Immediately after dinner, he suggested retirement. Marie-Thérèse gave vent to a few maidenly demurs – it was too soon – but on being told that the King was waiting for her, changed her tune and begged her ladies – ‘Hurry, hurry!' – to speed up the elaborate rituals, dressings and undressings thought necessary for a Queen to meet a King for the first time in bed. Appropriately enough, it would be Louis's mother who closed the bed-curtains on bride and groom before departing.33
The wedding night was a success, unlike most royal wedding nights throughout history. The marriage so ardently desired by Anne of Austria for over twenty-one years looked set fair to fulfil all her hopes.
* The name Précieuses was first used for these preternaturally clever women in 1654, not in denigration but descriptively. It should not therefore at this date be identified with the English word ‘precious' or affected. Molière's play of that name which poked fun at young women with highfaluting ideas about their own accomplishments (not women's education as such) dates from 1659. Its success had the effect of changing the meaning of the word to something humorously critical.
* A visit still commemorated in a vivid fresco of the royal party opposite the Mairie. Apart from King, Queen and Cardinal, it shows a musketeer – perhaps d'Artagnan – and two Mazarinettes, presumably not including Marie.
* By which name she will be designated in future.
* At roughly this date, Charles II was Duc to be restored to the throne of England on his thirtieth birthday (29 May by English reckoning, which lagged ten days behind that of the Continent in the seventeenth century). Unlike 1648, 1660 was a good year for kings.
* And remains blocked up to this day, with a plaque stating the reason.
CHAPTER 4
Our Court's Laughing Face
Our court rediscovers its laughing face.
– La Fontaine, ‘Ode to Madame' (Henriette-Anne)
On 26 August 1660 the King and the new Queen paraded through the streets of Paris in the traditional ceremony of the Royal Entry. It was a magnificent display of panoply and power, both spiritual and temporal. That is to say, it was the Church which led the procession: priests and monks brandished crosses and chanted the litanies of the saints, before the soldiers and courtiers followed. Marie-Thérèse was borne along in a chariot drawn by six grey horses, her person draped in gold, so richly embroidered, every inch of the cloth covered in precious jewels, that she dazzled the eye. Since the Queen would have no separate coronation – it was considered unlucky because Henri IV had been assassinated immediately after the coronation of Marie de Médicis – this was her introduction to her husband's subjects. Marie-Thérèse smiled graciously, acknowledging the cheers. The handsome figure of Louis, riding on a spirited bay horse whose harness also sparkled with jewels, left a deep impression on the multitudes who witnessed the parade.
Amongst these, watching from a balcony, was the twenty-five-year-old Françoise d'Aubigné, wife of the playwright Paul Scarron. ‘I don't think there could be a finer sight in the world,' she wrote the next day. ‘And the Queen must go to bed tonight well content with the husband she has chosen.’1 Her last remark may have been an unconscious reflection on her own very different marriage to the invalid playwright (who would die six weeks later). But it was also an allusion to Louis as the symbolic bridegroom of France, marrying a bride from Spain who brought ‘peace as her dowry': an allegorical arch at the beginning of the Pont Notre-Dame, one of many such, had as its theme the conquest of Mars, the God of War, by Conjugal Love. Another young woman, Louise de La Vallière, still in attendance on the Orléans princesses, gazed in silent rapture at her hero.
If Conjugal Love had not exactly conquered the God of War for ever – as Louis's subsequent history would amply demonstrate – it was certainly holding sway in the first months of his marriage. The wedding had been followed by a leisurely two and a half months' progress from the south. During this time and in the seasons to come, Louis paid assiduous court to his young wife, as indeed he continued to do in his own fashion for the rest of her life. In the previous century, the celebrated ancestor of Louis and Marie-Thérèse, the Emperor Charles V, had seriously advised his son Philip II to ‘keep a watch' on himself and not indulge too much in ‘the pleasures of marriage' lest he damage his health. This was not the advice which was tendered to Louis XIV, nor would it have been welcome to his bride. There is a story that Marie-Thérèse used the opportunity of the wedding night to make the King swear never to abandon her but to sleep every night at her side.2 While it would be surprising if the former Infanta had at this point sufficient worldly knowledge to extract such a brilliantly aimed promise, it is true that the King did end up almost every night – including some very late ones as time went on – in his wife's bed. In the morning he would depart for his own official lever or dressing ceremony, leaving Marie-Thérèse to that longer, lazier Spanish sleep so beloved of Queen Anne. When love-making took place, Marie-Thérèse made it clear that she was ‘well content with the husband she had chosen', in Françoise Scarron's phrase: blushing, rubbing her little white hands together, and accepting teasing the next morning. She would also ritually take communion to indicate a royal conjunction the night before, with prayers that the result might be a child in nine months' time.
The marriage therefore did not go wrong in the bedroom. And at first Louis basked in the general approval for his course of virtue, headed by that of his mother and the Church. As Madame de Motteville, observer of all this, noted: he enjoyed ‘the legitimate passion that his wife felt for him.3 (The passion that Marie Mancini had felt for him was not ‘legitimate', nor was the adolescent rebellion connected to it.) A few years after his marriage, Louis, drawing up instructions for his baby son for the future, told him to ask of God ‘a princess who was agreeable to him’.4* In this sense at least, God or Louis's advisers had certainly succeeded. The trouble was that Marie-Thérèse was dull. Uninterested in the arts, she formed a little Spanish-speaking Castilian world of her own, with her pet dogs and her equally pet dwarves, the traditional companions of a Spanish infanta as seen in Velázquez's portraits. Her one enthusiasm, for gambling, although a frequent pastime at all courts – both Anne and Mazarin gambled – could hardly be called inspiring.
In time she would display a possessive and jealous streak, so perhaps that wedding-night demand was actually true, but Louis XIV was perfectly capable of interpreting such jealousy as flattering to his ego. It was Marie-Thérèse's innate reluctance to accept the public role of Queen of France in its fullest implications which weakened her in her husband's eyes. (It is ironic that she would actually have made a very good Queen of Spain.) Louis XIV did not as yet know quite what he did want in his first lady – some kind of star to reflect the light of his radiant sun – but the instinct to explore the situation was there.
As it was, the person whose highest hopes were actually fulfilled was Anne of Austria. Just as Marie-Thérèse found the mother to whom she was determined to submit, so Anne found her royal ‘daughter', that name she had desired to give Marie-Thérèse all her life, as she wrote in March. Both immensely devout, the two Queens had an excellent time visiting convents, praying together and taking part in other religious practices. There was, it turned out, no question of Anne's Simeon-like retirement. They formed a kind of pious unit, speaking to each other entirely in Spanish (as a result of which, Marie-Thérèse's French never really improved, so that it was fortunate that the King could speak some Spanish). All of this could of course have been far worse. The Queen duly fell pregnant in early 1661, thus fulfilling what many, if not Louis XIV, might have thought was her only function. The pregnancy however left her young and active husband with a lot of energy to spare.
Providentially, as it seemed at the time, royal protocol was about to furnish him with a playmate. Furthermore, she was one ideally equipped to act as the First Lady of the Court: although she was in fact only the third lady at the court in the lifetime of Queen Anne. This was Henriette-Anne, marri
ed off to her first cousin Monsieur in March 1661; one of those alliances, like the ending of a Shakespeare play, intended to solve the destinies of the remaining unattached characters in the drama. (One of the other major players, Marie Mancini, finally got married to Prince Colonna a few weeks later and departed for Rome: even here she was an instrument of her uncle's policy, for Marie by this time would have preferred Prince Charles of Lorraine, but it was not to be.)6 As the wife of the King's brother, Henriette-Anne was now styled by the proudly simple title of ‘Madame'.
At sixteen Henriette-Anne, Duchesse d'Orléans, rated the best dancer at the court, was a very different creature from the little waif of a princess once scorned by her cousin Louis. No one would scorn Madame now, not so much because they would not dare, but because no one would wish to. Everyone now was falling chivalrously in love with Henriette-Anne: she herself would say wryly of this period that even Monsieur had been in love with her for six weeks. The Comtesse de La Fayette commented that the court was amazed by the sparkle of the young woman who had once been a silent child in the corner of her aunt's room.7
Where her looks were concerned, youth certainly played some part in her allure: versifier Jean Loret, author of The Historic Muse, described her as ‘this springtime beauty'. Madame de Motteville waxed lyrical about the natural bloom of her ‘roses and jasmine' complexion, her perfect teeth, the sparkle of her eyes, dark like her mother's (her fair hair had darkened too).8 Henriette-Anne had grown tall, and her slender figure had filled out, her natural grace helping to conceal the fact that her back was slightly crooked. She was a wonderful rider as well as dancer, with a passion for swimming which was perhaps one of the few things she owed to her English heritage. Charles II, the elder brother she reverenced and had recently visited in England to mark her future marriage, was a fanatical swimmer. Somehow she never seemed to need sleep, going to bed late and waking her people at dawn, in contrast to the somnolent Marie-Thérèse.
Where her tastes were concerned, Henriette-Anne had a passionate love of gardening, something she shared with the King: appropriately graceful swans floated in the ornamental water of her gardens at the Palais-Royal. She had a fine picture collection, including a Van Dyck of her English family and a Correggio of the penitent Magdalen. Henriette-Anne also loved to act as a muse to writers. The young Racine (born the year after Louis XIV) dedicated his play Andromaque to her, complimenting her not only on her intelligence but on her benign influence where the arts were concerned. ‘The court regards you', he wrote, ‘as the arbiter of all that is delightful.’9
But Madame de Motteville pinpointed the real secret of the attraction which everyone (including, briefly, her homosexual husband) felt for Henriette-Anne: it was her charm, that ‘something about her which made one love her', a ‘certain languishing air' she adopted in conversation, in the words of Bussy-Rabutin, which convinced people she was asking for their love ‘whatever trivial thing she said'. In short, she had not been able to become a queen – as she and her mother had devoutly wished – but ‘to remedy this defect it was her wish to reign in the hearts of honest men; and to find her glory in the world by the charm and beauty of her spirit’.10 Protocol dictated that this self-styled Queen of Hearts should, in the absence of the real Queen, head every entertainment, indoors and outdoors, with her brother-in-law, the real King.
‘Our court / Rediscovers its laughing face / For while Mars flourished / Love languished …', wrote La Fontaine in his ‘Ode to Madame’.11 But before that rediscovery could be complete, the new mode of the governing of France had to be established in the spring of 1661. The health of Cardinal Mazarin had grown progressively worse and it was clear that he must be dying long before his actual death took place on 9 March 1661. (He was fifty-eight.) This meant that the King was granted an extended season in which to decide who would replace the great minister, he who had in effect controlled France ever since Louis could remember. Queen Anne, after weeping inconsolably, commissioned an enormous marble tomb for her loyal friend.* To the astonishment of Louis's advisers, he announced that there was to be no replacement for Cardinal Mazarin. In future he himself would preside over his own government.
It was a decision based, one imagines, on a long-held desire to be his own master, which only the prospect of Mazarin's decease fully revealed to him. Some people secretly believed this decision to be the King's latest caprice, to be rescinded shortly: a reading of his character which would prove to be totally wrong. Of course, Louis was assisted by his Council. Some of its members were according to convention senior aristocrats, or warriors, or a combination of the two. But Louis was also aided by highly intelligent ministers such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Here was a man in his early forties at the death of Mazarin, whose father had been a failed merchant but who had, by diligence and efficiency, worked his way up the French bureaucratic system. As the Cardinal's confidential man of affairs Colbert had already shown himself capable of trust in intimate matters such as the business of Marie Mancini (and he had a trustworthy wife too). Colbert's orderly mind meshed perfectly with that of the King. His dual ambition was to advance himself and sort out the finances of France, bedevilled like those of any country involved in prolonged warfare. Then there was the Intendant of Finance, a man who had perhaps expected to replace Mazarin: the intelligent, powerful – and powerfully corrupt – Nicolas Fouquet. It remained to be seen what surprise the King, who had already surprised everyone with one decision, had in store for him.
The power of the King of France at this date was in theory absolute but in practice it was not absolutely unlimited. The Estates-General, composed of the three classes of society, noble, religious and commoners, had not met since 1614 (and would not meet, incidentally, until the summer of 1789). But the various parlements in the provinces led by the Parlement de Paris in the capital were certainly not without the power of protest over matters such as taxation, as the latter's behaviour at the time of the Fronde had demonstrated. The lessons of the Fronde and its suppression, the dangers of a turbulent aristocracy, could not fail to be fresh in everyone's minds including that of the King, whose boyhood had been branded by it. Sensibly or insensibly, the Sun King set out to make it clear that outside the hedonistic warmth of the rays he spread at court lay coldness, impoverishment – and personal failure.
Yet the kind of kingship he now proceeded to display was as much marked by his industry as by his hedonism. Where the industry was concerned, ‘all admired the extraordinary change' according to the Chevalier de Gramont and there was general surprise at ‘the brilliant emergence of talents' which the King had kept hidden. Certainly, it would be very far from the truth to see in Louis XIV the type of amused indolence which characterised his first cousin Charles II, now safely established across the Channel. Charles yawned and wrote notes in council meetings and wondered when it would be time for him to go hunting. Louis did not yawn and write notes, and as to hunting, in a fanatically well-organised day, that too had its place, but never to the detriment of his long hours of work. Not only was Louis hard-working as such, but he showed an obsessive interest and command of detail. This extended not only to military orders and decisions but to matters of architecture and decoration, down to the smallest points. For example, he criticised the figures on the royal fans and had them altered – this baton should be held higher, too many dwarves on one (a dig at Marie-Thérèse?), too many dogs on another (Louis adored dogs, so this was purely a design flaw).12 In his relentless industry, a lifelong pursuit, Louis XIV resembled his work-obsessed ancestor Philip II of Spain.
On the other hand the austere Spanish King surely never enjoyed a season like that first brilliant summer of the King's personal rule. They had all known hard times, even Marie-Thérèse with her sad childhood. Now they were free. And everyone was so young. Louis and the pregnant Marie-Thérèse were both twenty-two; Monsieur was twenty; Henriette-Anne's seventeenth birthday was in June. The ladies-in-waiting to Madame such as Louise de La Vallière, who had managed to join
her service, were very young too, a fact reflected in the nickname given to these female attendants: ‘the flower garden'. There were picnics. There were moonlight expeditions. Ballet as ever was the centre of graceful amusement. On one particular occasion at Fontainebleau, there was a Court Ballet in which the chief dancers were the King, Henriette-Anne and ‘the handsomest man at court', the Comte de Guiche (although much fancied by Monsieur, the Comte had declared himself in theatrical fashion in love with Madame: not welcome news to one of Monsieur's jealous temperament). A mechanical way was found to move the stage slowly from one sylvan alley to another so that ‘an infinity of persons' approached imperceptibly in an endless dance, as it were, to the music of time.13
There is one unforgettable image which emerges from that celestial season that comprised – time would show – the happiest hours Henriette-Anne would ever know. Madame had gone swimming with her ladies, as she did every day in midsummer, travelling by coach on account of the heat. But she returned on horseback, followed by her ladies ‘in gallant attire, a thousand feathers nodding on their heads', accompanied by the King ‘and all the youth of the court'. Then there was a supper and to the sound of violins, they drove in carriages round the canals for the greater part of the night.14 The only prominent person in all this who was not young was the now-dowager Queen Anne. Increasingly she was alienated from the joyous revelry, and it was at this point that the advanced age at which she had borne her sons began to tell: for she would be sixty in October.
If Henriette-Anne really was the Queen of Hearts, her ambition, it seemed to royal-watchers at court – and who was not permanently gazing at the King? – that one heart she had captured was that of her brother-in-law. There can be no question that at some point in that summer Louis and Henriette-Anne fell gently, happily in love, perhaps not even understanding what had happened to them for a while. Each incarnated the other's ideal. As Marie-Thérèse would have made a good Queen of Spain, Henriette-Anne, gracious and cultivated, would certainly have made a wonderful Queen of France. The private life of Louis XIV might indeed have read very differently if, by some diplomatic twist and chance, the Infanta had not actually been available. Anne of Austria would have promoted her other niece instead, and given the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, might well have succeeded. This is not to postulate improbable lifelong fidelity on the part of Louis XIV. Nevertheless the respect he subsequently felt for his intelligent sister-in-law, and the true, deep affection he always bore her – a letter from him years later attests to it* – reveals the best of his attitudes to the female sex. And she was a princess. Somewhere an opportunity was missed.
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Page 10