Louis XIV

by Olivier Bernier

  In this unstable situation, with plots and counterplots crisscrossing, a series of startling events made it look as if all might change. First, in late September 1647, the duc d’Anjou became ill, and, for a while, it was thought he might not survive. The queen, aside from her very real affection for Philippe, had another good reason to fear his death, since the duc d’Orléans would then become heir to the throne, a situation of much greater weight than that of uncle to the king. “[B]ut all pretended gaiety for different reasons: The Queen, who would have been desperate if she had lost the prince, pretended to be cheerful; and the duc d’Orléans, who would have been easily consoled, did not dare look sad for fear of being thought too false; but then, he was so frightened of looking pleased that he did not dare to joke or laugh about any topic.”27

  As it turned out, the little boy soon improved, and the disappointed Monsieur was, no doubt, able to laugh again. But then, on November 10, 1647, the nine-year-old king began to feel unwell, “People thought it would not be anything; but the next day, he had a high fever, which frightened the Queen greatly …

  “Two days later, the disease was seen to be smallpox, which at first reassured the Queen, who had feared it might be something worse. She left her apartment that day and slept in the patient’s room.

  “As the King’s fever continued unabated, the Queen grew more worried with every passing moment and the physicians were unable to reassure her …

  “The Queen, on this occasion, carried away by her feelings, was unable to put on a public face; and her anxiety showed that she felt a very great love for the King, more so than for her younger son. [The King] was given to her by God, after a thousand unfulfilled longings, and when she had even given up hope. He had rescued her from the wretched state to which Cardinal de Richelieu’s persecution had brought her. He had made her the Regent; and finally, he had been the first to claim all her love, so that she had only that left for Monsieur with which nature provides all good mothers …

  “The King’s illness now caused her to become ill herself. The feelings of her heart were plain on her face, and I have never seen her so changed in so little time. Two or three days later, she was reassured when the King’s fever suddenly went down, and the pustules came out abundantly.

  “Until the eleventh day of his illness, the King gave the Queen no worries other than those she had had before the pustules came out. She suffered because he did, but since these were sufferings common to all children, she was consoled in advance for the loss of his beauty as long as his life was safe. On the twenty-first, as she was hearing mass at Notre Dame, suddenly the King felt worse. His fever rose rapidly; he fainted and remained unconscious for three-quarters of an hour.

  “When the Queen returned and found him thus, she felt the strongest pain, and nearly died herself. For the rest of that day, according to the physicians, he remained in great peril and the Queen never stopped crying. The duc d’Orléans stayed with her, which made her feel even worse; she found neither relief nor consolation in crying in front of him. That evening, until midnight, the King felt a little better; but the next morning, his illness grew far graver again. On the Sunday, the fourteenth day of his illness, he felt so ill that the physicians no longer expected him to live because since the time of his faint, three days before, the pustules had all gone back in; and although he had been bled four times, his fever was no lower …

  “All that day the Queen was almost choked for she was not much given to crying and kept her sufferings to herself … but since no one can remain in that condition without showing it, she fainted that day by the King’s bed … finally at midnight God gave her back the child who was so dear to her and whose life was so necessary to France. The fever came down and the pustules reappeared; on Monday and Tuesday he was purged; and after that he grew progressively better.”28

  Throughout the king’s illness, of course, everyone at Court made plans for a new reign. Monsieur, having caught on too late in 1643, was determined to grab power this time, in either his own name or that of the duc d’Anjou; the Parlement, for its part, was planning to make Monsieur and the prince de Condé co-regents while preparing a text which would prevent any foreign-born person from becoming a minister. On the evening of the king’s fainting spell, Monsieur’s entourage gleefully toasted the health of King Gaston I, while the queen, sobbing, knelt by the bedside of her dying son. That, in the end, the boy recovered therefore seemed especially maddening: After all their hopes, Mazarin was more powerful than ever; his enemies, who had twice come so close to triumph, now redoubled their efforts, and the ten-year-old king watched it all.

  In this greedy, violent world, where slander was an everyday occupation and murder not uncommon, all the passions which had so long been repressed by Richelieu now flared up with extraordinary strength. All around Anne of Austria and her children, haughty nobles strutted, avidly looking for an opportunity to grab anything they could while the royal family led by Monsieur and Condé wanted nothing more than to replace Mazarin and the regent. Throughout it all, the most ardent devotion was professed for the person of the king while his true interests were firmly ignored by all except his mother and his foreigner of a prime minister: It was as sharp a lesson as any monarch has ever been taught. At ten, the unusually secretive Louis XIV already saw that he could count on virtually no one, that everyone was out to weaken his power and impoverish his realm, and that he could expect no pity.

  At the same time, he was very aware of his semidivine status. Kings, he knew, were chosen by God, from whom they held their absolute power; thus resistance to their orders was something very like sacrilege. That, at any rate, was the theory; how far it was removed from the everyday reality in France was something the child could see all too well, and it seemed all the more scandalous to him that the very thorough religious education he was receiving confirmed his understanding of what it meant to be a king. Of course, like all his literate contemporaries, he was taught Latin, and the texts he was given to translate in 1647-48 make interesting reading.

  “I know,” he wrote in his still childish script, “that a Christian prince’s first duty is to serve God and that piety is the source of all royal virtues.” And again: “I know that hypocrites do not serve God as they should because they worship him with words only. Therefore, I will adore God’s majesty not with words but with my heart, as I know that He will not be mocked …

  “I must command myself before giving orders to others … The king who obeys his passions, will do nothing they forbid and refuse nothing they demand is not free … I must always remember that I am a king so that I will do nothing unworthy of my name.”29 Lofty principles, but interestingly, the boy took them seriously. Already, he controlled his feelings and never showed what he thought; as for his duty to God and his people, that suffered no more doubt than its corollary, the obedience that was due him.

  All around him, however, he could see challenges to his mother’s authority. On January 15, 1648, the queen held yet another lit de justice to force the registration of new fiscal edicts. In truth, the Parlement had some reason to complain: The endless war was ruinously expensive while the government’s finances were increasingly mismanaged. Mazarin took no interest in matters such as taxes and expenses; the financiers who, with increasing frequency, lent the state money were thoroughly adept at making huge profits on the backs of the people; Mazarin himself, who was living in conspicuous splendor, looked as if he were stealing with the best of them when, in fact, most of his very large income was derived from ecclesiastical benefices.

  That the Parlement should have refused registration, therefore, was not very surprising. Far more startling was the speech made by Omer Talon during the lit de justice in which he came up with a whole new constitutional theory. Edicts, he said, only became the law of the land once the Parlement had discussed them and authorized their registration. Why should the king’s presence make an edict legal when Parlement had already voted against it? It was neither logical nor moral,
and he then went on to give a stark, moving, and all-too-accurate picture of the people’s sufferings.

  Laments about the peasants’ ruin were nothing new, but when he attacked the very notion of the lit de justice, Talon took a giant step away from tradition. By representing the Parlement’s registration of an edict as the result of a deliberative act rather than a mere formality, Talon was saying that the judges were co-rulers with the king; that, in fact, the Parlement was a Parliament. As for where that sort of theory was likely to lead, that, too, was perfectly clear: Charles I of England was at that very moment a powerless prisoner of the Commonwealth.

  Still, for the little boy who sat on a tall heap of velvet cushions, Talon’s words were not only an insult, they were also a clear example of the hypocrisy against which his tutor had warned him: If the Parlement had refused to register the fiscal edicts, it was less because it cared about the fate of the poor than because, in an effort to find money, the government had just created (and sold, as was the custom) twelve new offices of conseiller, the ordinary judges.

  After that, the Parlement’s rebellion grew apace. First, it ignored the lit de justice and still refused registration. The queen punished it by revoking the edict making its members’ offices hereditary. Thus struck where it hurt, the Parlement turned to three other, part judicial, part administrative, chambers, the Grand Conseil, the Cour des Comptes, and the Cour des Aides, and decreed that all four were, henceforth, to be one body. Mazarin forbade this move; the courts paid him no attention and, on June 16, the union took place. And in spite of the queen’s fury, that revolutionary step was legalized by the helpless government. The new chamber then set about changing the very nature of the monarchy. The king lost the power to arrest or detain people arbitrarily; taxes were only legal if voted by the Parlement; immediately, that assembly proceeded to starve out the armies by decreeing the end of a quarter of the government’s income.

  Clearly, the situation had become impossible. Since the time for a show of authority was now past, both Mazarin and Anne of Austria resorted to trickery: They pretended to like what was happening, while secretly asking the prince de Condé, who was leading France’s largest army, to help; then, on August 20, the prince won yet another crushing victory at Lens. “The gentlemen of the Parlement won’t like this,”30 Louis XIV commented when he heard the news, so clear had it become to the ten-year-old boy that the magistrates longed for the kind of bad news that would increase their power.

  As it turned out, the victory proved exceptionally fruitful in that it led to the conclusion within three months of the Treaty of Westphalia, which finally crushed the ambition of the Austrian Habsburgs while giving France a new province, Alsace, as well as the role of arbiter in a divided Germany. But it also gave Anne of Austria a wholly mistaken illusion of strength. At the end of the Te Deum celebrated at Notre Dame, she had the four most extreme Parlement men arrested.

  That very afternoon Paris rose. Its narrow streets were blocked by chains and barricades so that troops could no longer circulate, and it became clear that the Palais Royal itself was no longer safe. The queen, in deep humiliation, had no choice but to release her prisoners.

  That quieted the riots, but the situation remained tense and government impossible, so Mazarin tried something new. On September 12, he and the king, with some difficulty, moved out to Rueil, the palace Richelieu had built himself some ten miles outside Paris, and the next day, the queen joined them. Now it was all up to Monsieur le Prince and his army: With his help, Paris could be reconquered and the traditional monarchy restored.

  That Monsieur le Prince would play the role assigned to him was hardly in doubt: As a member of the royal family, he believed in the supremacy of kings and had nothing but disdain for those scriveners of the Parlement; besides, if free to rule as she pleased, the regent could pay for his help generously, and Condé was not only enormously proud, he was also very greedy.

  Instead, he chose to play the arbiter between Crown and Parlement, thus showing everyone that he was, indeed, the essential man. On October 22, Anne of Austria, tears pouring down her face, signed a declaration accepting the constitution invented by the Parlement, adding bitterly that henceforth her son would be no more than a playing-card king. Two days later, her Declaration was registered by an overjoyed Parlement which went on to ignore the signing, the very same day, of the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Court returned to Paris.

  Clearly, guile was called for, and luckily for the queen, Mazarin set out to justify his reputation as a diplomat. First, he sent Condé money which had been put aside to pay the troops. Naturally, Condé kept it. The Parlement, equally naturally, remonstrated. Condé, who felt he had been insulted, now turned against the magistrates and would have nothing more to do with them. It was a first step.

  The next was also engineered by the cardinal, who understood all about human foibles. Both Monsieur and Condé wanted to dispose of a cardinal’s hat; only one was available: that was enough to turn the princes into instant enemies, and since Monsieur backed the Parlement, the queen could now count on Condé if she decided to fight the magistrates.

  Still, Anne could do nothing if she remained in Paris, but obviously, the Parlement was not about to let her go. “On January 5 [1649], I went in to the Queen in the evening,” Mme de Motteville wrote. “I found her in her small study, peacefully watching the King at play and nonchalantly leaning on the corner of a table, apparently thinking only of what she was looking at … A moment later, Mme de La Tremoille … told me in a very low voice: ‘They say in Paris that the Queen will be leaving tonight.’ This surprised me. As an answer, I merely pointed to the Queen, and the peace of her mind; and shrugging my shoulders, I shared my surprise at this rumor with her.” It is perhaps useful to remember at this point that, although not in on state secrets, Mme de Motteville was not only one of Anne of Austria’s favorite ladies but an old friend as well. She could be expected, therefore, to recognize any sign of incipient nervousness.

  “The Queen spent the rest of the evening in the same quiet mood which accompanied all the actions of her life,” Mme de Motteville goes on. “The only thing we noticed was that she seemed more cheerful than usual … In a word, we were so thoroughly taken in that we laughed with her at those who said that she would be leaving that same night …

  “Having seen the Queen in her bed, we went off home … As soon as we had left, the gates of the Palais Royal were closed with the command not to open them again. The Queen got up again to think about her situation and confided her secret only to her First Woman of the Bedchamber who slept near her …

  “The necessary orders were then given to the captains of the guard … The maréchal de Villeroy allowed the King to sleep until three in the morning; then he roused him, along with Monsieur,* and brought them to a carriage which was waiting for them at the garden gate of the Palais Royal. The Queen joined the King and Monsieur.”

  From there, it was a very short ride to the Cours la Reine, safely outside the walls of Paris. This location was the rendezvous for the rest of the royal party: Mazarin, naturally, and all the other members of the royal family, who all arrived rubbing their eyes as they had had no more idea than Mme de Motteville of the queen’s plans.

  “Once all the royal House was assembled,” Mme de Motteville continues, “they drove off to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. [Because all the King’s household goods moved with him and the trip was strictly secret], the King, the Queen and the Court found themselves there without beds, without attendants, without linens, without any of the things needed for the service of the royal family. The Queen, upon her arrival, went to sleep in a small bed which Cardinal Mazarin had sent out from Paris a few days earlier for this purpose. In the same way, he had provided for the King, and there were, further, two small camp beds, one of which he gave Monsieur and the other of which he kept for himself. Madame la duchesse d’Orléans slept that night on a bunch of straw as did Mademoiselle.* All those who had followed the court shared the s
ame fate; and within a few hours, straw had become so expensive in Saint Germain that it could no longer be found at any price.”31

  At least the queen and her children were safe. Their security was no mean achievement, especially since, in February, the news of Charles I’s execution arrived at Saint-Germain: The lengths to which a rebellious people might go were all too plain, and while no one expected the civilized French to imitate the notoriously unruly English, still it was best to be protected from the Parisians by Monsieur le Prince’s army. That essential safety did not come cheap, however: It is never a good thing for a monarch’s prestige to flee in the darkness of night from his people’s anger, and no age was more conscious of prestige than the seventeenth century. Of course, by her removal, Anne of Austria had preserved the essential - the person of the king and his right to rule as an absolute monarch - since she could now freely repudiate her earlier Declaration limiting the monarch’s power. But neither she nor Louis XIV ever forgot the humiliation endured that day and compounded in the following months. It was not only that Monsieur le Prince was now master of the situation, and consequently brusque, haughty, and disdainful: With the beginning of the civil war - for that is what the siege of Paris meant - taxes stopped coming in so that the royal family lived in a state of extreme penury. Pages, for instance, had to be sent away because they could no longer be fed, let alone paid; the crown jewels were pledged to raise funds and still the king often lacked the necessities of life: His kitchen, which was separate from the queen’s, had to be closed for lack of money. The queen, obviously, minded it all, but it was the young king who felt the deepest resentment. He knew what was owed him as God’s representative on earth; he expected to be treated with deep respect and full obedience. Instead, he was now watching his proud cousin humiliate the regent, and by implication, himself, while his rebellious subjects forced him to live, almost unattended, in virtual poverty. This unacceptable situation was the result of the government’s weakness, and that, in turn, came from the excess of power enjoyed by the grandees. The lesson was clear, and it impressed the boy far more thoroughly than anything ever taught by the abbé de Beaumont.