‘Madame, I have been assured that you were pleased,' began the King. ‘Sire, I was charmed,' gushed Madame de Sévigné, ‘all that I experienced is beyond words.' ‘Racine has plenty of intelligence,’ observed the King. ‘Sire, he does indeed,' she agreed, ‘but to be honest, the young people were also very good; they attacked their roles as if they had never done anything else.’ ‘Ah, how true that is!’ were the King's final satisfying words. And off he went, leaving Madame de Sévigné the object of general envy by the court for the gracious notice she had received.34
Sixteen eighty-six, which marked the agreeable establishment of the ‘seraglio' at Saint-Cyr, was also the King's annus hornbilis where his health was concerned. Some premonition must have caused him to anchor Françoise to his side, for he certainly needed a wife at this point, not a mistress. We know a great deal – at times perhaps more than we want – about the health of Louis XIV from the detailed journals of his doctors, as well as those of Dangeau.35 He was purged routinely once a month, known as ‘taking medicine' (doses of herbs), as well as being given lavements (enemas) with mixtures of water, milk, honey and almond oil.* But early in 1686 a boil on his thigh, combined with the painful gout in his right foot, meant that he could hardly walk, despite tinctures of myrrh and aloes, red wine and absinthe. The boil was eventually cauterised, but it was not until May that the King could once again walk in his beloved Orangery at Versailles. In the meantime he had been obliged to lie down for Council meetings and shoot from his little carriage. In August the introduction of quinine helped the gout. But worse was to follow.
In the autumn the King developed an anal fistula, an abnormal fissure in that area. Painful as this was, the treatment, which involved separating the tissues with a scalpel (in an age, of course, before anaesthetics), was even more agonising. The Grand Operation, as it was later known, took place at seven o'clock in the morning of 19 November. It was kept a close secret. The people who shared it were Françoise, Father La Chaise, the doctor Fagon and the surgeon Félix. (It was said that Félix's hand trembled for the rest of his life – after the event.) Louis, the master of self-control, displayed exemplary fortitude and bore it all with a single cry of ‘My God’ when the first incision was made.37 His silent sufferings resembled those of the tortured Titan in the Fountain of Enceladus at Versailles, whose shoulder is half-crushed by the rocks of Mount Olympus; his eyes are staring, but only the noise of the water coming out of his speechless mouth can be heard.
Almost as extraordinary as Louis's fortitude under the knife was the fact that he actually held a Council meeting that night. The next morning he also held his normal lever for the court, although the sheen of perspiration could be seen on his dead-white face. Messages were sent to the royal family after the event, but they were forbidden to rush to him. Despite this, the Dauphin arrived at a gallop, in floods of tears. Athénaïs, who was with her daughter Madame la Duchesse at Fontainebleau, also hurried to Versailles only to be told that there was no crisis and she should go back. By the time Louis saw the old Prince de Condé on 22 November he was able to observe with sangfroid: ‘People who weren't here believe my illness to have been great, but the moment they see me, they realise that I have scarcely suffered.' (It was in fact the Grand Condé who died a few weeks later.) Unfortunately another smaller operation was needed to remedy the suppuration following the first one. The second cure worked: by the middle of March 1687 Louis was able to mount a horse again for the first time.
During his year of illness, Louis had not been able to attend the unveiling of his equestrian statue on 16 March in the Place des Victoires in Paris, laid out by Mansart the previous year; the Dauphin went in his place.* Now, in 1687, he was able to make one of his rare visits to Paris and inspect it for himself. Here the great King saw himself mounted aloft, above bas-reliefs on the pedestal of the Passage of the Rhine. The scale was magnificent and certainly in keeping with the contemporary notion of Louis le Grand: twenty men could and did dine inside the belly of the horse during its installation. The vogue for statues of the King was spreading through the provinces and far beyond: Quebec, the capital of New France since 1663, was graced with a bust of Louis XIV in its Place Royale. Louisiana, the area of North America conquered by Robert La Salle in 1682, went further and commemorated the King in its actual name.38 These salutations kept pace with his own policy of réunions mentioned earlier, that is to say, acquiring territories that he considered to be properly French. Then there were other lands which he considered had been bestowed upon France by marriages to heiress-princesses. The Spanish Netherlands was a prominent example of this.
It was in 1685 that the death of Liselotte's childless brother the Elector Palatine induced in Louis a new rush of territorial adrenalin: he would claim for Liselotte certain lands not covered by Salic Law (which prohibited female inheritance); or rather he claimed them for Monsieur, since by French law, the wife's rights were subsumed into the husband's. The League of Augsburg of 1686, an alliance against France which included Austria, Spain and Bavaria, was aimed at French expansionism. It provided the excuse for a disingenuous Declaration by the King to the effect that he was now obliged to resort to arms against his own will.
By the autumn of 1688 it was decided by the Council that a quick preventative war would secure the desired German cities. On 10 September six thousand troops entered Bonn, and the Dauphin himself was dispatched to seize Philippsburg. By December, Louvois was drawing up plans according to ‘the intentions of His Majesty … to destroy the city and citadel of Mannheim and all its houses'.39 In the meantime Louis had quarrelled with the Papacy over the nomination of the new Bishop of Cologne and had taken the opportunity to seize Avignon.
The misery of Liselotte herself throughout this autumn can hardly be exaggerated. In particular she was horrified at the plans to raze Mannheim to the ground, the city which her father had rebuilt with such care: ‘My name is being used for the ruin of my homeland.' She told the Dauphin that she saw the destruction of Heidelberg and Mannheim in her nightmares. Unable to control her suffering in public, Liselotte incurred the strong disapproval of the King, both for her sentiments and the uncontrolled manner of their expression. A few years earlier she had been ticked off indirectly by Louis – his confessor spoke to hers – for a variety of failings. Her language was vulgar: she had for example told the Dauphin that even if she saw him bollock-naked from the soles of his feet up, she would not be tempted by him (nor anyone else). She had allowed her ladies to indulge in gallantries, and had merely laughed with the wayward Marie-Anne de Conti about her own behaviour instead of reprimanding her.40
Liselotte was privately furious. She was not ‘a chambermaid', she told her aunt Sophia, to be treated like this, unlike the King's precious Maintenon ‘who was born to it'. She was not the Princesse de Conti's governess either, to stop her having lovers if she wanted them. Her frank language – and with her talk of crapping and pissing it was frank – she blamed on the King: he had said a hundred times that in the family one could say anything. And as for her ladies' gallantries, ‘such conduct was not without precedent' and in fact ‘quite usual at any court'. (Liselotte certainly had a point there.) In general, Liselotte's slavish devotion to Louis was fading. When she pleaded for her father and he merely replied: Je verrai' (I shall see) Liselotte wrote bitterly that this royal formula was worse than a straightforward refusal.*41
The truth was that neither Liselotte as Second Lady nor the Dauphine as acting First Lady of Versailles was fulfilling Louis's expectations; the latter had to be instructed to form a suitable circle with the curt words on the subject of royal duties: ‘We are not individuals.'42 it was here that the absence of a Queen-figure mattered to the whole harmony of the court: this was a need that Françoise could not fulfil.
The King's decision to attack Germany in September 1688 was however to have unexpected consequences in that respect. There soon would be a Queen at Versailles, if not a Queen of France. The German foray meant that Louis failed
to support the besieged Catholic King of England, James II, whom his own Parliament was trying to oust after a disastrous reign of under four years. He calculated that James's Protestant son-in-law William of Orange would not dare to invade England in late autumn. He was wrong. In the absence of the French navy, which Louis directed elsewhere, William sailed triumphantly towards England, landing on 4 November at Brixham in Torbay in the West Country. Within weeks Queen Mary Beatrice and her infant son were fleeing for France. As Louis XIV received the pathetic refugee, he was welcoming, of course, not only an unhappy woman, but also a policy: it was a policy of support for the Jacobite cause, as that of the exiled King James would soon become known.
After his death, it was discovered that his stomach and bowels in their size and capacity were double those of any ordinary man. No doubt this information consoled the surviving courtiers who had had to keep up with him.
The disappointed Figuelotte married another older man, the widowed Elector of Brandenburg, later first King of Prussia; her son was Frederick William I, the Soldier King, and her grandson Frederick the Great. Her possible progeny by Louis XIV – surely great warriors – are material for speculation.
Although morganatic marriages were principally used to enable a man of royal rank to marry a women of inferior status, it has been suggested that the Grande Mademoiselle married her suitor Lauzun in this manner when he was released from his long imprisonment, as many of their contemporaries believed.6
The Journals of the Marquis de Dangeau, from 1684 onwards, are an important source for the day-to-day routine, including the health, of Louis XIV.
The eight little volumes, 4½ inches by 2½ inches, are now preserved in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Versailles.
She is the wide-eyed, curly-haired little girl who features in the most famous portrait of Madame de Maintenon.
It has been calculated that in the twenty-four years Françoise owned the property she spent between eight and ten months there, if all the visits are added up.31
† Now a charming ruin, resembling a picture by Hubert Robert.
Le Roy Ladurie has argued that bleeding and especially purging fulfilled ‘a ritual of royal purity, comparable to the constant washing and bathing incumbent on the highest Brahmin circles in the Indian caste system'. Enemas were regularly prescribed by seventeenth-century doctors to rid the patient's body of its noxious humours.36
The present statue is a nineteenth-century replacement of the original, which was destroyed at the time of the French Revolution.
Je verrai was unpopular with others besides Liselotte: a one-armed Gascon soldier exclaimed: ‘If I had said “I shall see” to my general, ordering me into battle, I should still have my arm.’41
CHAPTER 12
Grandeurs of the World
You see what becomes of the grandeurs of the world, we shall come to that, you and I.
– Louis XIV to the Dauphin, 1690
Mary Beatrice, the fugitive Queen of England who flung herself upon the mercies of Louis XIV, was no longer the shy, sweet princess who had passed through France on her way to marriage fifteen years earlier. Then the tender King had described himself to the pretty teenager as her ‘godfather'; she was after all the daughter of a Mazarinette, Laura Martinozzi, who had been matched by her Cardinal-uncle to the future Duke of Modena. But Mary Beatrice's marriage had been from the first extremely testing both privately and publicly, and she had changed.
In 1673, at the age of fifteen, she found herself matched to an ageing and not particularly prepossessing prince twenty-five years her senior. James, then Duke of York, had been a dashing soldier in his youth, but somehow the Stuarts (those that kept their heads) did not improve with age. He was also a notorious roué like his brother Charles, but without the charm that enabled the Merry Monarch to carry these things off: so ugly were his mistresses that Charles wittily suggested they had been imposed upon him by his confessors. The young Catholic Duchess of York had to tolerate her husband's bastards, as well as the two Protestant daughters by his first wife, Mary and Anne. James's marriage was from the first extremely unpopular in the country: understandably so, since Charles II's intention in agreeing to it was to curry favour with the French King rather than the English Parliament.
The Protestants were cheered, and Mary Beatrice devastated, by the fact that she appeared to be unable to bear children that survived beyond infancy. Isabella, who died in 1681, reached four and a half; the rest died at birth or very young, and there were at least four miscarriages, the last in May 1684. That meant that the Protestant Mary, since 1677 wife of William of Orange, would in the course of time succeed; her equally Protestant sister Anne, wife of George of Denmark, would follow her, should William and Mary have no children. Perhaps the Protestants were foolhardy in supposing that a woman still in her twenties who had conceived nine times in ten years would not do so again. At any rate in the autumn of 1687 Mary Beatrice found herself pregnant once more. Possibly the therapeutic mineral waters at Bath which she had visited in September were responsible for her renewed fertility, or even a visit to the miraculous St Winifred's Well in North Wales a few years earlier.
A day of thanksgiving in England was decreed on 23 December in the hope that ‘the Queen might be the joyful mother of children'. The invocation of the Irish Catholic poet Diarmaid MacCarthy that God might vouchsafe a son and heir to James, whom he called ‘that bright shining star of bliss', was not however generally shared; nor for that matter was his lyrical description of James himself.1 The trouble was that this child if male would be heir to the throne – and Catholic. By the time Mary Beatrice did give birth to a healthy boy on 1 June 1688 it was found necessary to invent such fantasies as the baby having been smuggled into the Queen's chamber in a warming-pan: this despite the usual presence of a vast number of courtiers on the occasion, including Protestants.* Yet this birth, so long awaited by Mary Beatrice and James, was undoubtedly the catalyst for the crisis which erupted in English politics in the high summer of 1688, resulting in the invitation to William of Orange by a group of Whig grandees.
Helpless before William of Orange's invasion, which was joined by many of his alleged supporters, King James was taken prisoner. Queen Mary Beatrice and the little Prince James Edward escaped with the aid of the Duc de Lauzun, the Grande Mademoiselle's erstwhile fiancé. He had been brought out of his long imprisonment by the generosity of Anne-Marie-Louise. By this successful action Lauzun did at last restore himself to favour. Mother and son arrived at Calais in 21 December, awaited news of James, and then moved on to meet the King.
The result of all these eventful years, culminating in the ordeal of the flight, had been to make of Mary Beatrice a strong, intelligent woman of much resolution concealed under a modest, graceful and extremely feminine exterior. At thirty she had lost none of her youthful brunette beauty: she had an extremely good figure, on the thin side, but that only enhanced the impression of willowy grace. Her hair was ‘black as jet', she had a white skin, full red lips, beautiful teeth, dark eyebrows and soulful dark eyes, even if they were currently ‘dim with weeping’.2 All this made her not dissimilar to her aunt Marie Mancini, although Mary Beatrice's features, set in a perfect oval face, were far more classical. It was no wonder that she had been one of the favourite subjects of court artists such as Lely and Kneller, who painted her over and over again.
Furthermore, this Queen was cosmopolitan, speaking and writing excellent French as well as Italian and English, and enough Latin to read from the scriptures in that language daily.3 Above all, Mary Beatrice was naturally and sincerely devout. She had never wavered in the Catholicism in which she had been raised, despite the winds of change around her. For all these qualities, the whole French court, including the King and Madame de Maintenon, were from the first Mary Beatrice's respectful admirers.
Mary Beatrice was greeted on 6 January at Versailles by Louis XIV and given all honours. She was then escorted to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, her new home by kind permissi
on of the King, who also endowed the household generously and provided a lavish pension. Four days later Madame de Sévigné was in ecstasy over the court's newest royal acquisition, hailing her for her ‘distinguished bearing and her quick wit'. This, coupled with Mary Beatrice's beauty, meant that she had ‘natural sovereign power', as Lord Peterborough had reported long ago, inspecting his future bride for James II. The refugee Queen certainly understood the manners of Versailles. When Louis XIV fondled the six-month-old Prince of Wales, the Queen remarked that hitherto she had envied her tiny son's good fortune in knowing nothing of the calamities that beset him, but now ‘I pity him because he is also unaware of Your Majesty's caresses and kindnesses.'4
When King James did arrive it was thanks to a discreetly blind eye turned by William III. The new King, as he would shortly become at the instance of Parliament, joint sovereign with his wife Mary, had no wish to add to the embarrassment of the family usurpation by keeping his dispossessed father-in-law a prisoner. So James was allowed to slip away, joining his wife and baby son at Saint-Germain. Mary Beatrice raised her hands to heaven. ‘How happy I am! How happy I am!' she cried. The French court was less ecstatic.5 James certainly did not receive the golden opinions garnered by Mary Beatrice. It was probably a question of age: James was fifty-five and this was his second full exile in a lifetime (there had been other, shorter episodes). People noted that Mary Beatrice was by now the more ambitious of the two, not only because she was still in her prime, but because she had a young son to root for.
Very quickly the King and Queen of England, supported by Louis both financially and emotionally, were integrated into the court rituals of Versailles, once the difference between English and French rules of kissing had been sorted out: English duchesses, unlike French ones, did not expect to be kissed, but the French got their way after protests. Only the Dauphine Marianne-Victoire found something – as usual – to grumble about, since Louis insisted on Mary Beatrice being accorded the full precedence Duc to a Queen. This technically displaced the Dauphine, whose husband was a mere heir, not a King; she tried to avoid being visibly demoted by receiving Mary Beatrice in bed – a well-known ploy which left her precedence open to question. Marianne-Victoire could not stay there for ever. In the end she did get out of bed during Mary Beatrice's visit for fear of the King's displeasure. The situation was further complicated when Mary Beatrice gave birth to a daughter Louisa Maria, in June 1692: here was a princess who was a King's daughter even if the King concerned was over the water. There was no other such legitimate princess at court. There would be further ploys as Louisa Maria grew up, for her to establish her true precedence, for others to avoid it.
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Page 28