by Will Durant
In 1657 she opened a salon; she invited men of letters, music, art, politics, or war, and sometimes their wives; and she astonished Paris by showing an intelligence equal to that of any woman, and most men, of her time; behind the face of Venus they found the mind of Minerva. Says a severe judge, Saint-Simon:
It was useful to be received by her, on account of the connections thus formed. There was never any gambling there, nor loud laughing, nor disputes, nor talk about religion or politics, but much elegant wit . . . [and] news of gallantries, yet without scandal. All was delicate, light, measured; and she herself maintained the conversation by her wit and her great knowledge. 84
At last the King himself became curious about her; he asked Mme. de Maintenon to invite her to the palace; from behind a curtain he listened to her; charmed, he revealed and introduced himself. But by this time (1677?) she had become quasi-respectable. Her simple honesty and many kindnesses gave her a brighter renown; men left large sums with her for safekeeping, and could always rely on regaining them at will; and Paris had noted how, when the poet Scarron was incapacitated by paralysis, Ninon visited him almost daily, bringing him the delicacies that he could not afford.
She outlived nearly all her friends, even the nonagenarian Saint-Évremond, whose letters from England were the consolation of her old age. “Sometimes,” she wrote to him, “I am tired of always doing the same things, and I admire the Swiss who throw themselves into the river for that very reason.” 85 She resented wrinkles. “If God had to give a woman wrinkles, He might at least have put them on the soles of her feet.” 86 As she neared death, in her eighty-fifth year, the Jesuits competed with the Jansenists for the honor of converting her; she yielded to them graciously, and died in the arms of the Church (1705). 87 In her will she left only ten écus for her funeral, “so that it might be as simple as possible”; but “I humbly request M. Arouet”—her attorney—“to allow me to leave his son, who is at the Jesuits, one thousand francs for books.” 88 The son bought books, read them, and became Voltaire.
It was the crowning charm of French society that the sexual stimulus extended to the mind, that the women were roused to add intelligence to beauty, and that the men were tamed by the women to courteous conduct, good taste, and polished speech; in this regard the century from 1660 to 1760 in France marks the zenith of civilization. In that society intelligent women were numerous beyond any precedent; and if they were also attractive in face or figure, or in the solicitude of kindliness, they became a pervasive civilizing force. The salons were training men to be sensitive to feminine refinement, and women to be responsive to masculine intellect. In those gatherings the art of conversation was developed to an excellence never known before or since—the art of exchanging ideas without exaggeration or animosity, but with courtesy, tolerance, clarity, vivacity, and grace. Perhaps the art was more nearly perfect under Louis XIV than in the days of Voltaire—not so brilliant and witty, but more substantial and friendly. “After dinner,” wrote Mme. de Sévigné to her daughter, “we went to talk in the most agreeable woods in the world; we were there till six o’clock, engaged in various sorts of conversation so kind, so tender, so amiable, so obliging . . . that I am touched to the heart by it.” 89 Many men ascribed nine tenths of their education to such converse and social intercourse. 90
In the Blue Room at the Hôtel de Rambouillet the first of the salons was in its final glory. Condé came there, though he did not shine; Corneille came, La Rochefoucauld, Mmes. de La Fayette and de Sévigné, the Duchesse de Longueville, and La Grande Mademoiselle. There les femmes précieuses laid down the laws of nice conduct and polished speech. The Fronde interrupted these gatherings; Mme. de Rambouillet moved to the country; and though her hôtel later reopened its doors to the genius of France, the première of Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) was a mortal blow. The first famous salon ended with the death of its founder in 1665.
Other salons continued the tradition, in the homes of Mmes. de La Sablière, de Lambert, and de Scudéry—the last the most famous novelist of the reign, the first a woman who attracted men by beauty despite her love of physics, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy. In such salons flourished the femmes savantes who provoked Molière’s laughter in 1672. But every satire is a half-truth; in his philosophical moments Molière might have recognized the right of women to share in the intellectual life of their times. It is the women of France, even more than her writers and artists, who are the crown of her civilization, and the special glory of her history.
VI. THE COURT
The King and the court helped to civilize France. The court, in 1664, comprised some six hundred persons: the royal family, the higher nobility, the foreign envoys, and the servant staff. In the fullness of Versailles it grew to ten thousand souls, 91 but this included notables in occasional attendance, all the entertainers and servitors, and the artists and authors whom the King had singled out for reward. To be invited to the court became a passion only third to hunger and sex; even to be there for a day was a memorable ecstasy, worth half a lifetime’s savings.
The splendor of the court lay partly in the luxurious furnishings of the apartments, partly in the dress of the courtiers, partly in the sumptuous entertainments, partly in the fame of the men and the beauty of the women drawn there by the magnets of money, reputation, and power. Some notable women, like Mmes. de Sévigné and de La Fayette, were seldom seen there, for they had sided with the Fronde; but enough remained to please a King extremely sensitive to feminine charms. In the portraits that have come down to us these ladies seem a bit ponderous, overflowing their corsages; but apparently the men of that time liked an adipose warmth in their amours.
The morals of the court were decorous adultery, extravagance in dress and gambling, and passionate intrigues for prestige and place, all carried on a rhythm of external refinement, elegant manners, and compulsory gaiety. The King set the fashion of costly dress, especially in ambassadorial receptions; so in receiving the envoys of Siam he wore a robe laced with gold and bordered with diamonds, the whole worth 12,500,000 livres; 92 such display was part of the psychology of government. Nobles and their ladies consumed half the income of their estates on clothing, lackeys, and equipage; the most modest had to have eleven servants and two coaches; richer dignitaries had seventy-five attendants in their household, and forty horses in their stables. 93 When adultery was no longer prohibited it lost its charm, and gambling at cards became the chief recreation of the court. Louis again gave the lead, bidding for high stakes, urged on by his mistress Montespan, who herself lost and won four million francs in one night’s play. 94 The mania spread from the court to the people. “Thousands ruin themselves in gambling,” wrote La Bruyère; “a frightful game . . . in which the player contemplates the total ruin of his adversary, and is transported with the lust for gain.” 95
Competition for the royal favor, for a lucrative appointment or a place in the royal bed, led to an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, calumny, and tense rivalry. “Every time I fill a vacant post,” said Louis, “I make a hundred people discontented, and one ungrateful.” 96 There were quarrels for precedence at table or in attending the King; even Saint-Simon worried lest the Duc de Luxembourg should walk five steps in advance of him in a procession, and Louis had to banish three dukes from court because they refused to yield precedence to foreign princes. The King laid great stress on protocol, and frowned when, at dinner, he found an untitled lady seated above a duchess. 97 Doubtless some fixed order was necessary to keep six hundred beribboned egos from trampling upon one another’s toes, and visitors praised the external harmony of the enormous entourage. From the palaces, receptions, and entertainments of the King a code of etiquette, standards of manners and taste, spread through the upper and middle classes, and became a part of the European heritage.
To keep all these lords and ladies from being bored into regicide, artists of every kind were engaged to arrange amusements—tournaments, hunts, tennis, billiards, bathing or boating
parties, dinners, dances, balls, masques, ballets, operas, concerts, plays. Versailles seemed heaven on earth when the King led the court into boats on the canal, and voices and instruments made music, and torches helped the moon and the stars to illuminate the scene. And what could be more splendid or more suffocating than the formal balls, when the Galerie des Glaces reflected in its massive mirrors the grace and sparkle of men and women in stately dances under a thousand lights? To celebrate the birth of the Dauphin (1662) the King arranged a ballet in the square before the Tuileries, attended by fifteen thousand people. The Commune of 1871 destroyed the palace, but the site of that famous fete is still called the Place du Carrousel.
Louis loved dancing, praised it as “one of the most excellent and important disciplines for training the body,” 98 and established at Paris (1661) the Académie Royale de Danse. He himself took part in ballets, and the nobility followed suit. The composers at his court were kept busy preparing music for dances and ballets; there the dance suite developed which was so skillfully used by Purcell in England and the Bachs in Germany. Not since Imperial Rome had the dance reached such graceful and harmonious forms.
In 1645 Mazarin imported Italian singers to establish opera in Paris. The Cardinal’s death interrupted this initiation, but when the King grew up he founded an Académie de l’Opéra (1669), and commissioned Pierre Perrin to present operas in several cities of France, beginning with Paris in 1671. When Perrin bankrupted himself through excessive outlays for scenery and machinery, Louis transferred the privilège des académies de musique to Jean Baptiste Lully, who soon made the whole court dance to his tunes.
He too was a gift of Italy. The Chevalier de Guise brought him, as a peasant boy of seven, from Florence to France in 1646 “as a present” to his niece, La Grande Mademoiselle, who gave him work as an assistant in her kitchen (sousmarmiton). He annoyed his fellow servants by practicing the violin, but Mademoiselle recognized his talent, and provided him with an instructor. Soon he was playing in the royal band of twenty-four violins. Louis took a liking to him, and gave him a small ensemble to conduct. Through this little string orchestra he learned to conduct and to compose—dance music, songs, violin solos, cantatas, church music, thirty ballet suites, twenty operas. He became friendly with Molière, collaborated with him in several ballets, and composed divertissements for some of Molière’s plays.
His success as a courtier rivaled his triumphs as a musician. In 1672, through Mme. de Montespan’s influence, he succeeded in acquiring a monopoly on opera in Paris. He found in Philippe Quinault a librettist who was also a poet. Together they produced a succession of operas that constituted a revolution in French music. Not only did these performances delight the court at Versailles, they brought the elite of Paris to the theater that had been built for Lully in the Rue St.-Honoré, and in such numbers that the street was blocked with carriages, and patrons in many cases had to get out and walk, often through mud, lest they miss Act One. Boileau frowned upon opera as an enervating effeminacy, 99 but the King granted a charter to the Académie de Musique (1672), and authorized “gentlemen and ladies to sing at the representations of the said Academy without derogation” to their rank. 100 Louis raised Lully to the nobility as a secretary to the king; other secretaries complained that this was too high a post for a musician; but Louis told Lully, “I have honored them, not you, by placing a man of genius among them.” 101 Everything prospered for Lully till 1687; then, while conducting, he accidentally struck his foot with the cane that he used as a baton; the wound, maltreated by a quack, developed gangrene, and the ebullient composer died at the. age of forty-eight. French opera still feels his influence.
One more name survives from the music of that lordly reign. The Couperins were another case of heredity in art, contributing composers to France for two centuries, and ruling from 1650 to 1826 the great organ in the Church of St.-Gervais. François Couperin “le Grand” held that post for forty-eight years; he was also organiste du roi in the King’s chapel at Versailles, and was the most famous harpsichordist of the “great century.” His compositions for that instrument were closely studied by Johann Sebastian Bach; and his treatise L’Art de toucher le clavecin (the French name for the clavichord) influenced the great German’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier. Was music in the Couperin blood, or only in the Couperin home? Probably it is social, not biological, heredity that makes civilization.
VII. THE KING’S WOMEN
Louis was not a rake. We must always remember, in the case of kings even to our own century, that custom required them to sacrifice their personal preferences in order to contract marriages of some political utility to the state. Consequently society—and often the Church—winked an eye when a king sought the exhilaration of sex and the romance of love outside the marriage bond. If Louis had had his way he would have begun with a marriage of love. He was deeply moved by the beauty and charm of Marie Mancini, a niece of Mazarin; he begged his mother and the Cardinal to let him marry her (1658); Anne of Austria reproved him for allowing passion to interfere with politics; and Mazarin regretfully sent Marie off to marry a Colonna. Then for a year the subtle minister pulled wires to get as Louis’ bride María Teresa, daughter of Philip IV. What if, by some failure of the male line in the Spanish kings, this Infanta should bring all Spain as her dowry to the King of France? So in 1660, with all the costly splendor that mesmerized the taxpayers, Louis married María, both of them twenty-two years old.
Marie Thérèse was a proud woman, pious and virtuous; her example and influence helped to improve the morals of the court, at least in her entourage. But a severe discipline had made her somber and dull, and her great appetite was amplifying her, just when the beauties of Paris were ogling her handsome mate. She gave him six children, of whom only one, the Dauphin, survived infancy.* It was her misfortune that in the very year of their marriage Louis had discovered in his sister-in-law Henrietta Anne all the charms of young womanhood.
Henrietta Anne was the daughter of England’s Charles I. Her mother, Henrietta Maria (daughter of Henry IV of France), had shared with her husband the tragedy of the Civil War. When the Parliament army approached Charles’s headquarters at Oxford, the English Queen fled to Exeter, and there, so ill that she expected death, she gave birth (1644) to “a lovely little princess.” Pursued by Parliamentary agents, the ailing mother fled again, and made her way clandestinely to the coast, where a Dutch vessel, narrowly escaping English guns, took her to France. The child, left behind with Lady Anne Dalkeith, lived through two years of concealment in England before she too could be safely gotten across the Channel. Soon she had to experience the vicissitudes of the Fronde; in January, 1649, she joined her mother and Anne of Austria in the flight from barricaded Paris to St.-Germain. In that month the news came—doubtless kept from her for a time—that her father had been beheaded by the victorious Roundheads. After the Fronde subsided, Princess Henrietta was brought up in comfort and piety by her mother, and both lived to see Charles II restored to the English throne (1660). A year later, aged sixteen, she married the brother of Louis XIV, “Monsieur” Philippe Duc d’Orléans, and became “Madame.”
Monsieur was a little round-bellied man on high-heeled shoes, who loved feminine adornments and masculine forms; as brave as any knight in battle, but as painted, perfumed, beribboned, and begemmed as the vainest woman in this vainest land. It was a grief and a shame to Henrietta that her husband preferred the company of the Chevaliers de Lorraine and de Châtillon to her own. Almost everybody else fell in love with her, not so much for her frail beauty—though she was considered the fairest creature at the court 103—as for her gentle and kindly spirit, her almost childlike vivacity and gaiety, the fresh vernal breeze that she brought wherever she went. Racine—one of the many authors whom she inspired and helped—called her “the arbiter of all that is beautiful.” 104
At first Louis XIV found her too weak and slender for his vigor and taste; but as he came to feel the douceur et lumière, “sweetness and lig
ht,” 105 of her character, he found increasing pleasure in her presence, delighted to dance with her, frolic with her, plan games with her, go walking in the park at Fontainebleau or boating on the canal with her, until all Paris assumed that she had become his mistress, and thought it a just revenge on the “King of Sodom.” 106 But probably Paris misjudged. Louis loved her this side of adultery, and she, who spent her devotion in love for her brothers Charles and James, accepted the King as another brother, and took it as her mission to bind all three in alliance or amity.
In 1670, at Louis’ request, she crossed to England to persuade Charles to join France against Holland, even to urge him to proclaim his Catholic faith. Charles so promised in the secret Treaty of Dover (June 1, 1670), and Henrietta returned to France loaded with gifts and victory. A few days after reaching her palace at St.-Cloud she fell violently ill. She thought she had been poisoned, and so all Paris believed. The King and his Queen hurried to her bedside, along with the penitent Monsieur, and Condé, Turenne, Mme. de La Fayette, and Mademoiselle de Montpensier; and Bossuet came to pray with her. At last, on June 30, her suffering ended. A post-mortem examination revealed that she had died not of poison but of peritonitis. 107 Louis gave her such a funeral as was usually reserved for crowned heads, and over her remains in St.-Denis Bossuet preached a funeral sermon that has reverberated through the centuries.
It was Henrietta who gave the King the first of his more public mistresses. Born at Tours in 1644, Louise de La Vallière received with unquestioning faith the religious education given her by her mother and her priestly uncle, the future bishop of Nantes. She had barely reached the age of First Communion when her father died. Her mother remarried; the new husband, maître d’hôtel for Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, secured a place for Louise as lady in waiting to the daughters of the Duke; and when, after Gaston’s death, his nephew and successor Philippe married, he took Louise with him as a maid of honor to Henrietta (1661). In that capacity she frequently saw the King. She was dazzled by his splendor, power, and personal fascination. Like a hundred other women she fell in love with him, but hardly dreamed of speaking to him.