Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

by Antonia Fraser

  In order to assuage the horrified grief of Charles II, Louis ordered a state funeral as for a Queen of France, while one of Henriette-Anne's rings was delivered back to her brother. In an even greater departure from tradition, Louis sent Queen Marie-Thérèse to the ceremony incognito. (The King himself by custom never attended such rituals.) It was Bossuet's oration at these obsequies in Saint-Denis on 21 August which crowned the life of Henriette-Anne with the nobility it deserved.14* He stressed the shortness of her life: ‘Madame passed at once from morning to evening like the flowers of the field.' He harked back to her early years in France: how ‘the misfortunes of her House could not crush her in her youth and already at that time we saw in her a greatness which owed nothing to fortune', she who had a head and heart even above her royal birth. But now: ‘O disastrous night! O frightful night! When there arrived all at once this astonishing news: “Madame is dying! Madame is dead!”' And the Bishop told Louis XIV that Madame had been ‘gentle towards death as she was to all the world.15

  Just as La Fontaine had saluted Henriette-Anne for the recovery of ‘our court's laughing face', so Madame de Sévigné wrote to her cousin Bussy-Rabutin that ‘all happiness, charm and pleasure' had departed from the court with her death. The Comtesse de La Fayette put it quite simply: it was ‘one of those losses for which one is never consoled.16

  A few days after Henriette-Anne's death a scene took place which might seem bizarre by any standards except those of the French court created by Louis XIV. The King was devastated by the death of his brother's wife: his thoughts dwelled on her perennial youthfulness as he remembered it (never mind what had happened to her in recent years), her devotion to him seen in her embassy to England. Above all Henriette-Anne was the first beloved contemporary to die, an epochal moment in the life of any human being, including a king.

  Finding himself with the Grande Mademoiselle, Louis indicated to her that there was now what in modern terms would be called a job opportunity: the position of Madame was vacant and she might wish to fill it.17 Anne-Marie-Louise was forty-three years old and her childbearing capacity, which had been doubted in her thirties, had certainly now vanished. The King was therefore thinking along two lines. On the one hand he was, as ever with the unfortunate heiress, eyeing those rich properties coveted by so many over the years, and wondering about their fate after the Grande Mademoiselle's death. On the other hand he sincerely believed in the necessity of a new Madame to replace the old one. As a future incumbent would say later, ‘being Madame' was a métier, a profession. Effectively the second lady at court – Louis's surviving legitimate daughter, known as ‘the Petite Madame', was only three – Madame had a role to play in the royal order of things.

  As it happened, both the spinster-bride and the widower-bridegroom had other priorities. Monsieur definitely wanted a son and heir whereas the Grande Mademoiselle had for some time harboured the extraordinary, even exotic design of marrying a courtier named Lauzun, who was by no conceivable means a proper match for her. Anne-Marie-Louise therefore told the King that she had thought of marrying without specifying whom she had in mind.

  Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Comte de Lauzun, was now in his late thirties, a man of good family connections and much favoured by Louis himself. Unalluring to the eye of posterity, he clearly possessed considerable sex appeal, despite being described as ‘very diminutive' by the Duke of Berwick, who was baffled by his attraction. Perhaps it was the charm of outrageous, even louche behaviour which benefited him in such regimented society. Not all his reported remarks to his would-be fiancée were chivalrous: for example he criticised Anne-Marie-Louise for going to the ballet and parties at her age when she should be praying and doing good works. He also disapproved of an over-youthful red ribbon in her hair. The Grande Mademoiselle took a different line. ‘People of my rank are always young’, she once said.18 At any rate he caught her eye and somehow (the potential rewards to him were enormous) suggested in her emotionally virginal mind the dazzling prospect of marriage. That is to say, it was dazzling to this long-term spinster in romantic terms, otherwise horrifyingly daring and even foolhardy.

  Astonishing most of his court, Louis did give permission for the marriage, essential for public acknowledgement of the union (a secret marriage with the Church's blessing was another matter). Queen Marie-Thérèse and Monsieur, both sticklers for the formalities, were vociferously opposed to the match. Yet it was significant that the shock, horror at the news of this fearful mésalliance was felt most keenly by the Grande Mademoiselle's own servants. Three days later, on 18 December, with a heavy heart but conscious of the duty of the sovereign, Louis rescinded his permission, to the devastation of Anne-Marie-Louise. His excuse – given in a memorandum on the subject – was that Anne-Marie-Louise had pretended falsely that he, the King, had promoted the marriage: ‘my reputation was involved’.19 But court disapproval was the major reason. Whether Louis had been weak in the first place in giving in to her desire so strongly expressed, or was acting weakly now in cancelling his decision, was a matter of opinion. Most people at the time thought the former.

  Louis, having broken the poor woman's heart in the cause of the royal order in which he believed so passionately, now showed himself at his most supportive. When Anne-Marie-Louise broke down at a ball, it was the King himself who went to her aid, thus preempting the unpleasant ridicule of the courtiers. ‘Cousin, you are not well,' he said and personally escorted her away. So the Grande Mademoiselle remained with her fortune – who would now inherit it? The subject did not go away as she grew older – and her high position at the court. Louis also retained Lauzun in his favour, even using him on a confidential mission, until the rakish count, in a highly melodramatic manner, brought about his own disgrace.

  It was a question of the reputation of Athénaïs. Lauzun asked the favourite to intervene on his behalf with the King on the subject of the marriage and then hid himself under her bed when Louis was in situ to make sure she had carried out her mission. Athénaïs, believing herself in private, did no such thing. She then lied about it to Lauzun. He was a man of whose violence people at court tended to be frightened, and for good reason. Furious at what he saw as a gross betrayal (never mind his own gross invasion of the lovers' privacy), Lauzun now shouted at the King that he himself had slept with Athénaïs. Louis, with the greatest difficulty mastering his seething outrage, broke his own cane in half and threw it out of the window ‘lest he strike a gentleman'. (His self-control would later incur the ultimate approval of that courtly purist Saint-Simon.)20 Lauzun ended up in prison in the south, in the company of the disgraced minister Fouquet, where he languished for ten years.

  All this left the problem of Monsieur's second marriage unresolved. It was the eventual solution, in November 1671, which brought to the court of Louis XIV not only its most original female member but also its most entertaining observer, rivalled only by Saint-Simon (but the new Duchesse d'Orléans had over twenty years' start on the great memorialist).* The person in question, known to history by her family name of Liselotte, was Elisabeth-Charlotte, daughter of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine.

  At first sight Liselotte was an obscure German princess, very far from being the greatest match in Europe as Marie-Thérèse had once been. Nor was she a King's sister, and that King an important European player, like the first Madame. But the Palatinate, a principality on the Rhine with its capital at Heidelberg, had considerable geographical importance where the plans of Louis XIV to the east were concerned. The Wittelsbach dynasty had acquired the Palatinate in the thirteenth century, and by the beginning of the seventeenth the Palatinate was the leading Protestant German state. However, it suffered much devastation during the Thirty Years War. Liselotte's marriage contract, if not fulfilled, offered rights over and opportunities in the Palatinate, in a grim parallel (from the point of view of that country) with the rights of Marie-Thérèse in the Spanish Netherlands.

  Liselotte was born on 27 May 1652 and was thus nearly twelve years yo
unger than her future husband. Her interesting ancestry included her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I, known as the Winter Queen, who was herself the granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots, the most romantic femme fatale in history.* Liselotte however was neither beautiful nor romantic. She was stolid, not to say earthy, and even on occasion downright vulgar. In her letters home Liselotte would cover these vulgarities with the airy words: ‘By your leave, by your leave', when she gave vent to such comments as this: ‘With my cold, I shall probably look like a shat-on carrot.' More entertaining was her frequent use of folksy proverbs: ‘The snow falls as easily on a cow-pat [Kuhfladen] as on a roseleaf’ was one of them. ‘When the goat gets too frisky, she goes dancing on ice and breaks a leg' was another.

  It will be seen that in a world where style and dignity, everything possessed by the first Madame, were so highly esteemed, Liselotte was the exception. The Grande Mademoiselle deplored her ‘lack of a French air' Duc to her German origins. Certainly she must have spoken French with a strong German accent, as her phonetic spelling of some French words indicates. And Liselotte positively hated dancing, the art which distinguished the French court, starting with the exceptional skill of the King himself. This ‘confounded ball' she exclaimed in exasperation on one occasion, probably the only person at court to feel that way (Monsieur like his brother was an excellent dancer). Nor was she a romantic. Bérénice's lament over losing Titus in Racine's eponymous play did not move her: ‘All the howlings she sets up about this make me impatientx2019;.21

  In the matter of her appearance, the second Madame was also at the opposite end of the spectrum from her predecessor. Where Henriette-Anne was graceful and slender, getting thinner with the years, without ever sacrificing her charm, Liselotte was big and got bigger. A vivid interest in food and drink helped on the process: she never lost her taste for German food and drink such as sausage, sauerkraut and beer, which had to be sent to her by her favourite aunt Sophia. Liselotte was the first to describe her face in comic terms – it was a ‘badger-cat-monkey' face and her nose a ‘badger's snout'. As for her complexion, the apple-cheeked freshness of her youth quickly gave way to a coarse weatherbeaten appearance, her skin prematurely wrinkled and ‘red as a crayfish' Duc to her mania for hunting all day and every day without the conventional mask to protect her. All this was very far from Henriette-Anne's legendary complexion of‘jasmine and roses’. As her weight increased Liselotte once again pronounced the best verdict on her appearance: ‘I would be good enough to eat if 1 were roasted like sucking-pig.22 Nor did her clothes help: Liselotte boasted of taking no interest in them; no alluring déshabille for her, either cumbersome court clothes or serviceable hunting costumes, nothing in between.

  The peculiar circumstances of her family background surely explain the excessive attention the adult Liselotte would come to pay to what Saint-Simon called ‘honour, virtue, rank, nobility', with the emphasis on the last two. In time this attention would have something quite hysterical about it, especially about the status of the royal bastards: ‘mouse-droppings in the pepper' was her blunt way of describing them.23 Yet Liselotte had been raised against the background of a highly unusual marriage, or rather two of them. The constant disputes of her parents led in the end to the disappearance of her mother from court. Already Charles Louis had installed his mistress in a room above his own, and she had given birth to several of his children; Charles Louis now bigamously married this mistress in the lifetime of his wife to ‘legitimise’ them.

  The happiest times of Liselotte's childhood were the seven years spent with her beloved aunt Sophia, her father's sister, married to the Elector of Hanover.* Sophia, to whom many of Liselotte's letters were later addressed, took the girl on a prolonged visit to The Hague, where her grandmother Elizabeth the Winter Queen had taken up residence. It was here that Liselotte got to know her cousin William of Orange, two years older and like herself a Protestant. It had been Liselotte's wistful hope to marry him eventually. Now, for reasons of realpolitik, she was not only marrying elsewhere, but marrying a Catholic, in consequence of which she had to change her own religion. Nobody in her family circle seemed to see anything odd about this, including the stoutly Protestant Sophia: the French King's brother was a splendid match for someone like her niece. One simply had to make sacrifices …

  Liselotte said later that she had only agreed to conversion in order to honour her father. It certainly cannot be said that Catholicism was ever really imprinted on Liselotte. Once again this was something which set her apart from those at the French court, forever worrying about their own salvation. The torments of a Louise de La Vallière were unknown to her. Louise wrestled with a Catholic conscience; Liselotte did not. It was something she faced in herself: she was not devout and did not have the kind of faith that moved mountains. The most Liselotte could do, she declared, was try to keep the Ten Commandments. As for God Almighty, she conceded that she did admire Him ‘although without understanding Him’.24

  Over the years Liselotte became by inference quite anti-Catholic: ‘the boredom of all that Latin whining', she wrote privately of one particular long-drawn-out Easter. Any sermon longer than fifteen minutes sent Liselotte unashamedly to sleep. Perhaps her cynicism had begun with the day of her proxy marriage in the Gothic cathedral of Metz where a plethora of sacraments was rained down on her in a very short space: conversion, communion, confirmation and marriage. (At the time her conversion was said to be Duc to ‘the Holy spirit’.)25

  On arrival at the French court Liselotte did have one great asset which for the first few years outweighed her disadvantages of style: she amused the King who had, as it were, commissioned her arrival. Her frank speaking was an agreeable novelty, as people in power always do enjoy frank speaking until it wounds them. Her enthusiasm for the outdoor life, whatever it did to her complexion, was very much to his taste too. Liselotte, who had once wanted to be a boy, was a marvellous rider – not a graceful Diana of the chase as Marie Mancini had been, but an Amazon. The gazette Mercure Galant wrote that ‘few men were as vigorous in pursuit of this exercise' and certainly Madame was capable of hunting from five in the morning until nine at night. Liselotte also liked to walk, unlike most people at the French court, who she complained were left ‘puffing and panting’ twenty paces behind her, with the exception of the King. Like Louis himself, Liselotte was also passionate about the theatre.26

  Louis therefore showed his new recruit to court great kindness from the beginning, when he introduced her to Marie-Thérèse: ‘Courage, Madame,’ he said gently. ‘She is far more frightened of you than you are of her.' He also liked the fact that Liselotte was virtuous. No gallantries were to be expected from this Madame, and when the sophisticated Princesse de Monaco, a swinger avant la lettre, suggested a lesbian affair, Liselotte was outraged. If she was, as some suspected, a little platonically in love with the King, that was only to be expected from one of ‘these other stars' which surrounded the sun ‘like a court' in the words of Louis's memoirs, and hardly displeasing to him.27

  Contradictory as it might seem, Louis XIV had a great taste for virtuous women whom he could admire wholeheartedly as he remembered admiring his mother. One of these was Colbert's daughter, Jeanne-Marie, married to the Duc de Chevreuse, Liselotte's contemporary with ‘her admirable virtue which never failed her in any predicament'; she was incidentally one of the few fellow walkers Liselotte discovered, so perhaps virtue and exercise went together. Later Louis would admire Saint-Simon's young wife, daughter of the Duc de Beauvillier, for her mixture of modesty and noble bearing. The supreme example was the beautiful dark-eyed Italian princess, Mary Beatrice d'Este, who passed through France at the age of fourteen in 1673 to marry James Duke of York. On this occasion Louis described himself paternally as her ‘godfather', but he did not forget Mary Beatrice, that vision of Catholic youth and beauty, even if he could scarcely have predicted the circumstances in which they would next meet. Then there was his children's governess, Fr
ançoise Scarron, whom Louis was getting to know, in clandestine visits to the Parisian house of her little charges: she was nothing if not virtuous.

  Liselotte's take on the whole subject of marriage was expressed like this: ‘Marriages are like death. The time and season are marked, you can't escape. That's how Our Lord wished it and how we must do it’.28 It was a view which her predecessor would have shared, just as Liselotte quickly came to share Henriette-Anne's dislike of the Chevalier de Lorraine, who now proceeded to humiliate the second wife wherever possible just as he had humiliated the first. As for Monsieur himself, the best Liselotte could do, describing him to her aunt Sophia, was to call him ‘not ignoble', with his hair, his eyebrows and lashes all very black, his large nose and his small mouth.

  But in one crucial respect, the marriage of Monsieur and the second Madame was a success. Liselotte conceived her first child, a son, less than a year after marriage. ‘Very soon there is going to be a big bang,' she wrote in her merry way in May 1673. Although this boy did not live long, a second and healthy son Philippe, given the title Duc de Chartres, was born in August 1674. His horoscope predicted that he would be pope, ‘but I am very much afraid that he is more likely to be the Antichrist’, added Liselotte.* A daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, followed two years later, who evidently took after her mother: she was ‘as fat as a Christmas goose and large for her age'. After that, by mutual agreement, Monsieur and Madame ceased marital relations. Monsieur had found them, it seems, even more testing with Liselotte than with Henriette-Anne, when he had after all been a decade younger. From Liselotte's confidences we know that Monsieur needed the inspiration of rosaries and holy medals draped in appropriate places to perform the necessary act.*