The bereaved King and Françoise did attempt to fill the enormous gap as far as was humanly possible, by concentrating on the girl who, at seventeen, was now the First Lady of Versailles: Marie-Élisabeth Duchesse de Berry. As Louis had embraced his surviving grandson Berry with the words ‘I have no one but you’, so there was a real effort to mould Marie-Élisabeth into suitable material for an august position close to the throne, and an intimate one close to their hearts. But how very different the two young women were! Marie-Élisabeth's raucous behaviour and her proverbial drunkenness have already been noted; she now began to torture her husband with a flagrant affair with a member of her household, one La Haye. Perhaps infidelity could be overlooked if it was stylish infidelity: after all, it was not exactly unknown at Versailles in times gone by … Unforgivable was her dismissive attitude to self-presentation. Mouches (literally flies) or beauty-spots were becoming fashionable. Marie-Élisabeth splattered her face with them, up to twelve at one time. You look like an actress, not the First Lady of Versailles, groaned Liselotte.28 Worst of all, Marie-Élisabeth had failed to conceal her glee at the death of Adelaide, because it led to her own elevation.
The impossibility of making something – anything – of the new First Lady was, surely, partly responsible for a kind of bitterness which swept over Françoise at the death of Adelaide. ‘I shall weep for her all my life,’ she told her nephew-by-marriage the Duc de Noailles, ‘but I am learning things every day which make me think she would have caused me a great deal of trouble. God took her from us out of pity.’29 In practical terms it is of course possible that Françoise found incriminating matter concerning Nangis, for example, or that courtiers badmouthed Adelaide (no longer able to respond) on the same subject. But the predominant cause of this bitterness was the betrayal that the old feel when the young die first. Her comments that Adelaide would not after all have turned out so well belong to this category. In February 1712 Louis was seventy-three and Françoise seventy-six. Adelaide, nearly fifty years younger, had somehow broken the contract by which she would divert and care for the old couple at the head of the court until their deaths …
The canards of her treachery on the other hand belong to the middle of the eighteenth century, and certainly do not hold water according to the evidence of her own correspondence (nor psychologically according to her character). Burrow as she might in the King's papers, Adelaide was never in a position to discover war plans and pass them back to Savoy. That was in any case not her game: a typical letter to her mother in 1711 expressed the wish that she could bring Victor Amadeus ‘back to reason’ – that is, back to support for France.
There was an alleged remark of Louis XIV to Madame de Maintenon, when they were alone, reported in the Historiography of France of 1745. It was the work of Charles Pinot Duclos, who would have been eight years old at the time of Adelaide's death. ‘The coquine [little rascal],’ the King was supposed to have said of Adelaide, ‘she betrayed us.’ As has been pointed out by historians, this was not the language of Louis XIV, nor is it clear how a conversation between two individuals on their own ever got reported.30 Duclos had an entertaining career as a colourful, sometimes scabrous novelist, and it is surely to his talent for fiction rather than fact that this remark belongs. Adelaide's loyalties had so clearly passed to France from the moment she arrived, just as Louis XIV had planned when he deprived the child of her familiar ladies-in-waiting. Adelaide still loved Victor Amadeus in theory, but her letters to him were highly critical, with those lamentations that he was fighting the countries of both his daughters. Latterly her new devotion to her husband's interests aroused even Liselotte's admiration.31
The awesome double funeral of the Dauphin and Dauphine of France was something no one ever forgot. Voltaire, writing a generation later, said that even during the next reign, any mention of the deaths of 1712 produced involuntary tears from courtiers. Their hearts were taken to Val-de-Grâce according to royal custom; their bodies lay in state and were then buried at Saint-Denis. ‘I don't think that the world has ever seen what we are about to see now,’ wrote Liselotte, ‘a man and his wife being taken together to Saint-Denis.’ She added rather touchingly: ‘I almost think that all of us here will die, one after another,’ as though up till now they had all been immortal. Saint-Simon met his father-in-law the Duc de Beauvillier on his return from the solemn ceremonies at Saint-Denis and embraced him with the words ‘You have just buried France!'32
The body and soul of Louis XIV lingered on, but it is difficult to believe that much was left of his heart. As Saint-Simon wrote of Adelaide years later: ‘Mourning for her has never ceased, a secret involuntary sadness remains, a terrible void which nothing can fill.’33
* Françoise-Marie had displayed the same high fertility as her mother Athénaïs. By 1710, the Duc and Duchesse d'Orléans already had four daughters of whom Marie-Élisabeth was the eldest; two more would follow. Chartres remained their only son.
* Here he will continue to be referred to as Bourgogne, to avoid confusion with his late father.
* In the general obsession with health-giving lavements, Adelaide was not alone in this practice; the Duc de Richelieu for example took senna every evening followed by a lavement even when attending the Parlement. Under the circumstances Saint-Simon strongly disliked the idea of sitting next to him.17
* Charlotte Duchesse de Ventadour, who died in 1744 at the age of ninety-three, continued to act as governess to the Children of France for the next twenty years; King Louis XV, as the little Duc d'Anjou became, never forgot that she was the woman who had saved his life.
CHAPTER 16
Going on a Journey
He [Louis XIV] gives all his orders as though he were only going on a journey.
– Liselotte Duchesse d'Orléans, 27 August 1715
The peace that Adelaide, true to her dying prophecy, did not see came about in the year after her death. The Treaty of Utrecht of 11 April 1713 led to a general European and North American settlement between France, Spain, England and Holland. Lille and Béthune were restored to France, while Luxembourg, Namur and Charleroi were given to the Elector of Bavaria. Nice (then a Savoyard possession) was restored to Victor Amadeus and Sicily promised to him. Philip V was at last recognised as King of Spain by the Habsburgs, although Philip and his successors had to renounce their rights to the French throne, and the southern Netherlands, scene of so many blood-drenched battles, went to the Empire. An important part of the settlement was the full recognition of Queen Anne as the rightful monarch of Great Britain. This meant that the man known there as ‘the Pretender’, James Edward, had to be asked to leave France. He went to Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine.
Already for Queen Mary Beatrice it was a time of terrible sorrow. Her daughter Princess Louisa Maria, the girl on whom she doted, had died suddenly of smallpox in April 1712 at the age of twenty, two months after Adelaide, who had been her friend. It was yet another blow to the Jacobite cause: some of its supporters had harboured dreams of this delightful girl, whose countenance ‘mixed the noble features of the Stuarts and the d'Estes’, marrying, say, a Hanoverian prince and thus reconciling the two religious sides of the family. Madame de Maintenon told Louis XIV that Louisa Maria had been Mary Beatrice's ‘companion and chief comfort’. Now King and deposed Queen met in a visit of condolence. The two of them wept to see that ‘they, the old, were left, and that death had taken the young’.1
And the toll of deaths in the French royal family was not over. Marie-Élisabeth, the unsatisfactory Duchesse de Berry, failed to redeem herself in dynastic terms by producing a healthy son. The baby boy born in June 1713, created Duc d'Alençon, died after a few days. Apart from that, Marie-Élisabeth, like many self-centred people, did not have a talent to amuse. In vain Louis XIV showered jewels upon her, all the jewels of the crown, so that she could bedizen herself regally in just the way that Adelaide had failed to do. Marie-Élisabeth's extravagant hair-styles were also in contrast to the simple arrangements which Adelaide had a
dopted towards the end of her life. Her crazy drunken antics – it is kindest to regard Marie-Élisabeth as verging on madness if not actually mad – were not the sort to appeal to the fastidious Louis XIV.
Marie-Élisabeth was pregnant again in the spring of 1714 when Berry himself died at the age of twenty-eight, as a result of a riding accident out hunting at Marly in which the pommel of his saddle pierced a vein in his stomach. His life with Marie-Élisabeth had been more and more wretched as a result of what Saint-Simon called her ‘sudden, swift and immoderate’ love affairs. There was one frightful incident at Rambouillet when, provoked beyond endurance, he actually kicked her backside in public.2 But the rules of Versailles did not permit Berry to be released from his bondage.
Berry's posthumous child – a premature daughter – died on 13 June 1714. Perhaps it was just as well, again from a dynastic point of view, since Marie-Élisabeth's notorious train of lovers, chosen as though on purpose to affront her husband, caused the satirists to make merry on the subject of the baby's true paternity with a list of possible candidates. After that the widowed Duchesse de Berry no longer offered the possibility of a further royal heir to supplement the single life of the little Duc d'Anjou. Yet Louis remained remarkably tolerant towards her: even when she reviewed a regiment dressed in a soldier's costume and made her ladies do likewise, the sad old King only issued a mild protest. He himself had spoken the truest word on his own martyrdom: ‘I shall suffer less in the next world,’ said Louis XIV, since God was punishing him for his sins in this one, and ‘I have merited it.’3
An ageing monarch and a tiny child as his heir meant that barring an accident – such as the death of the child in question – a regency was inevitable. Philippe Duc d'Orléans, the King's forty-year-old nephew, was the obvious candidate because he was next in line of succession after Anjou. Regencies were of course hardly unknown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a series of child-kings succeeding in France, including Louis himself, but the Regent in question had been the Queen Mother. Indeed, Anjou's mother Adelaide might have made a great regent if she had survived Bourgogne – but the truth of that would never be known. Philippe however was on bad terms with Madame de Maintenon, who strongly disliked his openly debauched way of life: it was therefore as some kind of warning to him not to exceed his powers, that the idea of entering the legitimised bastards into the royal succession came into play. Madame de Maintenon's influence in this was surely crucial: her love of Maine, her dislike of Philippe, all added up to an alteration in the rules which Louis would not have countenanced in his prime: it went against every principle of order and legitimacy which he had always maintained.
For all the groans of Liselotte, the moans of Saint-Simon about ‘the golden age of bastards’, these princes and princesses had their role to play. The ‘mouse-droppings’ in Liselotte's crude phrase might fill a rigidly pious man like the late Duc de Bourgogne with horror, but in fact Charles II's bastards were regularly received at the French court. For example, Barbara Villiers' son, the Duke of Grafton, went swimming with the Dauphin, and her daughter the Countess of Sussex attended Appartement at Versailles. James II's son the Duke of Berwick was a brilliant soldier, so that even Saint-Simon had to admit that his genius cancelled out his dubious birth. The position of the Duc de Vendôme, descendant of Henri IV, has already been mentioned. Civilised behaviour was one thing: the Russian Ambassador to Versailles, A. A. Matveev, in his account of French court life, suggested Louis XIV, in his treatment of the Duc du Maine, as a role model for Tsar Peter the Great, who had his own bastards at home.4 But there was a vast difference between the rank Louis had begged for Maine's sons in March 1710, and the potential accession of Maine or his brother Toulouse to the throne – both born when their mother was married to another man.*
Maine's marriage to Liselotte's ‘little toad’, Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, had turned out surprisingly well (although her size did not increase, justifying Françoise's early worry that the weight of her jewels would stop her growing). With her sparkling wit and tireless energy, the tiny Duchesse created quite a different world at Sceaux: it was a place both high-spirited and intellectual, where Plutarch, Homer and Terence were the gods. There was much emphasis on the theatre, the plays of Molière for example being revived. In short it resembled the early court of Louis XIV in the 1660s, if the scale was not quite so grand.
The Duchesse even had her own literary society, the Order of the Fly in Honey, which consisted of forty chevaliers, both male and female; a medal was struck for it in 1703 with the motto: ‘I may be small but beware my sting’. Gradually it became accepted that fun was to be had at Sceaux, but it was innocent and imaginative fun, not debauchery, and thus tolerated by Madame de Maintenon. Even Liselotte brought herself to admire the wonderful new fountains – water was always a status symbol at that time – as once upon a time everyone had gaped at those of Versailles. ‘Her court was charming,’ wrote Marguerite de Caylus of the Duchesse du Maine. ‘One was as much amused there as one was bored at Versailles’. As for Bénédicte's extravagant way of life, ‘she could not have ruined her husband with more gaiety’.5
Naturally the Duchesse du Maine was delighted at the prospect of her husband's elevation.6 Although her Bourbon-Condé nephews were in the line of succession as Princes of the Blood, as were the Bourbon-Contis, Maine had not been. Now he leaped to eighth place, with his two sons acknowledged as Grandsons of France at nine and ten.† Was it quite out of the question for Bénédicte, born a Princess of the Blood, to become Queen of France? Only in her dreams, perhaps, was it a real prospect. And yet she was living in an age when three ranking members of the royal family had been wiped out within eleven months; in England the second cousin of the late Queen Anne, son of Liselotte's recently deceased aunt, Sophia of Hanover, had just succeeded to her throne as George I; that was something which would never have been envisaged at the birth of George of Hanover.
The decree which carried all this out was promulgated in July 1714. ‘If in the course of time all the legitimate princes of our august house of Bourbon die out, so that there does not remain a single one to inherit the crown,’ the legitimised bastards could succeed.7 The following May Maine and Toulouse were given the rank of Princes of the Blood, with precedence over the other princes of sovereign houses. More crucial to the present, however, was the testament the King made giving charge of the future child King's ‘person and education’ to Maine and not to Philippe. Once again it was the need to please Françoise which prevailed over the need to placate Philippe (who remained inescapably the future Regent). Such a testamentary condition was a clear slap in the face for the Duc d'Orléans.
In the early summer of 1715 English bookmakers began taking bets on the date of the French King's death. On 16 May the Maréchal de Villeroy wrote to Françoise about his concern over his master's health: he looked ghastly and could hardly walk.8 Louis XIV was visibly fading. He had put on weight in his fifties: now he seemed quite wizened as his flesh began to fall away in the manner of very old people. There was little trace here of the young Apollo, or even the handsome, virile King whose wife Françoise Scarron had once lightly envied. But then who now remembered Apollo? And you would have to be over eighty to remember plausibly the accession to the throne of the child Louis in 1643. The King spent much of his time among women: Françoise's secretary Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale continued to amuse him with her wit and zest for life. And his love of music remained to the last: Louis would be taken to Françoise's room to hear chamber music. The King's final visit to Marly was in June. After that no courtier stepped forward to enquire anxiously: ‘Sire, Marly?'
The last act of the drama took place at Versailles, the palace that Louis XIV had created,* dazzling with mirrors, set around with the fountains and the statues and the orange trees he loved, their silver pots long ago sacrificed to the needs of war.10 On 12 August Louis complained of pains in his thigh. The specific cause of his degeneration was the condition of his leg, which
became gangrenous. Dr Fagon did not dare order an amputation, which might have saved the King – although surely not for very long since he was suffering from gout, gravel, and hardening of the arteries. From 17 August onwards, the King no longer left his room, and Fagon slept there too. Throughout the long ordeal of his deathbed, however, Louis maintained all the standards of heroic dignity which he had set himself for so long.
The great national Feast of St Louis on 25 August, for example, had to be celebrated as ever, with drums and fife bands underneath his windows and twenty-four fiddlers in the antechamber before dinner. Yet the farewells were already starting to take place. In an important interview on the same day with Philippe and Maine, Louis confirmed their relative positions as Regent and effective governor of ‘the future King’ (courtiers blenched when their master used these words). In principle the King decided to die as he had lived – in public: ‘I have lived among the people of my court, I want to die among them. They have followed the whole course of my life; it is right that they should witness the end of it’. And he chided those so much younger than himself for their laments: ‘Did you believe me to be immortal?’ asked the King. ‘For myself, I never believed it’.
There was an elegiac quality to these last days which had been singularly missing from the recent unhappy years of military defeat and personal bereavements. The Marquis de Dangeau wrote on 25 August: ‘I have come away from the greatest, the most touching and the most heroic spectacle that men have ever seen’. Liselotte called it in similar terms ‘the saddest and most poignant spectacle that one could witness in this life’.11 (Both of them instinctively used the language of the theatre.)
Louis's control remained awesome despite his agonies. Liselotte praised his serenity: ‘He gives all his orders as though he were only going on a journey,’ she wrote, these orders including the demand for unity among the sparring princesses at court. The Duc d'Anjou, a handsome little boy of five and a half who strongly resembled his mother, with her ‘large pitch-black eyes’ and long black eyelashes, was brought in to see his great-grandfather. ‘Mignon,' said the King, ‘soon you are going to be a great king’. But he also told Anjou, in a memorable phrase: ‘Try to remain at peace with your neighbours: I have loved war too much …'
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Page 38