In spite of this frenzy of defeatism, the king, aging and sadder than ever before, retained his determination to fight on until he could negotiate a decent peace, and, within a few months, his steadfastness paid off. In January 1711, a secret emissary was sent by Harley, now Earl of Oxford, and Saint John, now Viscount Bolingbroke, to France: The abbé Gautier, a priest belonging to the chapel of the Austrian Ambassador in London, was a man of no importance, but he could hardly have been listened to with more attention if he had been Queen Anne herself.
The two English ministers had good reasons, both to want peace and to be so secretive about it: Not only were the queen and the landowners tired of the war, its end would enable them to encompass Marlborough’s fall; if their approaches became known, however, there might well be a patriotic reaction against them. Still, the negotiations started in earnest; then, on April 17, an event took place which changed the face of Europe: Away in Vienna, the Emperor Joseph I died, and he was succeeded by his brother, the Archduke Charles, the claimant to the Spanish Crown.
All these years, England had been fighting a costly war so as to prevent the accretion of French power consequent on having a Bourbon as king of Spain, and even then, there was every expectation that the French and Spanish branches would remain separate. But now, at one blow, the new Emperor Charles VI would unite Spain and the Austrian possessions, thus creating just the sort of preponderance the English were determined to stop. As a result, peace became possible as long as there was a solemn undertaking on the part of France that the Spanish and French crowns would remain forever distinct.
It began to look, in fact, as if Great Britain was ruining itself for its allies, Austria and Holland, to whom the Flemish cities were to be given and who was, after all, a commercial rival. So the ministers, warmly supported by the queen, began to negotiate in earnest. But after so long and so bitter a war, nothing was simple, and in the meantime, the fighting continued. Once again, Marlborough pushed the French back. Bouchain was taken in September 1711; there seemed to be virtually no obstacle between the armies of the Coalition and Paris, and these ill-timed victories substantially complicated the peace negotiations.
At that point, political reality took over: Backed by a solid majority in the House of Commons, the government dismissed Marlborough from all his offices and tried him for peculation: 1711 had seen the last campaign to be fought by British troops. By 1712, a cease-fire was signed, and on July 19, Louis XIV turned the city of Dunkirk over to the English army under the duke of Ormonde, Marlborough’s replacement, as security for his undertakings in the forthcoming treaty. That, however, left Prince Eugene’s army in the field. On July 6, he took Le Quesnoy and went on to besiege Landrecies. In June, the duc de Vendôme had died in Spain: If Prince Eugene reached Paris, if the French army in Spain, deprived of its commander was beaten, the war would be lost after all; already Louis XIV was considering a move to the Loire in case Paris was taken.
It was at that point that the maréchal de Villars saved his country. He saw that Prince Eugene’s lines at Landrecies were overextended and attacked at the nearby village of Denain on July 24; for the first time in many years, the French won a great victory, and they followed it up by taking Marchiennes six days later. In September and October, Douai, Le Quesnoy, and Bouchain were retaken: Now it was the French who were going forward, and the enemy back.
These victories carried with them the obvious consequence: The Franco-British negotiations which had been taking place at Utrecht were greatly speeded up. Peace was now in sight. After disappearing behind a cloud of blood and tears, the sun came out again: At Versailles, the seventy-four-year-old king, who almost alone had resisted the whole of Europe, was proved right: Never more than in those difficult years had he shown he was fully entitled to be called Louis le Grand.
* The duc de Bourgogne was after all, likely to have children. In fact, his second son became King Louis XV, but in the very long run, the Coalition was right to worry: Today, King Juan Carlos of Spain is Louis XIV’s only direct descendant.
* The duc de Bretagne. He died a year later.
* Gibralter is still a British colony.
* He had campaigned the year before under Marsin in Italy, but in a purely ornamental capacity.
* One of Philip V’s generals.
* Louis XIV usually stayed in Fontainebleau during the month of October.
* The king’s First Physician.
* The second duc de Bretagne, born in 1705.
All through the war, as defeat followed defeat and the Treasury grew ever emptier, life at Versailles remained unchanged. The king followed his appointed rounds, surrounded by his vast family and vaster Court, and just as he seemed above the ordinary joys and sorrows of humanity, so it appeared that he would never age. In 1711, he was seventy-three - hardly a youth by today’s standards, extreme old age by those of the time, but he was still as vigorous, energetic, hardworking and imperious as he had been twenty years earlier. Then, in less than a year, between April 1711 and February 1712, everything changed. The king went on governing, it is true; the negotiations at Utrecht were successfully concluded; the war was brought to a not unfavorable end. But the king had begun to grow old.
Louis XIV’s relationship to Monseigneur, his only legitimate child, had always been ambiguous; no one could tell whether there was any fondness between the two, but the king liked having his son around, and the dauphin was nothing if not obedient. Similarly, while the fifty-year-old heir enjoyed no power of his own, he did belong to the Council, and the king probably welcomed the support he invariably gave to Philip V’s interests. What is at any rate certain is that Monseigneur, that fat, awkward, and silent figure, was mostly a blank; still, as the heir to a monarch in his seventies, he had gained importance. A whole cabal was centered around him: It was expected that, when he finally succeeded, France would be ruled by a combination of the duc de Vendôme and Madame la Duchesse, and that anyone close to the Bourgognes would suffer in consequence.
Then, on April 9, 1711, the usually healthy Monseigneur fainted dead away as he was getting dressed, and by the next day, he was suffering from a high fever which, within another forty-eight hours, turned out to be smallpox. That often deadly disease came, however, in several varieties, and it seemed clear that Monseigneur was suffering from one of its lightest forms. “Up to now,” Madame commented on the twelfth, “the illness is going as it should, the fever is abating, the pustules are beginning to whiten, so we hope all will be well.”297 The king, who had had smallpox in his youth, moved to Meudon where the dauphin had been stricken; the Bourgognes, neither of whom was immune, were ordered to stay at Versailles. It was noticed that they held court, and were surrounded, much as if they were already the next heirs to the throne.
Until the fourteenth, the disease continued to progress in the most normal way, so much so that a deputation came from Paris to congratulate the dauphin on his impending recovery. But when it the announced that it was ordering a Te Deum, Monseigneur answered: “It is not time yet, wait until I am cured.” That day, Madame continues, “I went to Meudon to congratulate the King on M. le Dauphin’s being so much better … [At six o’clock], I saw the King, who received me very graciously; he told me I should not have complained so much when I had smallpox myself, and said that M. le Dauphin felt no discomfort. I answered that was yet to come, that the pustules would swell up and be painful. As I was about to leave, it was announced that M. le Dauphin was worried, that his head was much swollen; everybody thought that meant the pustules were beginning to suppurate and that it was a good sign … At nine, [at Versailles, where Madame had returned] news came again that all was well; but at ten there was a message that M. le Dauphin was beginning to be afraid, that his face was so swollen as to be unrecognizable; it was added that the eyes were especially affected. That was still not alarming; I supped at ten as usual; at eleven, I undressed and spoke for a moment with the maréchale de Clérembault*; I was then going to say my prayers and go to b
ed but, at midnight, I was very surprised to see the maréchale return in a very upset state; she said that M. le Dauphin was dying … A moment later, they came to tell me that it was all over, that M. le Dauphin was no longer alive.”298
That turn for the worst, in fact, came so quickly that there was time neither for a confession nor for the last rites before Monseigneur sank into a coma. As for the king, who was there, but not in the same room, he left immediately: The sacrosanct etiquette forbade the presence of the monarch in the same house as a corpse. “As he came out to get into his carriage,” Saint-Simon noted, “he found Monseigneur’s berlin before him; he waved it away because he could not bear to see it. He was not so stricken, however, that he did not call Pontchartrain to tell him to warn his father [the Chancellor] and the other ministers to come a little later than usual to Marly for the Council … He then had difficulty getting up into the carriage, being supported on both sides; Mme de Maintenon got in immediately after him … A crowd of officeholders from Monseigneur’s Household was kneeling all along both sides of the courtyard as the King went by, begging him with strange shouts to have pity on them who had lost everything and would be starving.”299
That was, perhaps, the truest regret elicited by Monseigneur’s death: No one seems to have missed him much; what his cabal regretted bitterly was the sudden loss of their prospects. All those who had counted on being powerful when he succeeded his father were now disappointed; worse, with his death, the duc de Bourgogne had become the next heir, and he was the very man Monseigneur’s friends had been slandering so assiduously: Their situation when he became king, therefore, was likely to be bleak in the extreme. There is, indeed, something exemplary about it all: Those who expected power were cast down; those who expected virtual persecution were raised. Short of the king’s own death, there could not have been a greater revolution at Court.
As it was, great efforts were made to hide these emotions, but perhaps the most surprising piece of behavior came from the duc d’Orléans. This brave, kind and cultivated prince had been sedulously attacked by Monseigneur and his friends: He had every reason to rejoice, therefore, all the more that he was on good terms with the Bourgognes, and that his eldest daughter had just recently, to the dauphin’s great anger, married the duc de Berry, the youngest of his three sons. Once again, Saint-Simon was there, and we may trust his report all the more that he was on terms of real friendship with Orléans.
“How great was my surprise,” the duc wrote, “when I saw the tears falling from his eyes. ‘Monsieur!’ I exclaimed, standing up suddenly in astonishment. He understood me and answered with difficulty, as he was truly crying: ‘You are right to be surprised, and I am too, but the event touches me. He was not a bad man, I have known him all my life; he treated me well and with friendship as long as he was allowed to do so* … I realize that my sorrow cannot last; but it will be a few days before I feel all the reasons I have for being consoled considering what they had done to my relationship with him; but right now I feel the blood tie, the closeness, the humanity, all that touches me.’”300 In fact, with the possible exception of the king himself, Orléans was probably the only person at Versailles whose sorrow was so unselfish.
As for Louis XIV, it is not easy to know what he felt. For Madame, there was no doubt: “He is afflicted by such sorrow that it would soften a rock,” she wrote her aunt, “and yet he does not give in but speaks to everyone with a settled sadness, but the tears often come to his eyes, and he swallows his sobs. I am deathly worried that he may become ill himself because he looks so terrible.”301 Torcy, who saw him the next day, gives a more complex picture. “We went to the King’s lever at Marly,” he noted. “Once it was over, His Majesty called in M. le Chancelier. He then had the other ministers come in but was hardly able to speak. His sorrow and his tears cut him short every time he tried to explain himself. He even said that, although deeply moved by his loss, he could not understand his condition, that yesterday he had not shed a tear, and that, right then, he could not stop himself from shedding them in abundance.”302
Madame was, for all her irony, a simple woman; it seemed very natural to her that the king should be devastated by the loss of his son. But Torcy was more subtle, and Louis’s own surprise at his sorrow is extremely telling. It is, of course, possible to think that he had not cried the evening before because he was still in shock, and that his tears the next day showed his true feelings. But there is also a case to be made for the fact that he did not, in fact, care much for Monseigneur, that his loss did not affect him deeply, and that it was the shock, the sudden change, and the breaking of so old a relationship (distant though it was) that made him cry so abundantly the next morning.
What is certain, at any rate, is that, on the morning after his son’s death, the king was functioning as usual. In the course of the meeting attended by Torcy, it was decided that the appellation of “Monseigneur” would be allowed to lapse and that henceforth the duc de Bourgogne would become known as M. le Dauphin.* Dispositions were taken to dispose of the late prince’s belongings, a 12,000-livre pension was given to Mlle Choin, his morganatic wife, and that was the end of it: Clearly, the king was anxious to put the whole situation behind him. Saint-Simon who, much though he disliked Louis XIV, could on occasion be singularly perceptive, noted: “Never was a man so easily given to shed tears, so inaccessible to real sorrow or so quickly back to his normal condition. He must have been strongly affected by the loss of a son who, although fifty years old, was still six as far as he was concerned … On Thursday already, he was amusing himself with the lists for Marly.”303 The duc is probably right, and, after all, the three people for whom the king really cared, Mme de Maintenon and the two Bourgognes were still alive. Finally, we know from Fagon’s* journal that for several days after the dauphin’s death, Louis XIV suffered from headaches, exhaustion, and violent constipation.304
With Monseigneur’s death, the Court took on a whole new complexion. The Bourgognes were eagerly sought, praised, surrounded. Monseigneur’s former set, with the single exception of Madame la Duchesse, receded into the outer darkness. People who, like Saint-Simon, were part of the duc’s small advisory group, and who had dreaded the accession of the dauphin, now triumphed. And the king himself, who had already allowed his grandson access to the Council, frequently asked his opinion; more, for certain, less important matters, the ministers were told to work directly with him: Clearly, he was being prepared to rule.
That, no doubt, helped the king to get over his son’s death, and so did Mme de Maintenon’s company. In September 1711, Madame noted that “Mme de Maintenon does not look her age at all. It is true that she is a little thinner, but she still looks very well.”305 In fact, to the end of her days, the marquise continued to look ageless, and her intelligence, her quickness of mind, her wit also persisted. More, it is virtually certain that the seventy-three-year-old king and his seventy-five-year-old wife continued to have an active sex life.
Unfortunately, the marquise also nagged - about the war, about the légitimés, about the future. She was, of course, far more secure with Monseigneur gone. The duchesse de Bourgogne, who called her “ma tante,” was genuinely fond of her: Under the next reign, she could look forward to the most favorable treatment. What would happen to the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse, however, was another matter: The new dauphin was known not to approve of their meteoric rise; what one king had done another could undo, and Mme de Maintenon was audibly worried about it.
On the main topic of the day, however, she had increasingly less reason to lament: The war was clearly coming to a conclusion. The negotiations, speeded up by the political situation in London, were also helped by the fact that Philip V gave his grandfather all powers to treat in his name. That included the right of abandoning various component parts of the Spanish Empire in order to satisfy the other side. It was, given the length and bitterness of the war, an enlightened move on Philip’s part, and the king took it accordingly.
&n
bsp; “I assure you,” he wrote his grandson on June 22, 1711, “that I care for your interests as much as for mine, and that it is with infinite chagrin that I must propose to you solutions we always find hard to bear when it is a question of losing a part of the States God has given us. But there are occasions when one must know how to lose, and if it means that you are the recognized ruler of Spain and the Indies, you will have no reason to regret the places you may cede to the English so as to gain the peace. I will use the powers you have given me to that end.
“God grant us success; for I think, by what I see of the state of your affairs, that peace is no less necessary to Your Majesty than it was last year, and that the situation is merely such as to make negotiations easier. Behave accordingly and believe that the only good advice is that which will bring peace while keeping you on your throne.”306
This sort of cooperation, given earlier refusals to renounce anything at all, greatly eased the king’s lot, and so did the undoubted popularity now gained by the Bourgognes. The duc, a serious, highly pious and hardworking young man had always been a little withdrawn: Now he made himself far more accessible, and was found to be immensely civil, fair and kind; as for the duchesse, she had always charmed the Court as well as the king; as she became dauphine, she gave up her taste for childish games, which had made her seem younger than her age, as well as an unfortunate propensity for flirting which, in fact, may have gone very far indeed, and she applied herself to the duties of her new station with the most marked success. In August, for instance, the usually critical Madame noted: “People are quite right to praise M. le Dauphin. He deserves it. Mme la Dauphine is endearing herself to all by her politeness. Last Monday, I was invited to have dinner with them; no one could have been more polite than they were: they served me themselves. A whole dozen duchesses was also there; they spoke to everyone.”307 Most important of all, the duchesse went on bringing youth, gaiety, and happiness into Louis XIV’s life. Indeed, one may well wonder whether he would have withstood the disasters of the war so well if it had not been for her cheerful presence.
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