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

by Antonia Fraser

  In all this Louis himself was gravely concerned to support the Queen, who from the first appealed to his sense of chivalry, while Madame de Maintenon quickly established a proper friendship with her; the two women, a quarter of a century apart in age, had much in common as regards their piety and good sense, besides which the beautiful and virtuous Mary Beatrice was a faithful if suffering wife, exactly the sort of friend Françoise wanted the King to have. There were after all some less suitable contenders, even if it was only a question of friendship these days. For example, there was the Anglo-Irish beauty married to a French aristocrat, Elizabeth Hamilton, Comtesse de Gramont. Once known for good reason as ‘la belle Hamilton', a former raffish member of the court of Charles II, Elizabeth was now ostentatiously pious, corresponding regularly with Bishop Fénelon. She remained however sharp and amusing even if her colourful past was behind her; in seeking and on occasion demanding her presence, the King chose to manifest a small measure of independence from his secret wife. Louis's addiction to her company was so great that Françoise once confided to a friend that if she died, Elizabeth would take her place.

  Mary Beatrice, the unfortunate refugee, posed none of these problems to Françoise. There was certainly no glint of naughtiness in her dark eyes, whereas ‘la belle Hamilton’ in her conversation at least retained something of the wit and sauciness which had enchanted the English. Marly, the King's new pleasure-house where he loved to retreat with designated courtiers (mostly ladies), was close enough to Saint-Germain for Louis to pay Mary Beatrice almost daily visits in 1689, as Dangeau's Journal records.6

  As to Versailles, the first version of his famous book entitled The Way to Present the Gardens of Versailles was actually produced in July 1689 to coincide with her visit ‘to view the waters'.7 According to Dangeau, numerous refreshments were served during a tour which started at the Fountain of Neptune. All this was exactly as laid down by Louis, with his usual eye for detail including the refreshments: ‘Go along the top end of the Latona, pause there, go to the Marais where there will be fruit and ices … Go to the Trois-Fontaines along the top and be sure that there are ices there.'

  Ices were good, but it was also considerate of someone trailing round Versailles in the July heat (a testing experience had by myriads since) that The Way also instructed: ‘Be sure that the carriages are waiting at the gate to the Trianon.' In any case there were by now at least fifteen ‘wheeled chairs' at Versailles, upholstered in damask of different colours, for the weary or the middle-aged. To say nothing of boats and gondolas, which thronged the canals and artificial water: another leisurely, beguilingly effortless way of enjoying Versailles. One is reminded that the iron-willed Sun King could also understand the weakness of others. As he sauntered around his potager (vegetable garden) the courtiers who followed were told that they could pick the fruit and eat it. In general the great outdoors brought out the best in Louis XIV.

  This was the light-hearted man who adored his hunting dogs – his Pistolet, his Silvie, his Mignonne, his Princesse – as much as Liselotte liked her domestic pets, and had a particular love of English setters. He carried biscuits for them ‘made daily by the royal pastrycooks' in his pockets, and designated a special chamber near his own, the Cabinet des Chiens, where he fed his dogs by hand. These favourites had magnificent beds of their own in all Louis's palaces, made of veneered walnut and ebony marquetry lined with crimson velvet (like their human counterparts the mistresses, for Louis looked after his own). It was the King who cancelled a Council meeting in February 1685 because the weather was so good and he wanted to be outside, with a jaunty parody of an air from Quinault and Lully's Atys: ‘As soon as he saw his dog, he left everything for her / Nothing can stop him / When the fine weather calls.'8 (The actual text referred to Bellona, the Goddess of War: ‘As soon as he saw her / He left everything for her' – rather more the popular image of Louis XIV.)

  Encouraged by King Louis XIV, who provided a small force of French troops and French officers, King James left for Ireland in the spring of 1689. His plan was to recover his English throne through the back door of Ireland. Louis's farewell to his cousin was a reversal of the salutation by which he had said goodbye to the young Marie-Louise d'Orléans of Spain: ‘I hope, Monsieur, never to see you again. Nevertheless if fortune so wishes it that we meet again, you will find me the same as you have always found me.'9 Mary Beatrice was left behind, her dignity and good sense admired more than ever as the English royal fortunes waned. King James's personal campaign ended with his defeat by his son-in-law William III at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July (NS) 1690, and he returned to France. The joint French and Irish campaign went on until it suffered a final defeat at the Battle of Aughrim a year later.

  Thenceforward the exiled King languished at Saint-Germain, receiving none of the plaudits from the French court which his wife continued to merit. They found him irresolute and self-pitying: thus charmless by the standards of Versailles. Occasional forays were planned to recover his lost kingdom. None were successful. The defeat of the French navy off Cap La Hogue in May 1692 prevented the army assembled at Cherbourg from sailing. Four years later another potential invasion was cancelled Duc to lack of ‘Jacobite' response over the water.

  There was an irony here. If Louis XIV had chosen to uphold James II by force against William III as early as the autumn of 1688, he would certainly have altered the course of William's invasion and might even have successfully quashed it. The support of an Irish campaign and the subsequent terser initiatives were too little, too late. Instead Louis involved France – and the whole of Europe – in a struggle that would last for nearly ten years, by his ill-considered and in many ways brutal invasion of Germany. The destruction of cities which had given Liselotte nightmares in advance, as she confided to the Dauphin, proved every bit as horrific as she had anticipated.

  Wars are always expensive, and long wars bring further depredations for every population whether their leaders are winning or losing the battles. This was certainly true of the so-called War of the League of Augsburg. The imploring words of Lalande's great De Profundis, which was first heard in 1689 – ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee' – stood for the anguish of many. So the people of France started to suffer; in addition the weather began to fail the Sun King, the cruel cold of 1692 leading to bad harvests and so to famine conditions by the winter of 1693. John Evelyn in England, who had once admired the grave boy King, now wrote of an ambitious monarch intent on pursuing his conquests while France was in ‘the utmost misery and poverty for want of corn and sustenance'. In their desperation the poor were eating cats, horseflesh from horses thrown on the dust heap, and drinking the blood running from slaughtered beef and cattle in the abattoirs. The number of the deprived made to ‘languish' by ‘famine and misery', according to an official of the Bishop of Beauvais, was infinite.10

  More spectacular if less painful, the glistening silver furniture of Versailles and the fine silver holders for orange trees were sacrificed: an inventory drawn up in 1706 of all the silver melted down between 1689 and 1690 lists about twelve hundred objects including borders of mirrors, chandeliers, basins, urns, flagons, plates, saltcellars, as well as ‘some of the most sumptuous furniture that ever existed'. So the glamour of Versailles, the showplace of a King in the prime of his glory, began to seep away. Furthermore, the death of Louvois in 1691 meant that Louis's own industry in directing had to be redoubled: Dangeau thought he worked an extra three or four hours as a result. ‘Having given his orders as a general … he then worked as King on the affairs of state, of which he neglected nothing, not the slightest detail.’11

  As for war itself, it was no longer quite so glorious as in those palmy days when the King progressed to Flanders with one Queen and two mistresses. Yet the ladies still went. Madame de Maintenon's account of it all in the early summer of 1692 is vivid enough, if depressing. Louis joined the army in May, in order to besiege Namur, on the Meuse; the town fell to the French at the end of June. Where R
acine, the heroic writer, found himself ‘so enchanted, so dazzled by the brilliance of the shining swords and muskets, so deafened by the sounds of the side-drums, swords and kettledrums', Françoise the middle-aged woman struck a very different note. She described to a correspondent what it was like to travel with the King: the horror of the bad roads, the carriages lurching and falling, ladies hanging on for dear life. The water was bad, wine rough, the bakers were for some strange reason concentrating on the need of the army and the royal servants could not find bread. The town (Namur) was very muddy and the pavements ghastly, since the minor roads served as general privies. Besides, the whole town shook with the firing of the artillery. And the King had gout in both his feet. To another correspondent, a Dame at Saint-Cyr, Françoise struck a slightly lighter note: ‘If one could conscientiously wish a nun to venture outside her convent, I would like you to experience for a short while the places of the war we have passed through. You would be delighted, Madame, to smell only tobacco, hear only the drum, eat only cheese …' She herself, added Françoise, who was beginning to suffer badly from rheumatism, would willingly be back doing tapestry with ‘our dear ladies’.12

  Back at Versailles, three deaths, a wedding and a retirement began the inevitable rearrangement of an ageing court. The first and most tragic death was that of Marie-Louise, the ill-fated girl whom Louis had dispatched to be Queen of Spain, in March 1689. She was twenty-eight. Her death, after years of unhappiness, was rumoured to be caused by poison, and for once there may have been some substance in the story that she had been given arsenic. Or perhaps there had been drugs to remedy the sterility which the Spanish blamed on the unfortunate girl rather than their King: those might have proved poisonous. Marie-Louise was violently ill for two days with vomiting and gastro-enteritical pains before dying. On her deathbed she told the French Ambassador that she did not after all believe she had been poisoned, although that had once been her suspicion. (Nevertheless he relayed the rumours back to France.)13

  Throughout her ten years as consort to the cretinous and cruel Carlos, Marie-Louise had tried hard to fulfil her role as France's envoy, fighting the influence of Austria in Spain. In the process she had made many enemies. Now the position of Queen of Spain was once more vacant, and this time the winner – in terms of material prospects but no other way – was a plain German princess, Maria Anna of Neuburg, in the Habsburg sphere of influence. She had nothing to commend her but a large bosom and a family reputation for fertility: Pope Alexander VIII coarsely remarked of the Neuburg princesses that they had only to hang their husbands' breeches at the end of the bed to get pregnant. Unfortunately neither Carlos II nor his breeches were able to have the desired effect, and it became increasingly certain that he would die childless, with enormous consequences for the whole European balance of power.

  Louis XIV greeted the news of Marie-Louise's death, including the rumours of poisoning, with outward calm: court mourning was ordered and all balls and masquerades cancelled. He talked of the paternal affection he had felt for the dead young woman, ‘and besides she could contribute much to peace between her husband and myself’. As for the rumours, any attempt to investigate them on behalf of France would, he felt, produce ‘neither usefulness nor satisfaction'. But Louis took pains to break the news of Marie-Louise's death personally to her father, when he woke at his usual hour of 11 a.m. The Comtesse de La Fayette reported that Monsieur was as sad about this ‘as he could ever be about anything’.14 It had indeed been ‘Farewell. For ever,' as Louis had said so imperiously to Marie-Louise when she left, weeping, for Spain in 1679.

  The second death had a more immediate effect on the court: that of the Dauphine Marianne-Victoire in the spring of 1690. She was in her thirtieth year. Her health had never been good, especially since the birth of her last child, although it was discovered later by autopsy that she actually died of lung disease. By degrees she spent more time lying in bed than engaged in the Dauphine-like social activities which the King thought appropriate. Nevertheless, unlike Marie-Louise, Marianne-Victoire had produced three healthy boys, three dukes with the titles of Bourgogne, Anjou and Berry, who were respectively seven, six and three at the time of her death on 20 April. Marianne-Victoire's deathbed was sufficiently protracted for her to give a blessing to each one of her sons, telling ‘my poor little Berry' that she gave him it with a good heart, ‘although you cost me dear'. Liselotte for her part wept to see colours of the House of Wittelsbach, which both German princesses shared, over the coffins. At the same time she took a secret oath to survive the hated ‘old Rumpumpel' (Maintenon), who was after all nearly twenty years older.15

  Louis XIV took the opportunity to counsel his son: ‘You see what becomes of the grandeurs of the world, we shall come to that, you and I.' Marianne-Victoire was accorded the same honours in death as the late Queen Marie-Thérèse, although according to etiquette, the King did not wear mourning. This was because Marianne-Victoire ranked as Louis's daughter (although in fact his daughter-in-law), and the King of France did not wear mourning for his children. There was another tricky point of etiquette when the body of the late Dauphine was ceremonially laid out, with her face exposed. The ladies who did not have the right to be seated in the Dauphine's presence in her lifetime were taking the opportunity to sit down during their watch, now she was dead. It had to be explained that an uncovered face still counted as being in the presence of the Dauphine, and so standing must be maintained.16

  The third death was that of the Grande Mademoiselle, at the age of sixty-six, on 5 April 1693. Her vast inheritance, which had dominated her life and prospects, finally for the worse not the better, passed to Monsieur, the beginning of the great fortune of the Orléans family which would begin to rival in monetary terms that of the senior Bourbon branch. Lauzun, who had been her heir, forfeited at last the great love she had borne for him, by his infidelities and his ingratitude for the payments she had made to free him from prison. She refused to see him on her deathbed. (He subsequently married a girl of fifteen.)

  The Grande Mademoiselle had spent many of her last months writing a commentary on The Imitation of Christ in which the salient message ran as follows: ‘Greatness of birth and the advantages bestowed by wealth and by nature should provide all the elements of a happy life … yet there are many people who have had all these things and are not happy. The events of my own past would give me enough proof of this without looking for examples everywhere.'17 It was a sad but accurate judgement on an existence which neither in public nor in private had fulfilled its promise. And as a judgement it also had something in common with the melancholy message of Louis XIV to his son on the death of the Dauphine.

  The retirement was that of Athénaïs, and the marriage that of her younger surviving daughter, Françoise-Marie, one of the two children who were the fruits of her reconciliation with the King. But there was no connection between the two events. Indeed, it was a sign of the times, this distancing of Athénaïs, representative of the King's seamy past, from her offspring, that the mother was not even invited to the daughter's wedding.

  It has been seen that shortly after the King's secret marriage, Athénaïs was removed from her palatial suite of apartments, similar to a Queen's, and installed in her Appartement des Bains on the ground floor, once the scene of such luxurious dissipation with the King. In 1691 she made the mistake, in a fit of temper, of announcing via Bishop Bossuet her departure ‘for ever' from the court and headed for Paris. Swiftly – after all Louis knew his Athénaïs – the King gave the Appartement des Bains to Athénaïs's son, the Duc du Maine.* It was said that the young man was in such a hurry to take advantage of the King's offer that he had his mother's furniture thrown out of the window ‘by orders of the Duc du Maine'.18 Unfilial as such conduct might be, one has to bear in mind that Françoise, not Athénaïs, was the true mother-figure in Maine's life, plagued by his physical disability: ‘the limping boy', as Liselotte crudely called him.

  The rest of Athénaïs's life was devot
ed to good works, much as that of her pious mother had been, whose example she followed at long last. One notes that both Louis and Athénaïs, whose mothers had been friends, reverted to the path of virtue, as though the maternal pull was too great – that, or the influence of their mothers in Heaven, as contemporaries would have believed. Athénaïs's once-famous beauty had vanished. Ten years after her retirement, when Athénaïs was sixty, Liselotte was able to crow over the terrifying sight that the former favourite represented: the skin that looked like paper ‘which children have folded over and over', the whole texture a mass of tiny lines, the beautiful blonde hair entirely white.19 (Was Liselotte, grossly fat by her own admission, with her big red face at which no one had ever swooned, or ever would, quite the right person to rejoice?)