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 permission 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.

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 wasonly 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.'⁹Mary 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 Racine, 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 devoted 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?)

It is true that Athénaïs did occasionally haunt Versailles. There she was compared poetically by Marguerite de Caylus to ‘those unhappy souls who return to the places where they lived to expiate their faults'.²⁰ At the same time there is no reason to suppose that she was all that melancholy, with the satisfaction of atonement through good works to support her (any more than Louise de La Vallière, busy with her own expiation, was unhappy). A later confessor, Father Pierre François de La Tour, even persuaded Athénaïs to apologise to her husband. With her practical streak, Athénaïs was happy enough mending shirts for the poor, dining frugally, and dressing in crude fabrics at the orders of the clergy, as once she had been feasting (a little too much) and dressing in diamonds to divert the King.

The next generation, however, did not present that interesting mixture of sexuality reined in by religious fervour which their parents had exhibited. Françoise-Marie, for whom the glorious fate of marriage to Monsieur's only son, Philippe Duc de Chartres, was proposed, had no such inhibitions. This was a yet higher step for a (legitimised) bastard: Françoise-Marie's sister and half-sister had married Princes of the Blood, the Duc de Bourbon and the Prince de Conti respectively, but Philippe was a Grandson of France, and in direct line to the throne, after his three cousins, the young dukes. This meant that Françoise-Marie, younger than Madame la Duchesse and Marie-Anne de Conti by five and twelve years respectively, now took precedence over them, and they were obliged to call her ‘Madame'. In vain the angry sisters tried to get away with cries of ‘Darling' and ‘Sweetheart': the King had to utter a rebuke at this dereliction of etiquette.

For Liselotte, the horrified mother of the bridegroom, it was a step altogether too far. She cried all night before submitting because she had no choice. The King's will was law. She responded, however, to the King's request with the briefest of curtseys, according to Saint-Simon, a mere pirouette in ballet terms, before turning on her heel. Louis, for his part, swept such a deep bow or révérence that by the time he straightened himself all he could see was the retreating back of his sister-in-law. In the public language of Versailles, this was the nearest she could come to expressing her disgust.

Liselotte was bitter on two counts. First, there was her rooted objection to the stain of bastardy as such, which for her could never be wiped away by legitimisation (at least Athénaïs had been officially separated from Montespan at the time of Françoise-Marie's birth). Then she suspected Monsieur's favourites of persuading him to agree, in return for the King's help in other ways; and of course ‘the old trollop' was at the back of the whole thing. Liselotte outdid herself in venom on the subject of her future daughter-in-law: ‘the most disagreeable person in the world, with her crooked figure and her ugly face, although she considers herself a raving beauty and is forever fussing about her appearance and covering herself with beauty spots'. Madame behaved, wrote Saint-Simon, like Ceres whose daughter Proserpine had been taken down to the underworld by Pluto – except she was bewailing a son, not a daughter.²¹

In truth Françoise-Marie was more than adequately pretty in youth, as her pictures show: not unlike her catlike sister Madame la Duchesse, if not quite as ravishing as Marie-Anne. She does seem to have had some curvature of the spine, but her figure was none the less ‘stately', with a fine bosom. She had remarkable eyes and good if long teeth. Her hair grew ‘prettily' even if it was not particularly thick and she had long eyelashes, although her eyebrows were scanty. It was her character that grated, and her upbringing or rather lack of it. She had been born to a couple no longer passionately in love, and she had not been raised by Madame de Maintenon (even though she was born at her château). The result was a wilful child who had been spoilt and indulged with sporadic but ineffective correction. There was something touching – but significant – about the scene in which her august destiny was broken to Françoise-Marie. She was dressed up magnificently, like a fashion-doll used by dressmakers to display their wares, but she actually imagined she was going to be scolded until Madame de Maintenon took her on to her lap.²²

Unfortunately Françoise-Marie had the violent urges of both her parents but none of the style and charisma which made them, even at their worst, magnificent. She neither pretended to love her husband nor expected him to love her. ‘All that matters is that he should marry me,' the future Duchesse de Chartres, lording it over her sisters, was reputed to have said. It was true that she had the Mortemart wit, that languishing tone of voice in which impossible things could be said, and it was through Françoise-Marie and her descendants that the ‘wit' would be perpetuated into the eighteenth century long after the death of its most famous exemplar. But as a teenager she already drank heavily, and within a few years as Duchesse de Chartres, she was ‘drunk as drunk' three or four times a week. A love of food combined with the Mortemart tendency to plumpness meant that her fine figure degenerated: besides, Françoise-Marie, with her mother's high fertility, gave birth to seven healthy children, and repeated pregnancies did not help. Her pride was inordinate: it was said that even on her chaise percée (commode) she remembered she was a Daughter of France, and her husband wryly nicknamed her Madame Lucifer.²³

As for Liselotte, she might be compelled to bow to the will of the monarch, but when her quaking son came to break the news that he had agreed to the match (what could poor Philippe do against the King and his father?) she slapped him in the face. It was a slap which echoed throughout Versailles – but with a hollow sound. Whatever Liselotte's values, Françoise-Marie, Duchesse de Chartres, illegitimate at birth, was now the Second Lady at Versailles after her disgruntled mother-in-law.

Saint-Cyr and its virtuous charming seraglio was at least a pure pleasure for the King and Madame de Maintenon, guaranteed salubrious entertainment. This was in contrast to a Versailles which offered endless gambling and a thrice-weekly social evening known simply as Appartement. Gambling in itself was not seen as wrong: both Anne of Austria and the late Queen had been great gamblers, as had Mazarin; the King had had to pay Marie-Thérèse's debts after her death. A courtier was expected ‘to play like a man of honour', according to the Chevalier de Mere, ‘ready to win or lose without showing whether one has won or lost in one's expression or behaviour'. It could be a form of social advancement: the Marquis de Dangeau for example, he of the Journals, was admired for his gambling skills: ‘Nothing distracts him, he neglects nothing, he profits by everything.'²⁴*

The games concerned sound simple enough, but so do most gambling games to those who are not wagering on them. Bassette for example came from Venice, and included a banker, with players betting on the draw of their cards; Louis got so angered by the excessive losses of this game that he forbade it in 1679. Reversi, from Spain, a particular favourite of Louis himself according to Liselotte, was introduced by him during the court's expedition to Strasbourg to give Marie-Thérèse something to do; the winner scored the lowest points and made the least tricks. Tric-trac was a game of dice to advance pawns across a board. Lansquenet, which dethroned the popular Reversi, was a card game introduced into France by German mercenary soldiers (Landsknechts). By 1695 it was ‘all the rage': even simpler than Reversi, it consisted once again of betting on the draw. For some reason, Lansquenet aroused particularly foul language in its frustrated players; the King ordered an end to the swearing but he could not successfully forbidLansquenet.There were many others, including the long-established Lottery, passing or enduring fashions: Portique, where little ivory balls were rolled through arches, and another somewhat similar ‘game of skill' invented by Louis himself in 1689, a form of hoop-la.²⁵

As money got tighter, the gambling became more frenzied. Louis would have to pay enormous gambling debts on behalf of his son the Dauphin, his daughter Madame la Duchesse, and in time for his grandson the Duc de Bourgogne. No wonder the stern Father Bourdaloue lashed out in one of his sermons in the chapel of Versailles: ‘Gambling without measure is not a diversion for you [the court] but an occupation, a profession, a traffic, a passion, a rage, a fury. It causes you to forget your duties, it deranges your households, it dissipates your revenues.'²⁶ And yet the King could not control it, this instinct for amusement, any amusement, diversion, any diversion, where the younger members of court were no longer engaged by the solemn rituals and found going to the King's pleasure-house at Marly frankly dull.

Informality was deliberate at Marly and the wearing of full court dress was abolished. A charming custom arose whereby courtiers found all they needed overnight including robes de chambres and toiletries already laid out in their rooms (as in some modern luxury hotel). This demonstrated Louis's thoroughness as a host – or perhaps his passion for controlling every detail of life around him. Work had begun in 1679 and the first Fête was held in July 1684; for the rest of the reign, annual visits were paid in increasing numbers. Those who were frequently present were known as ‘les Marlys'. With time informality was demonstrated even by the methods of dining: there was a sideboard piled with plates, glasses, wine and water, and a mechanical table â la clochette(summoned by a bell from below) so that the meal was virtually servant-free. Even the method of invitation was informal – or intended to be (it was in fact extremely testing). Would-be guests had to step forward and propose themselves: ‘Sire, Marly?' Afterwards an emissary either confirmed or denied the visit. In spite of all this, Marly was still not a riot of fun, and Duc to the presence of water, Liselotte at least came to complain about mosquitoes. There was also a great deal of tea- and coffee-drinking, even if the British Ambassador would have preferred a good Burgundy to ‘all these stupid drinks from the Indies'.²⁷*

Compared to all this, Saint-Cyr seemed to offer not only an agreeable alternative but a solution to the King's equal need for diversion. It was therefore an enormous disappointment in the early 1690s when King Louis's troubles with his own Catholic Church, spilling out from his troubles with the Holy See, complicated the simple establishment of Saint-Cyr. There was a warning shot in January 1691 when Racine proposed another edifying tragedy, Athalie, to be performed by the young ladies, in succession to the enormously successful (and edifying) Esther. Athalie herself, another powerful female like Vashti in the earlier play, was declared to be against the natural order as a ruler on the grounds of her sex: a reference perhaps to the situation in Britain where Mary, ungrateful daughter of James II, was co-ruling with her husband William. Here was Athalie, an ‘impious stranger / Seated, alas, on the throne of kings', and again: ‘This haughty woman with her head held high / Intruded in a court reserved for men.'²⁸

Trouble was made however by Madame de Maintenon's confessor the Abbé Godet des Marais over the performance of this piece by young girls. Godet des Marais had just succeeded Gobelin because the latter now felt himself too humble to counsel such an exalted lady. Godet des Marais on the other hand was professionally forthright. Athalie was unsuitable for the Demoiselles but it was not unsuitable in itself. After all, the emphasis of the text was all on the vanquishing of the unnatural Athalie, followed by the triumphant coronation of the rightful ruler-by-blood the young boy Joas. Here were more contemporary allusions: either to the future restoration of James II, or to Louis's ultimate heir, the eight-year-old Duc de Bourgogne, France's ‘dearest delight' and, it was to be hoped, France's future Joas.²⁹

In the end the piece was performed by the girls in ordinary clothes, a sort of concert performance. When King James and Queen Mary Beatrice asked to see Athalie in February, Madame de Maintenon agreed, but once again there were to be no costumes. This time Father La Chaise and the theologian the Abbé François Fénelon, tutor to Bourgogne since 1691, did attend, but still Françoise's confessor declined.

The Abbé Godet des Marais, ten years younger than Madame de Maintenon, was prominent among those who encouraged her in her feelings of destiny, the one chosen by God where the King was concerned. But he also preached a distaste for the theatre, as opposed to good works, which Madame de Maintenon did not share (still less Louis XIV). It was all about the threat to innocence: Marguerite de Caylus, the best actress of them all, was demoted from her part because she was felt to be unbecomingly adept at the art. The ecclesiastical hold tightened in 1692 when it was deemed unacceptable for Saint-Cyr to remain outside the structure of the Church. Henceforward the lives of the girls, and the ladies who taught them, would be much more conventionally those of nuns and aspirant nuns.

Louis XIV had been involved in a bitter struggle with the Papacy over ecclesiastical revenues, the so-called ‘regalian rights', for some years. The Saint-Cyr foundation became involved in the controversy when he tried to use the revenues of the Abbey of Saint-Denis to fund it. The Holy See complained vociferously about a foundation partaking of religious revenues where the women concerned had taken no vows. Madame de Maintenon's position in all this was sensitive, since whatever private assurances the Papacy had received about her status, in the eyes of the world she had none – or worse still, that of mistress.

So Saint-Cyr was changed, the uniform was changed, although Louis XIV, with his eye for detail and his dislike of the morbid, suggested that at least the young ladies should not be stripped of their charming bronzé leather gloves. These were a fashion item much in demand, also as love tokens. (Samuel Pepys laid out ten shillings on such, ‘very pretty and all the mode'.) No wonder the King, a sentimental admirer of young women, protested: ‘Would you take from them their cloaks, their gold crosses and the gloves?' he enquired plaintively. The gloves at least were restored. Madame de Maintenon's authority as supreme head of Saint-Cyr was however not touched. As her girls sang to her in 1695: ‘You are our faithful foundress …'³⁰

The death of Marianne-Victoire in 1690 had left the Dauphin, still not yet thirty, in theory the most eligible bachelor in Europe – if you accepted the fact that his father was otherwise engaged. But the Dauphin, like Louis XIV before him, chose domestic bliss over duty, on the grounds that by providing three sons, he had already done more than enough. He settled down at Meudon with his mistress Marie-Émilie Jolie de Choin, who had originally been a lady-in-waiting to his favourite half-sister Marie-Anne de Conti. No beauty – with her short legs and round face she looked ‘like a bull terrier' – she was intelligent and very sympathetic. She provided him with the security that his over-severe childhood had stolen from him; this comfort was symbolised by a pair of ‘monstrously large breasts' which were said to ‘charm' him because he could beaton them as if they were kettle-drums'.³¹ It seems likely that in the course of time this couple too went through some form of morganatic marriage for which after all nothing was needed except a priest and two witnesses.

No French Queen (and no prospect of one) and no Dauphine meant that Liselotte was now the First Lady of Versailles. At least she did not have to pay the despised ‘old woman' the respect Duc to the King's wife; offering her the chemise at her lever for example as senior royal lady. It seemed unlikely that Liselotte would be ousted from the ‘métier' which made her groan – but which she also treasured – until the marriage of France's ‘dearest delight' in the shape of Louis's grandson the Duc de Bourgogne.

In view of the wartime situation, that was certainly a match which would be dictated by strong diplomatic considerations. The League of Augsburg had been transformed into the Grand Alliance by the adherence of England and Holland. In 1693 Louis failed to capture Liège (he never joined his troops in the field again). Two years later William III took back Namur for the Alliance. Flanders was not the only sphere of action: in the south France invaded Spain.

The sufferings of France itself (never mind the other countries) were beginning to be denounced by those quite close to royal circles. Prominent among these was the Abbé Fénelon, Bourgogne's own preceptor, who had managed to establish a tender, quasi-paternal relationship with the boy. ‘I will leave the Duc de Bourgogne behind the door,' he said, ‘and with you I will be no more than little Louis.' Fénelon, now in his early forties, had been a disciple of Bossuet. Tall and ascetic-looking, he had famously burning eyes and preached ‘like a torrent', according to Saint-Simon. But Fénelon had sweetness too, and a genuine love of the young: he wrote a treatise on girls' education for Louis XIV's devout friends the Duc and Duchesse de Beauvillier who, having nine daughters, certainly stood in need of it.³²

Fénelon was fearless, as Bossuet and Bourdaloue had been before him. He had denounced the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in a strong letter to Madame de Maintenon. Now he wrote the ‘Anonymous Letter to Louis XIV’ of 1694, which, via Beauvillier, may even have reached the King himself; certainly Françoise knew of it. He referred to the putative 2 million dead in the recent famine. As for the King: ‘You live as though with a fatal blindfold over your eyes.' And again: ‘The whole of France is nothing but a huge desolate hospital.'³³

Appropriately enough, Louis now sought to use Bourgogne's marriage to a Savoyard princess as part of a package which would bring about peace between France and Savoy. It would also hopefully control the mercurial and wily Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus, who with his numerous changing allegiances coupled with his advantageous geographical position, was showing form as the gadfly of Europe. Fortunately Victor Amadeus did have a daughter, still very young, but of an appropriate age to wed Bourgogne one day. Her mother was the French princess Anne-Marie d'Orléans, like the unhappy Marie-Louise a daughter of Monsieur by his first marriage to Henriette-Anne.

The name of the child was Adelaide. She was three and a half years younger than her proposed bridegroom Bourgogne. Since Victor Amadeus specialised in tantalising his would-be allies with the other possibilities before him, he was also considering an Austrian Habsburg prince for his little daughter, maybe the Archduke Charles. Time would reveal whether Adelaide was to be yet another unhappy cipher at a foreign court, where the ‘grandeurs of the world' very often led to acute unhappiness on the part of the imported bride, as witness Liselotte and Marianne-Victoire in France. Or perhaps this particular princess would have inherited something of the special grace of her grandmother Henriette-Anne which would enable her to survive and flourish …

* The real fantasy was the Protestant belief that the Queen was unable to conceive: four years later, she did in fact give birth to another healthy child who survived to maturity, Princess Louisa Maria, known for good reasons as ‘the Consoler'. James of course had had numerous illegitimate children by other women.

* Today at Versailles only the original shutters remain in place in the former Appartement des Bains of Athénaïs: dolphins spouting water, shells and seaweed can be discerned (the marble bath, as already noted, is now in the Orangery, having had an exciting period when it was given to Madame de Pompadour).

* Apart from his gambling skills, Dangeau was a licensed jester, able to impersonate Louis XIV, to whom he bore a strong physical resemblance.

* Marly today is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, still sign-posted as Demeure champêtre du Roi (the King's Rustic Retreat), although the buildings were destroyed at the time of the French Revolution. The verdant site is on a gentle slope looking down towards Paris and up to where there were once cascades; the surviving reservoir is a reminder of the centrality of water in the vision of Louis XIV.