Louis XIV
Page 18
All these precautions were still not enough to reassure the king, however. A secret treaty was concluded with Emperor Leopold I which provided that should Charles II of Spain die without heirs - a likely possibility for a sickly child - the provinces in question would become French while the remainder of the Spanish Empire would go to Austria, so that the war was only the anticipation of what, no one doubted, would soon happen anyway. Then, too, any German prince able to attack France was bribed not to do so. Finally, a treaty was signed with Portugal on March 31 so that Spain, if need be, could be attacked from the back.
All in all, these were methods that differed sharply from those of Louis XIV’s predecessors. Here was no bold attack, carried out in a chivalrous spirit: The famous furia francese had been replaced by the most careful, the most thorough of preparations. When it came to going to war, in fact, the Sun King behaved like the most bourgeois of rulers. Predictably, his caution was rewarded: Seldom in the history of France has a war been won so easily; seldom have the objects of a conflict been achieved so fully and so promptly.
Because the king knew himself - and his shortcomings - so well, far from trying to set strategy himself, he called on Turenne, the most experienced general in France. The result was a model campaign: One after the other, the Spanish fortresses fell before the French onslaught. By August, the French army had taken Ath, Tournai, Oudenarde, Furnes, Armentières, Courtrai, and Douai. Only Lille, then an even more important city than today, resisted for a while, but even that proved to be a good thing as it gave the king a chance to join his men in the trenches and be exposed to enemy fire before the city fell on August 27. Then, on the thirty-first, the maréchal de Créqui defeated the remainder of the Spanish army, and to the amazement of all, the king stopped the war: He had won enough; now the gains must be made safe. So rather than strike deeper into Flanders, he ordered a young* but immensely talented engineer, Vauban, to design a new, impregnable fortress at Lille.
Although the results of the campaign can hardly have surprised either Louis XIV or his ministers, they stunned the rest of Europe. Spain had been dominant for so long that it was, erroneously, still considered a major power. In fact, its military organization had been dealt a deathblow at the battle of the Dunes in 1658, and its government was not only virtually bankrupt but also a model of inefficiency. Europe did not yet know all this information, but the French government did; the king’s restraint may therefore seem all the more surprising. Once again, however, he preferred to run no risks and consolidate his gains before going on to the next campaign.
Just because he chose to stop the war did not mean that he meant it to pass unnoticed. His triumph was widely celebrated, by pen and fireworks, throughout France, as was only normal, but he also inaugurated a new, publicity-conscious style of campaigning. Since Flanders was, after all, part of the queen’s inheritance, and being conquered on her behalf, she and the rest of the Court were invited to come along and watch her husband play the role of the conquering hero. As city after city fell, special ceremonies were organized to celebrate her entry into them, and just so none of the campaign’s incidents could ever be forgotten, Le Brun was commissioned to design tapestries, to be woven at the Gobelins, picturing all the great events of the war. In time, engravings were made after the tapestries and broadcast the king’s exploits throughout Europe while setting a new trend: From then on, tapestries were everywhere the proper way to enshrine a victory.
This kind of cross-pollination of art and politics was in itself typical of the new, emerging age. While Louis XIV understood painting, and collected it throughout his life, he also, from then on, provided contemporary artists with a stream of commissions, the object of which was to add to the patrimony of France while celebrating the achievements of the king. Indeed, at the same time, another series of tapestries, also designed by Le Brun, was celebrating the great moments of the reign, from the Coronation to the meeting with the Nuncio who brought the pope’s apology in regard to the Corsican Guard incident. In 1667, however, Louis XIV still lacked the proper place in which to display paintings and tapestries, a shortcoming of which he began to be acutely conscious.
In one other way, the campaign created a new situation, both at Court and in the king’s personal life. Although his affair with Mlle de La Vallière had long been public knowledge, she still lacked an official status; her children - by 1667, there were two daughters, one of whom died in infancy - were listed in the register of births as of unknown parents. Since even the best-planned war is not without danger, Louis XIV decided to revive his grandfather’s custom: La Vallière was made a duchess in her own right, and the surviving daughter, Marie-Anne de Bourbon,* was officially declared, before the Parlement, to be the king’s issue.
This move was important: Once again, the king set himself above the rules observed by ordinary mortals. He now, besides his wife, had a maîtresse déclarée, an officially recognized mistress; the position, once created, proved to be long-lasting: The last holder of that office was Mme du Barry, more than a century later. As for the legitimization of the little Marie-Anne, precedents had been created by Henri IV. Still, circumstances were very different: Henri IV had not only come to the throne late in life, and after a bitter civil war that had taught him to live less like a king than like a marauding general, he was also notoriously averse to etiquette. Given his grandson’s high regard for his own position, it was an easy guess that his bastard children, once they were recognized, would be given a far more important place than had been customary.
Far from taking the new duchesse’s elevation as a sign of increased favor, however, most courtiers assumed that it signaled the beginning of the end, and that she was, in effect, being pensioned off - a cynical but not unnatural view, since the king’s eye was visibly roving. La Vallière herself, by 1667, realized that the king no longer loved her as passionately or exclusively as had once been the case; indeed, it is not unlikely that the queen mother’s death may have helped weaken Louis’s attachment to La Vallière because it meant that the mistress was no longer forbidden fruit. Of course, she still suffered from Madame’s very visible hatred: The princess, who had longed to be if not the king’s mistress, at least the sole partner of his amusements, still loathed and resented her former maid-in-waiting. But, in spite of her intellectual qualities, she no longer held the royal interest, and so, fuming in vain, she consoled herself by making Monsieur’s life as uncomfortable as she could.
What everyone failed to realize, however, was that Louis XIV liked to keep what he had once had, and that he was also quite able to love several women at a time. While, in the course of his life, he became devoted to only a few, very special, ladies, he was eager, and because of his position, able, to have sex with virtually any young and pretty creature he happened to see; thus while the list of his official mistresses is, in itself, not inconsiderable, that of his conquests, while it has never been drawn up, would, no doubt, easily surpass Don Giovanni’s mille e tre. This self-indulgence, so notable from then on, was, however, still new, and La Vallière began to worry.
That, unfortunately, was calculated to alienate him further. Had the duchesse become his mistress simply because she was ambitious or greedy, she would, no doubt, have coped far more easily with the new situation and traded on the king’s affection and periodic appetite for her. Instead, because she loved him, she entered a period of almost unalloyed suffering, torn as she was when Louis was paying attention to another woman and full of apprehension that his returns to her would not last. So she cried, looked visibly wan, tried her clumsy best to regain his undivided love, and irritated him instead.
At first, she expressed herself in moderate ways. There was the sonnet written for her by Benserade, for instance, and addressed to the king, who was using the war as a pretext for neglecting her: “Tout se détruit, tout passe, et le coeur le plus tendre Ne peut d’un même objet se contenter toujours. Le passé n’a point vu d’eternelles amours Et les siècles futurs n’en doivent po
int attendre. La raison a des lois qu’on ne veut point entendre, Jamais de nos désirs rien n’arrête le cours, Ce qu’on cherche aujourd’hui déplait en peu de jours Notre inégalité ne saurait se comprendre. Tous ces défauts, Grand Roi, sont joints a vos vertus. Vous m’aimiez autrefois et vous ne m’aimez plus. Ah, que mes sentiments sont différents des vôtres! Amour de qui depend et mon mal el mon bien Que ne lui donniez vous un coeur comme le mien Ou que n’avez vous fait le mien comme les autres!” (All is destroyed, all passes away, and the most tender heart cannot always be satisfied with the same love. The past has seen no eternal loves and future centuries can expect none. Reason has its laws that we do not wish to know Nothing ever stops the burgeoning of desire what we seek today will soon cease to please Our inconstancy passes understanding, All these failings, great King, are joined to your virtues You loved me once, you love me no longer Ah, how different my feelings are from yours! Love on whom depends for me good and evil Why have you not given him a heart more like mine Why have you not made mine more like everone else’s!).
A touching plaint, but, like so many such, wholly ineffective. The king, polite as always, and fond of verse as he was, promptly replied through Benserade’s pen, but the answer, using exactly the same rhymes, was hardly what the first sonnet demanded: “J’ai le coeur, belle Iris, aussi constant que tendre Ce que j’ai droit d’aimer, je l’aimerai toujours; Mais dès que mon devoir condamne mes amours De ma fidélité l’on ne doit rien attendre. L’honneur a des raisons et je les dois entendre Bien que de mes plaisirs il arrête le cours, J’immole à ce tyran le repos de mes jours Par un effort sur moi que je ne puis comprendre. Je renonce á l’amour qui ternit mes vertus N’alléguez pas ses lois, je ne les connais plus, Ma gloire a des appats qui triomphent des vôtres. Après tout, belle Iris, ne savez vous pas bien Qu’un heros dont le coeur est fait comme le mien Donne à l’amour des lois que l’amour donne aux autres?” (My heart, fair Iris, is constant and tender She whom I may love I will love always But when my duty condemns my love No more can be expected of my fidelity. Honor has its reasons and I must heed them even if it interrupts my pleasures I sacrifice my peace to that tyrant through an effort on self beyond understanding. I give up love when it tarnishes my virtues Do not cite its laws, I know them no more Glory has attractions even greater than yours. After all, fair Iris, do you not know full well that a hero whose heart is made like mine rules love as love rules all else?).130
Quite admirable, no doubt, but, for someone who knew better, not very convincing. It was, in fact, in the summer of 1667 that the king became, secretly at first, the lover of the duchesse’s best friend, a development which the lovelorn woman no doubt promptly guessed. Still, from her point of view, not all was lost: The lady in question was a married woman with a jealous husband, an awkward situation at best, and one of which the king might soon tire. Had his attraction to her been purely physical, that might well have been the case, but in the marquise de Montespan, the king had found not just great beauty and the most enormous gusto for life, but also dazzling intellectual gifts, a well-known characteristic of the Mortemarts, the marquise’s family. There could not have been a sharper contrast to the retiring and docile La Vallière, but that did not mean that the latter’s unconditional adoration had lost all charm for the imperious monarch.
La Vallière had been left behind when the Court joined the army because she was again pregnant, but frantic and desolate, she ordered her carriage and drove as fast as she could to the front, only to be met with universal blame when, to the queen’s fury, she appeared before the walls of the besieged La Fère. The next day, “when Mme de La Vallière was on a hilltop from which she could see the army, she had her carriage cross the countryside at top speed. The Queen saw this and became dreadfully angry … When the King reached the Queen’s carriage, she urged him to join her; he refused, saying he was too muddy. After the Queen had left her carriage, the King stayed with her for a moment, and then went off to Mme de La Vallière, who was not seen for the rest of the evening.”131 This time, it had worked, but as the wretched duchesse soon found out, one evening of ardor changed nothing at all. True, the king did not send her away from Court, but he did not return to her either. Neither wholly loved nor wholly neglected, she found herself in that bitterest of positions, that of having to share the man she adored with a victorious rival, and she suffered accordingly. As for the king, who was seen to spend all his evenings with Mme de Montespan, he had no intention of giving up either of his mistresses; and that fall, Mme de La Vallière gave birth to a son.*
Neither his new conquests, feminine and territorial, nor the usual cares of government were enough, that year, to occupy Louis XIV. The Court, in residence, first at Saint Germain, then at the newly completed Tuileries, was as brilliant as ever, and the king saw to the least details of his new system. So thorough was he, in fact, that on January 1, 1667, he wrote the duc de Chaulnes, the senior member of one of the great French families,† the following letter: “My cousin, I have arranged the marriage of the sieur de Chevreuse [Chaulnes’s nephew] with the sieur Colbert’s elder daughter, and since, through this means, I tie the head and sole heir of your House to that of a man who serves me in my most important business with zeal and success, I have wanted to give you myself the notice of this alliance and feel sure that you will take part in the satisfaction felt by both families.”132
This letter seemed to be mere courtesy; in fact, it was also a warning to the duc de Chaulnes that he had better toe the line: The marriage of a girl from a bourgeois family - her grandfather was a mere clothier - to the heir of a duke was virtually without precedent; in an age of aristocratic pride, not to say arrogance, it seemed immensely shocking, but once again, a piece of the new system was being put into place. The king, in fact, was taking care of three matters at once: He was rewarding Colbert, that exemplary minister, by raising his daughter to a level of which she could never have dreamed, and thus making it a virtual certainty that Colbert’s grandson would be a duc et pair;* he was, for the first time, advertising the fact that, in his eyes, all who represented him were ipso facto placed in the very first rank of society so that achievement in the royal service counted as much as noble birth, a revolutionary notion; and he was, finally, lowering the status of the great nobles who now became mere cogs in the machinery of state, with the corollary that, the more independence they lost, the less likely they were to rebel.
Because the Court was so brilliant and the etiquette so important, the king’s purpose was not immediately apparent; indeed, Mlle Colbert’s marriage was seen, at the time, as just another example of royal indulgence to a favorite. In fact, a new division of French society had begun, in which the king was no longer barely more than primus inter pares; now, below the throne, all owed equal, prompt, and unquestioning obedience.
Indeed, it seemed as if no matter was unworthy of the royal attention. Converting the Protestants was, obviously, one of the government’s goals, so the king could be expected to set up a system of incitements. What is more surprising is that he kept track of individual conversions; thus, for instance, on July 9, 1668, he wrote the marquis de Théobon, a minor noble: “M. le marquis de Théobon, having learned that the comte de la Motte, your grandson, after having been fully apprised of the Christian and Catholic truths, has, without any pressure, given up his heretical beliefs and at the same time has professed his faith to the Lord Archbishop of Paris, I am pleased to appoint him one of the pages of my Grande Ecurie and to assure you myself, by this letter in my own hand,* of the care I mean to take of him. As for you, I feel sure that you will not love him less than you did before this happy change since he alone decided on it.”133 Whether the young man’s conversion was, in fact, spontaneous may well be doubted, although it is possible it was due, simply, to ambition: Protestants, after all, were not likely to rise in the king’s service.
All conversions, even that of even so unimportant a young man as the comte de la Motte, seemed, to the king, a proof tha
t, politically and religiously, his endeavors were approved from on high. But when Turenne, who lacked neither glory nor honors, and who, furthermore, belonged to one of the greatest families in France, decided to convert, Louis XIV felt that here, indeed, was the justification of his system. No one could claim that Turenne acted as he did out of an ignoble motive: He was, it seems, genuinely convinced that Catholicism was the true faith. Since he was the most visible of all the Protestants, it seemed almost certain that most of his co-believers would follow him.
Turenne’s conversion was a matter of state, but so, in the king’s eyes, were the particulars of the dauphin’s education. On May 21, 1667, when the boy was only six, he wrote to the maréchale de La Mothe, his governess: “I am very glad that my children should have arrived at Compiègne in good health and that my son should be well-behaved; use the time in which you are alone with him to make him fear you. I can see nothing more needed at the present time … Please write me without ceremony.”134 And two years later, in another letter to the maréchale, he added: “Your letters need no excuse: it is enough that they are from you to be always welcome and besides, they give me such good news of my children that you cannot doubt that I read them with joy.”135 Those two letters define the king’s attitude to his son, the only one of his legitimate children to survive infancy. On the one hand, he cared a great deal about him, and not only because he ensured that the throne would descend in his direct posterity; on the other hand, the child was to be made obedient to authority. No doubt Louis XIV realized that the king’s heir can also be his enemy and offer a rallying point to all potential opponents, and he was thus trying to prevent the development of a very real problem. But in this case, the personality of the dauphin, not a forceful one at best, was ignored: It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Louis was treating the boy as if he had been a miniature version of himself. This judgment not being the case, it was soon noticed that the dauphin was not only terrified of his father but also possessed of a wholly passive disposition.