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

by Antonia Fraser

  This sense of order makes Louis's firm choice of Madame de Maintenon as his second, if secret, spouse all the more remarkable. She shone no glory on him; rather to the contrary, her early association with Scarron was considered disreputable. Not only Liselotte but the satirists lamented that she was a nobody in hierarchical terms, and older than the King. But the King chose her and kept to her. In his forties, thanks to the lucky – in these terms – death of Marie-Thérèse, he selected the kind of woman, in nature if not rank, that his mother had been, and he stuck to her. Good women – in the moral sense – were always fascinating to Louis XIV, and for all his (justified) reputation for promiscuity in youth and the establishment of his ‘harem’ as he reached thirty, one notes that he spent at least half of his seventy-seven-odd years in their company.

  ‘Greatness of birth and the advantages bestowed by wealth and by nature should provide all the elements of a happy life,’ wrote Louis's first cousin the Grande Mademoiselle in her final months. ‘But experience should have taught us that there are many people who have had all these things who are not happy.’ She added: the good moments arrive but they do not last. Louis XIV certainly had a happier life in emotional terms than the Grande Mademoiselle whose ill-conceived but valiant efforts to make a late marriage to Lauzun he had quashed (another example of his ruthless determination where dynastic matters were concerned). It would be fair to say that most of the happiest moments of his life were associated with women, whether enjoying Anne of Austria's marble bath in the Louvre, riding romantically with Marie Mancini or Louise when he was young, throwing away the sword that dared to hurt Marie's hand, lending his own hat to put on Louise's golden curls, amusing himself at summer nights of revelry with Henriette-Anne or travelling with her granddaughter Adelaide round the gardens of Versailles in a little pony cart when he was old.

  For the latter attachment he paid a terrible price: the Sun King who would not let there be clouds in his presence, forbidding mourning as a matter of principle, was brought to acknowledge his own impotence in the face of heaven's decrees and ‘submit’. In the dignity of this grief and the stoicism of his death, Louis XIV was entitled to call himself an honnête homme, a civilised man, that ultimate term of seventeenth-century praise.

  We must also remember that in the century when Louis XIV chose the sun as his symbol – ‘the most vigorous and the most splendid image of a great monarch’ – one of the declared attributes of the sun was ‘the light which it shines on those other stars which surround it like a court’. And those stars in their turn, the women in his life, lit up the court of the Sun King.

  * This was no Henry VIII, the fate of whose six wives is traditionally recorded as ‘Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.’ With Louis XIV there were no divorces and certainly no decapitations: the mistresses who abandoned the court were not compelled to do so.

  * It was appropriate that in the mid-nineteenth century Flaubert had Madame Bovary turn to La Vallière for inspiration when she attempted to recover her faith after being abandoned by her lover: ‘in the pride of her godliness, Emma compared herself with the great ladies of old, they whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La Vallière, those who … shed at the feet of Christ the tears of a heart wounded by the world.’3

  NOTES

  Full bibliographical details of the works cited in short form will be found in the list of Sources.

  CHAPTER 1 Gift from Heaven

  1 Motteville, I, p. 33.

  2 Gazette de France, 28 April 1638.

  3 Kleinman, p. 137.

  4 Sackville-West, p. 49.

  5 Spanheim, p. 32.

  6 Dulong, Femmes, p. 74; Dictionary of Saints', St Leonard.

  7 Motteville, I, p. 22; Bluche, Vie quotidienne, p. 131.

  8 Bluche, Louis, p. 11.

  9 Motteville, I, pp. 14–15;

  Kleinman, p. 65.

  10 Saint-Simon (1856), I, p. 36.

  11 La Porte, p. 36.

  12 Kleinman, p. 17.

  13 La Porte, p. 93.

  14 Bouyer, p. 35.

  15 Levi, pp. 14, 19, makes a case for Mazarin's paternity throughout his biography of Louis XIV based on the evidence of a document which has vanished; he does not tackle the question of Monsieur's birth two years later. Historians generally accept that Louis XIII was the father of Louis XIV.

  16 Petitfils, Louis, pp. 24ff.

  17 Teissier, pp. 35ff; Goubert, p. 17.

  18 Teissier, pp. 57fr.

  19 Dulong, Anne, p. 142, accepts the storm story; Bertière, I, p. 306, is sceptical.

  20 Petitfils, Louis, p. 25.

  21 Muhlstein, p. 206.

  22 Journal de la Santé, p. 386.

  23 Decker, p. 58; Duchêne, Femme, p. 211; Henriette-Anne d'Orléans in 1662, Norrington, p. 54.

  24 Wolf, p. 4 & note 2, p. 623; Dunlop, p. 2.

  25 Horoscope by Liz Greene, Equinox.

  26 Pitts, p. 124.

  27 La Porte, p. 133; Louis, Mémoires, I, p. 120.

  28 Mademoiselle Andrieu, quoted in Kleinman, pp. 112–13 & note 54, p. 303.

  29 Motteville, I, pp. 170ff.

  30 Bonneville, pp. 82–3; Petitfils, Louis, p. 117; Muhlstein, p. 236; La Porte, p. 135.

  31 Motteville, I, p. xxvii.

  32 Corneille, Le Cid, Act III, scene 6.

  33 Wolf, p. 11, calls it ‘improbable … perhaps the story is one of those that should have happened even if it did not'.

  34 Ormesson, I, p. 43; Miller, Bourbon, p. 85.

  35 Motteville, I, p. 102.

  36 Dunlop, p. 27.

  CHAPTER 2 Vigour of the Princess

  1 See especially Wolf, pp. 46, 85, & 626, note 4 to ch. 8, who suggests ‘a secret marriage'; but Kleinman, p. 226, refers to the ‘lack of solid evidence' for it.

  2 Madeleine Laurain-Portemer, see Kleinman ref. 63, p. 322.

  3 Visconti, p. 6; Ziegler, p. 193.

  4 Dulong, Amoureuses, p. 26; Dulong, Mazarin, p. 137.

  5 Clairambault MSS, 1144, fols 90–100.

  6 Muhlstein, p. 193; Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 780.

  7 Maximes d'Éducation, passim; Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 33.

  8 Cornette, ‘Éducation', p. 217; Pitts, p. 16; La Rochefoucauld, p. 121.

  9 Muhlstein, p. 398; Maximes d'Éducation.

  10 Motteville, I, p. 236.

  11 Halfax, p. 55.

  12 Motteville, II, pp. 282fr.

  13 Motteville, II, p. 341.

  14 Pitts, pp. 5, 231.

  15 Déon, p. 284.

  16 Louis, Mémoires, I, p. 120.

  17 Evelyn, I, pp. 268–9.

  18 For the Court Ballet, see especially Christout (1967); Christout (1987); Guest, p. 12; also Hilton, Dance; Quirey.

  19 Christout (1987), p. 153.

  20 Wolf, p. 115.

  21 Petitfils, Louis, p. 171, describes his short stature as ‘a myth'; see Bertière, I, p. 490 & note.

  22 Verney, III, pp. 65–6.

  23 Beaussant, Louis, pp. 14fr.

  24 See Oresko, ‘Marriages', passim.

  25 Doscot, p. 33; Egerton MS 23, fol. 32, 91.

  26 Mallet-Joris, pp. 9ff.

  27 Although Bertière, I, p. 23, correctly describes this story as an ‘unverifiable tradition', it has been generally accepted; see also Carré, Vallière, p. 18; Decker, Louis, p. 120.

  28 Saint-Simon (1856), I, p. 34.

  29 Motteville, IV, p. 158.

  CHAPTER 3 Peace and the Infanta

  1 Oresko, ‘Marriages', passim, for the careers of the seven Mazarin nieces and their interaction with the politics of Savoy.

  2 Buckley, pp. 238, 296.

  3 Pitts, p. 160.

  4 Motteville, IV, p. 85.

  5 La Fayette, Secret History, p. 16.

  6 Corneille, Le Cid, Act V, scene 3.

  7 Loyau, Correspondance 1709, p. 51; Davis, Society, p. 124.

  8 Davis, ‘Women in Politics', p. 178; Craveri, p. 358; Duchêne, Sévigné, p. 72.


  9 Scudéry, Sapho, pp. 45, 58.

  10 Doscot, p. 107.

  11 Doscot, p. 215, note 2; Doscot points out that even if Saint-Bremond edited them, he used Marie's own Italian text; and see Wolf, p. 627, note 3: ‘If … not written by Marie Mancini herself, it was obviously written by someone who knew her and her career very, very well.'

  12 Beaussant, Louis, p. 35.

  13 Motteville, IV, p. 118.

  14 Buckley, p. 308.

  15 Dunlop, p. 43; Motteville, IV, p. 110.

  16 Journal de la Santé, note 2, ‘Maladie du Roi à Calais’, pp. 372–8; Meyer, éducation, p. 151.

  17 Journal de la Santé, note 2, ‘Maladie du Roi a Calais’, pp. 372–8.

  18 Bouyer, p. 147.

  19 Dunlop, p. 49.

  20 Doscot, p. 109.

  21 Wolf, p. 105 & note 5, p. 627.

  22 Motteville, IV, p. 144.

  23 Voltaire, p. 283.

  24 Motteville, IV, pp. 147, 156.

  25 Racine, Bérénice, Act IV, scene 5; Act V, scene 6; La Rochefoucauld, p. 29; La Fayette, Mémoires, p. 12.

  26 Motteville, IV, p. 133.

  27 Caylus (1908), p. 41.

  28 Bertiere, II, pp. 43ff.

  29 Cortequisse, p. 32.

  30 Pitts, p. 151.

  31 Cortequisse, pp. 33ff.

  32 Motteville, IV, pp. 165fr.

  33 Bluche, Louis, p. 90.

  CHAPTER 4 Our Court's Eaughing Face

  1 Geffroy, Maintenon, I, p. 70.

  2 Brandi, p. 488; Wolf, p. 124.

  3 Motteville, IV, p. 322.

  4 Cortequisse, p. 87.

  5 For the composition of the Mémoires, see Déon, pp. 55ff; Petitfils, Louis, p. 217.

  6 Oresko, ‘Marriages’, p. 145.

  7 La Fayette, Mémoires, p. 30.

  8 Loret, IX, p. 29; Motteville, IV, p. 256.

  9 Saint-André, pp. 96ff.

  10 Bussy-Rabutin, p. 250.

  11 Saint-André, p. 34.

  12 Hamilton, p. 91; Cowen, p. 6; Burke, p. 2; Dunlop, p. 142.

  13 The title of Nicolas Poussin's allegorical picture A Dance to the Music of Time, painted about twenty years earlier; La Fayette, Mémoires, p. 35.

  14 La Fayette, Mémoires, p. 32.

  15 Déon, p. 301.

  16 Loret, p. 129; Bottineau, p. 728.

  17 Decker, Louis, p. 51.

  18 La Fayette, Mémoires, pp. 31ff.

  19 Motteville, IV, pp. 260ff.

  20 Saint-Simon (1967), II, p. 790.

  21 Lair, p. 61, note 4.

  22 Sonnet, p. 151; Loyau, Correspondance 1709, p. 65, note 1; Duchêne, Femme, p. 75.

  23 Petitfils, Vallière, pp. 34ff.

  24 Bertière, II, p. 93.

  25 Carré, Vallière, p. 45.

  26 Lair, pp. 52ff.

  27 Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires, II, p. III.

  28 Dunlop, p. 87.

  29 Loret, XI, p. 173; Decker, Louis, p. 63.

  30 Loret, XI, p. 173.

  31 Déon, p. 162.

  32 Petitfils, Masque de Fer, p. 58.

  33 For Jansenism see Doyle, p. 29 and passim; Couton, pp. 61ff & note 9.

  34 Lear, pp. 75, 107; J. P. Landry, ‘Bossuet', DGS, I, pp. 215–17; Minois, passim.

  35 Carré, Vallière, p. 36; Lair, p. 75.

  36 Couton, p. 31; Bajou, p. 28.

  CHAPTER 5 Sweet Violence

  1 Petitfils, Vallière, p. 106; Couton, p. 43; Bardon, p. 302 & notes 107 & III.

  2 Hamelin, p. 8.

  3 Haskins, pp. 15ff.

  4 Jardine, p. 245; Norton, Sun King, p. 29.

  5 Molière, Dom Juan, trans. Frame, Act I, scene 2.

  6 See Gaimster et al. ‘Dudley Castle condoms'.

  7 Le Roy Ladurie, Saint-Simon,

  8 p. 113; Dulong, Vie quotidienne, pp. 90ff.

  9 Pitts, pp. 174—5; Hufton, Prospect, p. 182.

  10 Carré, Vallière, p. 80.

  11 Castro, p. 28; Ormesson, p. 496, note 2.

  12 Saint-Maurice, II, p. 60.

  13 Bussy-Rabutin, II, p. 151; Christout (1967), pp. 111ff.

  14 See Solnon, Versailles, passim; Norton, Sun King, p. 44; Grasse, p. 29.

  15 Farmer, p. 100. 1) Mitford, p. 20.

  16 Bluche, Louis, p. 180.

  17 Beaussant, Lully, p. 800.

  18 Solnon, Cour, p. 256; pp. 274ff.

  19 Mallet-Joris, p. 39.

  20 Solnon, Cour, p. 260; Duchêne, Molière, pp. 381ff.

  21 Pitts, p. 250, note 30; Molière, Tartuffe, Act V, scene 7.

  22 Motteville, IV, pp. 344ff.

  23 Motteville, IV, p. 357.

  24 Kleinman, pp. 283ff.

  25 Motteville, IV, p. 392.

  26 Georges Matoré, ‘Galant, Galanterie’, DGS, I, p. 632—3; Scudéry, Galant, p. 21; Scudéry, Clélie, I, pp. 178ff.

  27 Sarti, p. 134.

  28 Saint-Simon (1967), III, p. 463; Hilton, p. 157; Pitts, pp. 177–8.

  29 Motteville, IV, pp. 339ff.

  30 Louis, Mémoires, I, p. 117.

  31 Motteville, IV, pp. 437ff.

  32 Pitts, pp. 174–5.

  33 Sévigné (1955), p. 169.

  34 Motteville, IV, p. 447; Dulong, Amoureuses, p. 11.

  35 Racine, Bajazet, Act I, scene 1, trans. Hollinghurst.

  CHAPTER 6 The Rise of Another

  1 Decker, Louis, p. 82; Saint-Maurice, pp. 105, 130; Couton, p. 84.

  2 Carré, Vallière, p. 127; Genlis, p. 112.

  3 Bertière, II, p. 197.

  4 Decker, Montespan, p. 45.

  5 Hilton, p. 18; Saint-Simon (1967), II, p. 131.

  6 Scudéry, Galant, p. 112.

  7 Petitfils, Montespan, pp. 1ff.

  8 Hilton, pp. 119ff.

  9 Couton, p. 98.

  10 Scudéry, Sapho, p. 43; Duchêne, Femme, p. 268.

  11 Backer, pp. 91—2.

  12 Decker, Montespan, p. 29.

  13 La Rochefoucauld, p. 38.

  14 Saint-Simon (1856), I, p. 251; Burke, p. 5; Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 145; Petitfils, Louis, p. 322.

  15 Lebrun, p. 50; Gady, p. 59; Sabatier, pp. 361—6.

  16 Davis, ‘Women’, p. 168, Saint-Maurice, pp. 71ff.

  17 Lair, pp. 170–1.

  18 Furetière, Dictionnaire, ‘Légitimer’.

  19 Louis, Mémoires, II, p. 313; Lair, pp. 176-80.

  20 Letters of a Portuguese Nun, p. 18.

  21 Kay et al., p. 167.

  22 Hilton, p. 55.

  23 Castro, p. 56.

  24 Saint-Maurice, pp. 204ff.

  25 Duchêne, Molière, pp. 511–12.

  26 Castari, p. 478; Mainardi, p. 7; Couton, p. 135.

  27 Norrington, p. 153.

  28 Bertière, II, Annexe 1, p. 490, ‘a girl?’; Hilton, p. 71, ‘most likely a girl’ (Louise-Françoise).

  29 Saint-Maurice, p. 527.

  30 Flandrin, pp. 114—29; Grieco, p. 70; Duchêne, Femme, p. 223.

  31 Duchêne, Sévigné, p. 132; Goreau, p. 107; Barker, p. 213.

  CHAPTER 7 Marriages Like Death

  1 Christout (1967), p. 118.

  2 Christout (1967), p. 133, note 179; Saint-Simon (1856), II, p. 60.

  3 Pepys, IX, p. 352; Fraser, p. 235.

  4 Cowen, p. 181.

  5 Dunlop, p. 173.

  6 Bertière, II, p. 142; Norrington, p. 194.

  7 Norrington, p. 195, Saint-Maurice, p. 402.

  8 Visages du Grand Siècle, p. 232.

  9 Fraser, pp. 273ff.

  10 Hartmann, p. 314.

  11 La Fayette, Mémoires, pp. 76ff; Hartmann, pp. 326ff.

  12 Dr Jean Fabre, Sur la Vie et Principalement la Mort de Madame; see Hartmann p. 333; Bertière, II, p. 152: ‘no symptoms of poisons … Everything points to natural death’; Barker, pp. 113ff.

  13 Erlanger, p. 135.

  14 Lear, pp. 157ff; Couton, pp. 103—4.

  15 Lear, p. 107.

  16 Sévigné (1955), p. 43; La Fayette, Mémoires, p. 9.

  17 Pitts, pp. 186ff; Bouyer, pp. 2
06ff.

  18 Berwick, I, pp. 75—6; Bertiére, II, p. 171.

  19 Wolf, p. 312.

  20 Hilton, p. 92.

  21 Kroll, p. 46; Liselotte Briefe, p. 51; Forster, pp. 5, xxviii.

  22 Kroll, pp. 106, 14; Forster, p. 10.

  23 Saint-Simon (1967), II, p. 448; Kroll, p. 18.

  24 Kroll, p. 27.

  25 Cruysse, p. 121.

  26 Cruysse, pp. 193fr.

  27 Louis, Mémoires, II, p. 570.

  28 Bertière, II, p. 319.

  29 Kroll, p. 27; Bertière, II, p. 319.

  CHAPTER 8 A Singular Position

  1 Haldane, p. 75.

  2 Carré, Vallière, p. 183.

  3 Hilton, p. 117.

  4 Norton, Sun King, pp. 67ff.

  5 Fumaroli, p. 373; Couton, p. 138; Visconti, p. 70.

  6 Fumaroli, p. 370.

  7 Bluche, Louis, p. 196; Cowen, p. 92.

  8 Molière, Tartuffe, Act IV, scene 3.

  9 Mallet-Joris, pp. 211ff; p. 217, note 1.

  10 Doscot, p. 172.

  11 Saint-Évremond, p. 269.

  12 Bertière, II, pp. 185ff.

  13 Desprat, p. 19.

  14 Castelot, p. 50; Desprat, p. 236; Bandenier, p. 52.

  15 Cordelier, pp. 8–9; Chandernagor, ‘Maintenon’, pp. 936–7.

  16 Guide Bleu: Les Antilles, pp. 284–5.

  17 Le Roy Ladurie, p. 101.

  18 Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 41.

  19 Leroy & Loyau, Estime, p. 28.

  20 Bremond, p. 150.

  21 Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, pp. 37, 125.

  22 Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 38.

  23 Bray, p. 245; Mesnard, pp. 193ff.

  24 Geffroy, Maintenon, p. 4.

  25 Some kind of consummation – ‘manage gris’ as opposed to ‘blanc’ – is a common verdict of historians: see Castelot, p. 43; Bertière, II, p. 226; Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 107.

  26 Caylus (1908), pp. 62–3; Leroy & Loyau, Sagesse, p. 288; Geffroy, Maintenon, II, p. 328; Scudéry, Sapho, p. 22.

  27 Saint-Simon (1967), I, pp. 94–5.

  28 Castelot, p. 60 & 2 note 1.

  29 Haldane, p. 42; La Rochefoucauld, p. 46.

  30 Norton, First Lady, p. 3, note 1.