And yet the pleasures Marie Mancini outlined do not seem to have been particularly sensual, unless taste for high romance in plays and novels be seen as such. What Hieronyma Mancini, the wicked Stepmother – actually mother – of Marie's story had missed was her daughter's originality by the standards of the time. Not only did she appreciate painting and music but she had an ardent love of literature. The heroic plays of Corneille, especially Le Cid, were a particular favourite: a taste, of course, that Marie Mancini had in common with Queen Anne. Here was a heady mixture of love, honour, duty and renunciation as Chimène passionately adores Rodrigue the killer of her father, yet feels compelled in terms of her personal gloire to demand his death. At the same time the proud Infanta Urraque is inspired with an equally unsuitable passion for Rodrigue, but in her case it is the need for royal to wed royal which inhibits her. ‘Heaven owes you a king,' Urraque is admonished at one point, yet ‘you love a subject’.6 A female who was obsessed by Corneille and his lofty chivalric ideals was in a different class from most girls of her age for whom the prayer-book was enough, with the best-selling novels of Madeleine de Scudéry the far horizon of their reading.
The standard of women's education in France was not only low in the seventeenth century but unabashedly so. Even a clever woman like the Princesse des Ursins would boast of merely knowing her catechism and her rosary ‘as good women do' (although she certainly knew a great deal more). Most women were held to have no need of such leisurely accomplishments as reading and writing. Physical weakness was equated with moral frailty to add to the presumed inferiority of the weaker sex: women were by nature disorderly beings not even responsible for their own actions (with of course no status at law).7 What need of education for them?
Estimates of the number of women who could actually sign their own name in this period vary between 34 and 14 per cent. ‘Oh, that I were but a Man, I should study Night and Day,' wrote the English pamphletist Elinor James. But since they were not men, as a whole the female sex accepted its virtually illiterate destiny. For women of the upper classes, a convent education, provided by inspiring individual nuns, offered growing possibilities as the century progressed. But even here a clever woman like Madame de Sévigné looked down on the quality of the teaching supplied: she rejected the idea of a convent for her daughter's child, telling the daughter, Juliette de Grignan, to whom she wrote so constantly and so richly: ‘you will talk to her [the child]. I think that is worth more than a convent.' Conversation, declared the great letter-writer, was better than reading.8
The fact was that, as Madame de Sévigné's remark indicates, there were clever women in France – in Paris – and it was the art of conversation which was their principle organ of expression. In the salons of the brilliant, witty, cultured, refined women later nicknamed by Molière the Précieuses, ideas flowed during conversation. And from ideas came a special kind of excitement, making other more stolid company unendurable. Madeleine de Scudéry, for example, suggested that a woman in conversation should demonstrate a marvellous rapport between her words and her eyes, while she should of course be careful not to sound ‘like a book talking'; she should rather speak ‘worthily of everyday things and simply of grand things’.9 But these women and their male admirers deliberately constituted their own kind of society with their private nicknames and their codes, which had little to do with the court, particularly during the troubled years of the Fronde.* In short, the young Louis XIV did not know many sparkling young women. Thus Marie Mancini constituted his introduction both to the arts, which made a lifelong impression, and to a kind of chivalric love.
It helped that Marie was not entirely preoccupied with things of the mind. She was a wonderful rider, and her slender figure – scrawny, some said rudely – meant that she had a marvellous air dressed up in boy's clothes on her horse, where the plumper beauties fashionable at the time might not have made such a pretty picture. In black velvet edged with fur, including a matching hat above the huge dark eyes which were her best feature, she was irresistible. It was certainly not a coincidence that the King's early loves were all superb equestriennes, able to outdistance the court if necessary, since riding in the forests and glades round the various royal châteaux represented some of the few opportunities for privacy that Louis had.
As for the Cinderella element in the story, the King's eye first fell upon the neglected Marie when her disagreeable mother was dying in late 1657 and he paid a series of courtesy visits to his chief minister's sister. According to Marie, the King appreciated the frankness she showed in their talks: ‘the familiar way in which I lived with the King and his brother [due to the intimacy of Cardinal and Queen] was something so easy and pleasant that it gave me the opportunity to speak my thoughts without reserve.’10
Louis was able to taste the delights of knightly rescue: the beguiling thought that he had transformed Marie's life with his attention. As she wrote much later in her memoirs,11 it was a pleasure for Louis to be so generous to her: the King saw them as Pygmalion and Galatea, the sculptor and the marble statue that he brought to life. In other words, from her own point of view (that of an ordinary young woman of little or no fortune) ‘it was the love of a God'. The Court Ballet Alcidiane and Polexandre of 14 February 1658, founded on a novel by Marin de Gomberville, contained these lines: ‘Your Empire, Love, is a cruel empire / All the world complains, all the world sighs.’12 But in these early months of their relationship, neither Louis nor Marie found Love's Empire anything but delightful.
What Marie Mancini really offered Louis in the heady days before that inevitable royal marriage – or was it really inevitable? – was something totally new to him in an upbringing which had at times been traumatic but in private terms always carefully cloistered. Of course there was her unconditional love for him as opposed to his crown, a tribute which like any young man born to a great position, Louis found immensely seductive. But there was more to her hold over him, the ‘spell' she had cast, than that. Marie, in her ‘witty, bold and wanton' way offered independence from the clearly stated wishes of his mother and the Cardinal.13 Even their disapproval must have been exciting because it was new.
The situation to outsiders was especially baffling since it seems quite unlikely that Marie and Louis ever slept together. Once again contemporary commentators, no friends to Marie, combined to doubt the fact. The abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden spent a week at the court at Compiègne and longer than that – rather longer than expected – in France. She had a low opinion of Marie Mancini's looks: she told the Grande Mademoiselle that it was a shame the King could not be in love with someone more attractive. Nevertheless Christina doubted that ‘he [Louis XIV] has even touched the tip of Marie's finger'. Perhaps it was not quite that platonic: the discreet Madame de Motteville probably expressed the truth when she wrote that the relationship was ‘not altogether without its limits’.14 Subsequent events would show that Marie's nature was romantic and impetuous, in contrast to her frankly carnal and charmingly calculating sisters Olympe and Hortense. A physical affair – however far it went – with Olympe Mancini or the rash Anne-Lucie de La Motte d'Argencourt was something that could be tolerated as harmless (if sinful, as the Queen never failed to point out) and then quietly ended with all the weapons of society at the disposal of Cardinal and Queen. But the winning card of God's thunderous disapproval could hardly be played against a platonic friendship, however intense.
It was when Louis began to reflect dreamily on the possibility of marrying Mazarin's niece that the dangers of the situation came home to the Queen and the Cardinal. In spite of the malicious suggestions of his enemies, there is no evidence that Mazarin ever entertained the idea of the family union seriously and a great deal of evidence that he did not. He loved Louis, who was his godson, his creation, the summit of his gift to his adopted country, and he did not particularly like Marie. While Louis dallied with Marie Mancini, the Cardinal was involved in a series of resourceful manoeuvres aimed at peace between France and Spa
in – peace and the Infanta.
The serious illness of Louis in the summer of 1658 served to concentrate the Cardinal's mind on the need for a royal marriage. On the surface it was a time of joyous French victories. The shifting alliances of Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century were illustrated well by the fact that in their shared contest against Spain, France had recently joined up with Cromwellian England (despite the close relationship of the French to the exiled English royal family). At the Battle of the Dunes on 14 June 1658, which led to the seizure of Spanish-held Dunkirk, the celebrated commander the Vicomte de Turenne headed the French, aided by six thousand English infantry under Sir William Lockhart. The Spanish forces under Don Juan José of Austria included not only Turenne's former commander the Grand Condé, but also the younger brother of Charles II, James Duke of York.
The French King, who believed in sharing so far as was possible the rigours of a campaign with his troops, insisted on lodging at nearby Mardyck despite the discouragement of Mazarin. The Cardinal pointed out that the courtiers were eating the food from the countryside needed by the army. But Louis would not listen. As Mazarin commented wryly to a colleague: ‘He is the master, but nothing will prevent me from telling him always what I believe would be in his interest.' It was extremely hot and Mardyck was notoriously unhealthy, with the lingering odour of corpses all about, some new (there had been four thousand Spanish casualties alone), but also the half-buried dead of battles long ago. Wrote Madame de Motteville of these unwelcome presences: ‘the dryness of the land’ preserved the bodies.15
Louis fell ill, probably with typhoid fever. Even now he argued with Mazarin about the need to retreat to Calais. But once there his fever flared up hideously and many of those around him – in an age when sudden death from a disease like typhoid was a common phenomenon – feared the worst. For about ten days he was in extreme danger. There was something like panic. (The point has been well made that the contemporary concentration on the eldest son ‘took no account of sudden death’.)16 The sight of this nineteen-year-old royal sun in eclipse led to court attention focusing on the new light on the horizon: seventeen-year-old Monsieur. It was at this moment that the remarkable subjugation of Monsieur's spirit – subjugated since birth – was evinced. For Monsieur himself never wavered publicly and privately in his despair at his brother's illness and his total loyalty to him personally. In turn this critical moment in Louis's life cemented his own feelings of protection and loyalty to his brother. Monsieur's evident homosexuality – for which Louis had no time in others – did not come between the brothers.
Louis XIV recovered. His cure was attributed to doses of wine laced with emetics such as cassia (an inferior kind of cinnamon) and senna. The ecstatic gratitude of the whole country, spared ‘the most grievous loss France could have' in the words of a gazette, left Cardinal Mazarin with two problems.17 One was the need for a suitable royal bride (and royal mother of future kings) sooner rather than later. The other was, of course, the problem of his spritely niece Marie Mancini, who was found weeping at Louis's bedside during his illness. An expedition to Lyon in the autumn of 1658 was intended to solve both problems, although at the time it appeared to solve neither. It was intended to bring together two young people in a very public manner to see if a marriage could be arranged. The people concerned were Louis King of France and – to the unconcealed disgust of Queen Anne – his first cousin, Marguerite-Yolande of Savoy. As the court trailed south to Lyon, Queen Anne was alternately morose and furious (her lovely Spanish or Spanish-accented voice became extremely shrill when she was angry). And Marie Mancini went along too in the great caravan of the court.
Once Lyon was reached, the King continued his ostentatious attentions to Marie. They laughed together. They gossiped: Marie's mocking style made her a good gossip. They whispered conspiratorially. Marie Mancini sang to the music of Louis on his beloved guitar while the Italian-turned-French musician Lully composed airs for her. They danced and rode together. And Queen Anne remained torn between her disapproval of her son's defiant conduct and her dismay at the Cardinal's Savoyard project (so much less appealing to her than that shimmering vision of the Infanta …).
When the French and Savoyard royal families encountered each other, formal kisses were exchanged, denoting Duchess Christine's previous status as a princess of France. Marguerite-Yolande proved to be pleasant enough, if extremely shy: ‘the most demure and reserved person in the world'. Her appearance was derided by the Grande Mademoiselle, who generally found something unpleasant to say about younger women, on the grounds that her head was too big for her body. But she had beautiful eyes, even if her nose was rather large. Marguerite-Yolande's main defect was her ‘sunburnt' complexion. This was an age when a white skin was so highly prized that women of society wore masks outdoors to protect themselves, especially when out hunting: Marguerite-Yolande had evidently not worn a mask. Naturally Marie Mancini, like the Grande Mademoiselle, disparaged her in private to the King.
Nevertheless the solemn ritual dance of seventeenth-century royal encounters was carried out. Other marriages were mentioned. The Grande Mademoiselle for the young Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy? In her teens Anne-Marie-Louise had been attractive enough, given her material endowments, if rather masculine-looking: her appearance had fitted her for her warrior-queen stance at the Bastille during the Fronde. It was true that she was big-boned with a prominent reddish nose and bad teeth in a long face: but she had the fair hair and blue eyes admired at the time. Now she was thirty-one and the fair hair was already greying. It was a trait the Grande Mademoiselle told Queen Anne with characteristic pride of race that she inherited from both noble families from which she was descended: although in principle she saw herself as far more Bourbon than Montpensier, referring to her mother's mother dismissively as ‘my distant grandmother: she was not a queen’.18 Madame de Motteville loyally remarked that the Grande Mademoiselle's pink and white complexion had not faded, but it was hardly surprising that Charles Emmanuel did not leap at the opportunity. Later he married her pretty little half-sister Françoise-Madeleine d'Orléans.
Poor Marguerite-Yolande! Far from being the future Queen of France, she was the present victim of the Cardinal's machinations. He bestowed a present of diamond and black enamel earrings upon her. This was intended as a consolation for the fact that all the time tectonic plates were moving beneath the surface of dynastic Europe, which would not be to her advantage. As the Savoyard match looked ready for conclusion, King Philip IV of Spain acted in dramatic fashion.
‘That cannot and will not be,' he said angrily to his courtiers. The Cardinal had won his game of bluff: the Spanish King refused to contemplate the prospect of a Franco-Savoyard block of territory so hostile to his own interests. Within a remarkably short time, given the bitterness and length of the military dispute between the two countries, an envoy, the Marquis de Pimentel, was sent offering the hand of the Infanta. As for Marguerite-Yolande, some care was taken to gloss over the fact that she had been rejected, since a seventeenth-century princess had a certain market value which was not enhanced by this kind of incident. The fiction was maintained that Savoy not France had ended the marriage negotiations.
There was universal relief in France at the prospect of peace, even though the negotiations for the marriage between King and Infanta which would bring closure to the past were protracted. As one Frenchman wrote of the possible union with Maria Teresa to a friend on 1 January 1659: ‘Everyone who is a good Frenchman wants this very much. That will put an end to the war and she will be the Queen of Peace.'19 These popular feelings were matched by a spirit of hectic gaiety at the court which was on a less statesmanlike level. Anne of Austria's own relief at the ending of the Savoyard negotiations and her hopes for future ones with Spain were marred by her disgust at her son's behaviour. Much later Marie Mancini gave a nostalgic account of the revels which ensued: every lovely lady had her cavalier and every gallant cavalier his lady: ‘we were all easily persuaded t
hat love was the only thing that mattered, which was the spirit of these festivities.’20 So in various allegorical ballets Marie played the character of Venus, a Summer Star, a Fairy, a Goddess and even on one occasion ‘my Queen', as Louis murmured in her ear.
One incident left a special impression on all the courtiers who witnessed it. ‘His Majesty wishing to give me his hand,' wrote Marie later, ‘and mine having struck against the pummel of his sword, hurting it slightly, he drew the sword briskly from the sheath and threw it away.' She added: ‘I will not try to tell with what an air he did this; there are no words to explain it.’21
Was Louis XIV still dallying with the unthinkable: marrying for love a girl from a modestly noble Italian family, who owed her social prominence entirely to the fact of being the niece of the King's unpopular adviser? At one point Mazarin told Anne that Marie was boasting that her hold was so great she could actually force the King to marry her. At this, Anne of Austria positively screeched at the Cardinal: if the King was capable of such a ‘despicable' action, all France would rise up against the Cardinal and I would head the rebels’.22 But was he capable of it? The answer seems to be the proverbially indecisive yes and no.
On the one hand the Queen's agitation is only explicable in terms of Marie Mancini's demonstrable power over Louis, that Armide-like enchantment she was said to have exercised. On the other hand Louis always knew in his heart of hearts that his mother and the Cardinal were there to rescue him. Voltaire put the situation eloquently in his history written in the following century: Louis XIV ‘loved [Marie] enough to marry her and was sufficiently master of himself to separate himself from her’.23 This however was with the benefit of hindsight, full knowledge of the famously self-controlled man Louis would become. But perhaps it was not so much Louis's mastery over himself at this point, as Anne and Mazarin's mastery over him, the training in duty which he could not and finally did not want to cast aside.
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Page 8