unless you take the trouble to visit me, I will probably not have the pleasure of seeing you tomorrow or the day after.”
“Your Majesty goes hunting?” asked the queen.
“No, Madame; Bouvard felt that after all these festivals, which are fatiguing for me, I should be purged and bled. So tomorrow, and the day after, I shall bleed. Good night, Madame, and excuse me for having awakened you. By the way, who is serving you tonight, Madame de Fargis or Madame de Chevreuse?”
“Neither, sire—it is Mademoiselle Isabelle de Lautrec.”
“Ah! Very good,” sa
id the king, as if the name were reassuring. “But where is she?”
“In the next room, where she sleeps fully clothed on a couch. Does Your Majesty wish me to call her?”
“No, thank you. Au revoir, Madame.”
“Au revoir, Sire.” And Anne, with a sigh of regret—feigned or real, but, under the circumstances, we suspect feigned—released the curtain of the bed and dropped her head to the pillow.
As for Louis XIII, he resumed his hat, gave the room a final look, which showed he was still suspicious, and went out, muttering, “It seems this time the cardinal was mistaken.”
He entered the antechamber where his retinue awaited him. “The queen is indeed very ill,” he said. “Follow me, Messieurs!” And in the same order they had come, the procession resumed its march toward the chambers of the king.
IX
What Passed in Queen Anne of Austria’s Bedchamber
After the Departure of King Louis
No sooner was the sound of footsteps fading down the hall, along with the last reflections of the flickering torches, when the door of the closet in which the Comte de Moret had taken refuge was gently opened by his guide, and the head of the young lady peeked from the opening.
Then, seeing that all had returned to silence and darkness, she ventured out and looked down the gallery, where the last rays of the pages’ torches were disappearing.
Finding that the danger passed, she returned to the closet and said to the count, light as a bird, “Come out, Monseigneur.”
Then, remaining always at a distance where the young man could not quite see her face clearly, she opened one after another the three doors which the king had closed behind him.
The Red Sphinx Page 8