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

by Antonia Fraser

  In attendance was the royal accoucheur (man-midwife), the calm and competent Julian Clément: he had already performed the same function for Athénaïs. When the baby was finally born shortly after ten o'clock in the evening, he answered the King's question about its sex according to a prearranged code: ‘I do not knowyet, Sire.' This meant a boy. (‘I do not know, Sire' was code for a girl.) It was therefore the suddenly radiant King who cried out: ‘We have a Duc de Bourgogne!’.21 The baby was put on a silver platter and examined – successfully – for perfection.* ‘The little Prince', as Bourgogne was known, was promised a splendid destiny according to his horoscope, with the Sun in the sign of the Lion, Saturn in the eleventh house at the hour of Jupiter. From Louis XIV's point of view, the dynasty was now secure, especially since Marianne-Victoire became pregnant again without mishap a few months later. As a forty-four-year-old grandfather (little older than his parents had been at his birth) he could now relax. He personally had no more need to produce further legitimate heirs.

  The King's patriarchal contentment contrasted with the mood of Liselotte. In July 1682 she described herself as ‘miserable as an old dog'. Everyone went on about her being so sad, she wrote, ‘when they themselves are the daily and hourly cause'. Once again, as with Henriette-Anne, it was not Monsieur's homosexuality which was at issue, since for the last four years, following the birth of a healthy son and daughter, ‘I have been permitted to live in perfect chastity.' (A few years later she decided that abstinence had actually made her ‘a virgin' again.) It was Monsieur's slavish adoration of the Chevalier de Lorraine which upset the balance of what could have been a perfectly acceptable condition. There were also rumours, probably spread by Monsieur's supporters, of Liselotte's own gallantry with the Chevalier de Saint-Saëns: quite untrue, since Liselotte much preferred her dogs (‘the best people I have come across in France, I never have less than four about me … no eiderdown could ever be as cosy').22

  In her unhappiness and her indignation Liselotte asked to retire to a convent where one of her Palatine aunts was a Catholic Abbess. But Louis refused. He gave her three reasons. ‘First of all, you are Madame,' he said, ‘and obliged to uphold that position. Secondly you are my sister-in-law and my affection for you will not allow me to let you leave. Thirdly, you are my brother's wife and I cannot let him be touched by scandal.' To this Liselotte had no alternative but to submit with the words: ‘You are my King and thus my master.' King, Monsieur and Madame all three embraced.

  With the genuine affection he felt for her, Louis now assured Liselotte that although he had taken his brother's part and would always do so, on all other issues he would take hers. It had to be enough. The number of Liselotte's dogs increased: her Mione, ‘the most beautiful little dog in the world', her Rachille behind her chair, her Titti near the writing-table, her Mille Millette on her feet, her Charmion beneath her skirts crying to be close to her mistress, her Charmante also under her skirts on the other side, her Strabdille, her Charmille …23

  There was a subtext to Liselotte's dissatisfaction, and that was her growing jealousy of Madame de Maintenon, a woman not only inferior in birth and with a questionable marriage behind her, but seventeen years her senior. Liselotte, in her frank and often extremely vulgar allusions to Françoise, never stopped harping upon her age: she was ‘die alte Zott' (the old trollop), and in future years old prune, frump, chambermaid, hag, whore, garbage and ordure (an extremely coarse German word was used for this). A handy German proverb was quoted: ‘Where the devil cannot go, he sends an old woman.’24 It was the beginning of a duel which would only end with the death of the King.

  Others, accustomed to the royal mistress being in her prime of beauty, were simply baffled by the spectacle of the King's attentions to a woman now nearer fifty than forty. Primi Visconti, for example, wondered if Françoise might be ‘a skilled person whom the King would use to help him rewrite his memoirs'.25

  Madame de Maintenon was not helping Louis with his memoirs, but the question remained open (and will always be subject to speculation) as to exactly what their relationship was at this point. It was in September 1681 that Madame de Sévigné made her famous pun on the French word for ‘now': Madame de Maintenon was ‘Madame de Maintenant' (Madame Now).

  The following summer marked the date when Louis XIV officially designated Versailles the seat of his court and government. According to the Marquis de Sourches, on 6 May 1682 the King left Monsieur's château of Saint-Cloud to establish himself in Versailles, where ‘he wishes to be for a long time although it is still full of masons'.26 Despite the presence of the masons and the plasterers which upset the great ladies, the disposition of apartments at the new official residence declared a great deal about the current state of his relationships. Françoise's rooms, for example, were of an ambivalent status, parallel to her own ambivalent position.

  Queen Marie-Thérèse had immense and splendid rooms on the south face of the central block of the Parterre du Midi. The Dauphin and Dauphine were also on the royal floor, the latter annoying the King by her grumbling about the builders. Athénaïs, still theoretically maîtresse en titre, had four principal rooms on the same floor, looking out over the Cour Royale. Then there was the plethora of courtiers up above in cramped conditions occupying what would now be seen as attic rooms, obliged to share a common kitchen some way away, even if they had their own privies: nearness to the sovereign was preferred to spacious living.

  But Françoise's accommodation fell into neither category. She had some little square rooms facing north and not very well heated (she suffered from cold, with the beginnings of arthritis, and loved cosy Maintenon for its warmth). The cabinet containing the chaise percée or commode was small enough to be extremely inconvenient: filling and emptying the copper bath tub would also not have been an easy task. A tiny wooden staircase led up to the landing where Françoise's faithful servant Nanon Balbien, her companion since the old Scarron days, kept Françoise's wardrobe in a single cupboard. The windows actually faced those of Athénaïs, but there was no comparison between the two suites of rooms: one demonstrated splendour, the other intimacy.27*

  As late as August 1682 Françoise was still taking care to separate herself from the position formerly occupied by Athénaïs. ‘People are saying that I want to put myself in her place,' she wrote, with her usual sensitivity to gossip about her reputation. ‘They don't understand my distance from these sorts of commerce [sex] nor the distance which I want to inspire in the King.'28 The battle for the King's salvation was not certainly won: there had been some earlier talk of his flirtations with pretty younger women. Françoise was evidently bearing in mind the warning in Madeleine de Scudéry's Map of Love on the subject of the fast-flowing River of Inclination which led into the Sea of Danger. Her aim, she said, was to be Louis's ‘best friend'. The evidence is, however, that shortly after Françoise wrote these words, she decided that a best friend's duty to Louis XIV did unfortunately include sleeping with him, in order to prevent other more frivolous, less religiously focused people doing it without her own pure motives.

  She did not of course put it like that to herself: six years earlier Françoise had criticised the King's confessor Father La Chaise for being content with ‘a demi-conversion' and commented to the Comtesse de Saint-Géran how ‘the atmosphere of the court spoils the most pure virtue and softens the most severe'. Now she herself had been softened. Much later, Françoise could look back with more detachment and tell her confidential secretary Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale that the King ‘would have looked for his pleasures elsewhere if he had not found them with me'.29 Her take on Marie-Thérèse was along the same lines: the Queen was a saint but ‘not very intelligent', since she was always at prayer when the King needed her. But at the time her avoidance of public Communion in September caused her perturbation; still more did she agonise over the need to ‘make her Easter’ in 1683.* She told Madame de Brinon that it was true that she had taken her Easter Communion ‘after a very troubled night shedding man
y tears' although she knew only too well that they might be considered affected. Françoise then mentioned her charities as distinguishing her from other people in her position: an unfair allusion to Athénaïs, who was nothing if not charitable. But then Françoise could not bring herself to be generous about her effective predecessor. Something about past slights still rankled: Athénaïs was, Françoise wrote in May 1681, ‘fatter by a toot’ than when last seen.30

  There was therefore from the first something bleak about the sexual relationship of Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon: a necessity for two middle-aged people, but from completely the opposite point of view. For Louis it was the passion he could not master, for Françoise the passion she had to endure for the higher good. For Louis XIV there was no urge for conquest as with Louise, no rampant lust as with Athénaïs, no resurgence of youth as with Angélique. Whatever Françoise's sexual experiences with Scarron twenty-five years earlier, they had not given her a high opinion of men in that particular respect. How dominated they were by their physical urges! As she would reflect years later: ‘Men, if passion does not guide them, are not tender in their friendships.'31 Madame Now on the contrary specialised in tender friendship in which physical passion played no part.

  With a serene – if still theoretically sinful – private life, Louis XIV was free to concentrate on the further glorification of Versailles, for which the expenses peaked at over 6 million livres (20 million pounds sterling in today's money) in 1685. A place where strict hierarchical values reigned, Versailles was conversely the scene of extraordinary disorder. It was not just the perpetual building-works, scaffolding everywhere, the smell, the dust, the noise. Security was also non-existent by modern standards. The gold fringes of the King's own bed were cut off, the crime discovered only when an anonymous packet containing them was dumped on the royal dinner-table with a message for the valet Bontemps from the thief: ‘Take back your fringes, Bontemps, the pleasure is not worth the bother. My compliments to the King.' As the royal doctor examined the returned fringes for possible traces of poison, the King himself remained cool, merely observing: ‘What insolence!’32 Which was true enough.

  Yet Versailles was, as Louis had intended it to be, glorious.33 Perhaps the King's favourite silver furniture symbolised the apogee of this glory: the glittering silver chairs and tables, the shining silver pots, for example, which held the beloved orange trees in the Orangery, more and more added yearly, many of them brought from Fontainebleau. The relation of dark to light at Versailles was also symbolic. The outer corridors were dark, and servants had to guide visitors and residents with torches. Yet Versailles itself, the state apartments, lit up by night by a myriad of candles and flambeaux, was a majestic, unforgettable sight.34*

  The King's militant and militaristic foreign policy was also part of his concept of personal glory. In 1682 two young Scots lords, sons of the Marquess of Queensberry, admired the huge gilded ship named the Grand Louis at Toulon: the legend on its hull ran: ‘I am unique on the waves / As my master is in the world.' This was how the French King was beginning to see himself. Unfortunately both aspects of the King's will – the creation of Versailles as the centre of Europe and his quest for military glory – demanded enormous sums of money: and money was finite, even if it did not seem so at the time to the Sun King.35

  The fragile Peace of Nijmegen of 1678 which ended the Dutch War was fractured as Louis indulged by stages in the annexation of certain cities and territories he considered to be justly French. This subversive policy of réunions was enough to lead to another Grand Alliance against France in 1682. The Habsburg Emperor, Spain, Holland and Sweden were involved and war was surely on the horizon. It was the arrival of the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683 which distracted the Emperor and the Christian Kings, and it was John Sobieski, King of Poland, who saved Europe from the Muslim invasion, not Louis XIV: he for his part, much less helpfully, saw his opportunity to foment revolt in Hungary. It was in this atmosphere of impending European chaos that a totally unexpected event took place in both the public and the private life of Louis XIV which was to have an irrevocable impact on its future course.

  In the last week of July 1683 Queen Marie-Thérèse was seen happily wandering in the gardens of Versailles, admiring the play of the new fountains. Her health appeared to be perfect: her complexion clear, her colour good. A few days later she fell ill of a tumour under her arm. The tumour turned purple and became an oozing abscess. In spite of the best – or worst – efforts of the doctors, the emetics in wine, the usual purgings and bleedings, the enervating clysters, the Queen became progressively sicker, and her pain increased proportionately.36 To the amazement of her doctors, who understood the agonies she must be suffering, the Queen did not complain – but then she had seldom complained in her life.

  As the situation rapidly worsened, the need for the Holy Sacrament to arrive from the chapel became acute. Normally the Sacrament was formally escorted by servants bearing enormous flaming torches: it was the King who ordered the ordinary candles on the altar to be taken because there was no time to lose. He was right. The Queen was dying fast. Did she murmur the words: ‘Since I have been Queen, I have had only one happy day'? And if so, which day was it? No one knew. Her wedding day? Her wedding night, when she was sure the King loved her? The day of the birth of her first child, the son that everyone wanted? She did not say. Marie-Thérèse, Infanta of Spain and Queen of France, died towards the end of her forty-fifth year at three in the afternoon on 30 July 1683. The King spoke his own epitaph on this shy, unhappy, dull but ever dutiful woman to whom he had been married for over twenty years: ‘This is the first trouble she has ever given me.'

  Compared with the King's tender but solipsistic verdict, the oration of Bossuet at Marie-Thérèse's state funeral was predictably magnificent, as was Lully's Requiem, including its solemn, plangent Dies Irae. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking that Bossuet was actually lauding Louis XIV, not burying Marie-Thérèse, so great was the emphasis on the King and his works, above all his support of religion: ‘Let us not forget what made the Queen rejoice: Louis is the bulwark of religion: it is religion which he has served with his armies by land and sea.'

  And in the prevailing tense political atmosphere, Marie-Thérèse's Spanish birth and the claims of succession deriving from it (now, of course, passed to her only child the Dauphin) were given a special lengthy commendation. Only as an afterthought did Bossuet throw in the fact that Marie-Thérèse's virtues, as well as her high birth, had made her a suitable bride for Louis XIV. With her Christian faith, her love of Holy Communion and her dependence on its efficacy: ‘she now walks with the Lamb because she is worthy of it.' To say however that Louis's love was as steadfast as ever after twenty-three years was surely economical with the truth. It was when Bossuet invoked the names of the two Queens, Anne and Marie-Thérèse, even closer in piety than in blood, that he struck a note with which everyone including the King could agree.

  The funeral cortège was headed, by a splendid irony, by Madame de Montespan, since she had been Superintendent of the late Queen's Household (a job that had now vanished). According to the Grande Mademoiselle, Athénaïs, with her inborn sense of the grand style, was shocked by the levity of some of the younger members of the cortège. It remained to be seen in what direction the court would develop after the Queen's death: whether it would be dominated by the wayward spirit of the younger generation or whether the newly devout mood of the King, encouraged by Madame Now, would hold sway.

  The most recent book in English, Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons (2003), gives a lucid account of it all.2

  The index of books prohibited to Catholics after the Council of Trent in 1564 included (Regula IX) works on necromancy, chiromancy (palmistry), the preparation of magical drafts or poisons, auguries and magical incantations. ‘All these things are utterly forbidden.'

  There is a comparison to be made between the Affair of the Poisons and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which Mari
e-Antoinette was pilloried, one hundred years later. People at the time (and historians later) believed in the guilt of Athénaïs and Marie-Antoinette if they wished to do so.

  These marriages of state, made at such a young age (the Duc de Bourbon was seventeen to his bride's eleven), were not however consummated until a more appropriate time; in this case a year later, when Louise-Françoise was not quite thirteen.

  † Louise-Françoise will henceforth be mainly designated as ‘Madame la Duchesse', in view of the quantity of similar forenames.

  The royal houses of Bourbon-Condé and Bourbon-Conti in this period descended from two brothers, respectively Prince de Condé and Prince de Conti, born to Henri II Prince de Condé and Charlotte de Montmorency in the 1620s. the Prince de Condé (known as Monsieur le Prince as his heir was Monsieur le Duc) was the elder of the two; thus he was the senior Prince of the Blood. Intermarriage of the cousins would make them further inextricably entwined.

  In the classical myth, Cadmus slew the dragon guarding the spring sacred to Ares; when he sowed some of its teeth in the ground on the orders of Athena, they sprang up into warriors.

  Julian Clément, whose career as a royal accoucheur flourished, was finally ennobled in 1711. Given the strain of royal births, with their dynastic implications and the frenzied hope for boys, no one deserved it more.