CHAPTER 13

Becoming a Child Again

Everyone at court is becoming a child again.

– Liselotte, Duchesse d'Orléans, November 1696

The betrothal of Marie Adelaide, Princess of Savoy, and Louis, Duc de Bourgogne, was announced in June 1696. This union of two young people – ten and a half and just under fourteen respectively – personified the Treaty of Turin by which the opportunist Duke of Savoy abandoned the Grand Alliance for the winning force of Louis XIV. It was a Treaty which marked an important step in the direction of general European pacification.

The hostilities which had cost France (and others) so much in men and money in the War of the League of Augsburg were not finally ended until the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697. Nevertheless in 1696 it was already possible to regard the little Savoyard bride as a harbinger of peace – as the Spanish Marie-Thérèse had once been. ‘Is she a princess? Is she an angel?' ran one welcoming poem. ‘Don't you see the vital difference? / The angel simply announces peace. / She herself gives it to us.'¹ Furthermore, it was part of the deal that the peace-bringing princess should be educated in France. She was young enough, it was felt, to be moulded into the ways of Versailles even before the actual wedding took place. So Adelaide set out for her glorious destiny in the autumn of 1696, her tiny person conveyed by a huge carriage draped in purple velvet (royal mourning for a deceased cousin of Louis XIV).

The circumstances of Adelaide's childhood conspired to prepare her for what she would find at Versailles. First of all, her mother, Anne-Marie d'Orléans, had taught her of the superior nature of all things French, like many another expatriate French princess before her. Adelaide spoke French well, and with a proper accent (although she could adopt an exaggerated Italian accent when she wanted to tease); in any case the court of Savoy has been described as ‘polyglot’, German as well as Italian competing with French.²

Quite apart from her upbringing, much of Adelaide's blood was actually French. She had two great-grandmothers who were French princesses, daughters of Henri IV: Henrietta Maria and Christine de France, Duchess of Savoy. Her grandfather, Monsieur, was French and her grandmother Henriette-Anne was half French. Her father's mother (a strong influence upon her), Jeanne-Baptiste de Savoie-Nemours, known as Madame Royale, was partly French; she had been born in Paris and descended from Henri IV via one of his bastards, César, Duc de Vendôme.

Duchess Anne-Marie had left the court at which she was raised twelve years earlier but had forgotten none of the details. As a result Louis XIV himself would comment much later that Adelaide had been taught in advance ‘the only way she could be happy with us'. For example there was to be no foolish snobbery about Madame de Maintenon such as the late Dauphine had once evinced, since her influence was already palpable when Anne-Marie left for Savoy. In a brilliant move, little Adelaide would address her by the honorific title of aunt; ‘Tante' was respectful and intimate but also delightfully vague. In Adelaide's attitude towards Françoise, obedient and very affectionate, the hand of her powerful grandmother Madame Royale, once Regent of Savoy, can be detected: ‘I have carried out what you ordered me to do,' she wrote to Madame Royale on one occasion in the course of their continuing correspondence.³

In quite a different way Adelaide was prepared for life at Versailles by her early experiences. For example, her father Victor Amadeus, known – to her anyway – as le Grand, was the strong male figure who was the centre of her world; he was also blatantly unfaithful to her mother. Adelaide grew up understanding that men had mistresses and that mistresses bore them children (Victor Amadeus's maâtresse en titre the Comtesse de Verrue had two that he acknowledged).⁴ Then, much of her childhood had been spent in the country, the Vigna di Madama, a favourite haunt of Duchess Anne-Marie, having something of the French style. Here Adelaide made cheese and milked cows; here she learned to love flowers, gardening and animals – all the things in short that Louis XIV loved.⁵

It was not however a childhood that had been totally without trauma. Victor Amadeus's earlier rupture with France, which he deserted for the League of Augsburg, had led to depredations by French invaders and the destruction of Savoyard buildings: although that experience carried with it the connotation of France's immense strength as a power. Then the winter of 1693, shortly after Adelaide's eighth birthday on 6 December, had been no better in Savoy than in France, with vineyards and orchards destroyed, and starvation threatening the poor.

By nature Adelaide was kind, exceptionally so, hating to cause pain to anyone in the world, and she was gentle. Her manners were superb. Her greeting of the exiled Queen Mary Beatrice, for example, was perfectly judged, the young woman on the verge of a great destiny showing the greatest respect and tenderness for one whose fortunes were so markedly in decline. In other ways Adelaide was shrewd as the children of troubled marriages are shrewd – for such her own parents' marriage certainly was, give or take Victor Amadeus's sporadic sleeping with his wife in the hopes of begetting a male heir. (A healthy prince had however not yet arrived before Adelaide's departure for France, only another daughter known as Louison, born in 1688.)

Ill-educated as she might be by the standards of Saint-Cyr, Adelaide was naturally intelligent, quick, amusing and very, very lively. In fact she might have been specially designed to divert the ageing Louis XIV – Adelaide arrived at Versailles when Louis was in his fifty-ninth year – a man with a pious older governess of a wife, troublesome daughters both spoilt and dissipated, and the cares of Europe (as he saw it) on his shoulders. This was the man who had gloomily warned his son that ‘the grandeurs of the world' would all turn to dust, King, Dauphin not excluded. Six years later this sweet little monkey of a girl took Versailles by storm and in the process captured the heart of Louis XIV.

The King seems to have had some premonition of the emotional importance Adelaide would have in his life. He insisted from the first – that is, before her marriage – that she should have proper precedence as the First Lady of Versailles. This gave her parity with Queen Mary Beatrice, whose rank Louis had hitherto jealously guarded. Since it was not planned for Adelaide and Bourgogne to marry yet awhile, the King ordained that she should be known simply as ‘the Princess' – a single title, like all the grandest titles in Versailles. The proud sisters Françoise-Marie and Madame la Duchesse were indignant: a mere ‘Princess of Savoy' to step ahead of them!⁶

Liselotte, however, demoted from the position she had occupied for the last six years, did not particularly mind. She was more concerned to have a swipe at Madame de Maintenon: at least she would not have to hold the chemise for ‘the old whore' if she was officially acknowledged as Queen (a familiar obsession): that would be for Adelaide as senior royal lady. Liselotte was in a particularly grumpy mood towards Françoise these days over the marriage prospects of her only daughter, the hoydenish and rather plain Élisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans, born in 1676. Liselotte blamed Françoise for denying her daughter the position of the Dauphin's second wife out of ‘spite'; Liselotte had also thought of Élisabeth-Charlotte for Bourgogne, despite her six years seniority.⁷

At least Liselotte was spared the horror of another bastard polluting her pure family when the Duc du Maine was married off to a member of the Bourbon-Condé family, Bénédicte, the midget sister of Louise-Françoise's husband Monsieur le Duc. Known to Liselotte as ‘the little toad', Bénédicte was however quite proud enough for Liselotte's liking: although she accepted Maine, she had originally twitted his sisters on their illegitimate birth when they tried to mock her diminutive appearance ‘like a ten-year-old child'. As for Athénaïs's second royal son, the Comte de Toulouse, ‘We have given the little stinker the slip,' Liselotte reported proudly.⁸ In the end Élisabeth-Charlotte had to make do with Duke Leopold Joseph of Lorraine: a legitimate princeling and occupying a geographically debatable area on the fringes of France. It was not the great marriage Liselotte had envisaged. (She was also annoyed that Élisabeth-Charlotte's half-sisters, Henriette-Anne's daughters, had made superior matches to the King of Spain and Duke of Savoy respectively.)

The King's premonition about ‘the Princess' took a further form when he insisted on riding to greet her at Montargis, twenty-odd miles south of Fontainebleau, instead of waiting there with the whole court. There he stood on a balcony, watching the road like the King in a fairy story for the dust of the Princess's cortège to signal her approach. There had been considerable fuss about the arrangements for her arrival the French Ambassador reporting tersely: ‘We want the Princess naked,' that is to say, there were to be no inferior Savoyard clothes … only her shoes were allowed to come from Turin. Otherwise Adelaide's trousseau was modest indeed, a few chemises and gowns, some lace lingerie, while she awaited the full panoply of French fashion which would be bestowed upon her on arrival. Her ‘body', that is to say a corselet built around her actual shape, had been sent to France before her, including a ribbon to indicate her minute waist. Nor for that matter were there to be presumptuous Savoyard servants to encourage homesickness.

Victor Amadeus minded less about the clothes – which after all were saving him expense – than he did about the servants. It was understood that a great Princess should have a great household chosen from the great ladies of her adopted country. In fact the French had been squabbling over these appointments since the betrothal was announced: there had not after all been such a prominent royal household since the death of the Dauphine in 1690. The winners, including the Duchesse de Lude as Dame d'Honneur, owed much to the influence of Françoise and Nanon, her famous confidential servant. A genuine feeling of pity for his little daughter seems to have gripped Victor Amadeus. Was not this mere child to have a familiar servant looking after her chamber-pot, for example? The Duke worried that Adelaide might forget herself unless ‘some intimate woman' was present to calm her ‘in her moments of weakness'. In the end there was a mild effort at compromise on the part of France: Adelaide was allowed to bring one woman with her, Madame Marquet, on condition she returned to Savoy at once although in reality Madame Marquet managed to stay for two years. Fortunately Adelaide's First Equerry was the Comte de Tessé, who had acted as Ambassador Extraordinary to Savoy during the negotiations for the marriage, a middle-aged man she trusted and who acted as a kind of father figure.

France's ruthless attitude – that of the King, who as usual supervised every detail – was based on the principle of being cruel to be kind. Louis wanted all her tears to be shed before Adelaide reached her new country (he was of course being kind to himself rather than the child). So it was that the Handover took place, a symbolic event whenever a foreign princess left her own country for a glorious marriage. In this case the Princess was installed in her carriage on a hump-backed bridge which joined the two countries, back wheels in Savoy, horse and front wheels in France. She got into the carriage in one country and out in another.

Certainly all tears had been shed before the momentous meeting between King and Princess at Montargis at six o'clock on 4 November 1696. (She had spent the previous three days at La Charité-sur-Loire for the Feast of All Saints.) Adelaide, like the star she was, rose superbly to the occasion, despite her tender age. Understandably she showed signs of nerves when the King held a flambeau to her face. But when he declared: ‘Madame, I have been waiting impatiently to greet you,' Adelaide replied: ‘This, Sire, is the greatest moment of my life’.⁹ Whoever coached her in these words – Madame Royale? – had taught her well. And as she tried to kneel before the King he lifted her up ‘like a feather'. Then Adelaide put her hand in his. But there was – there had to be – one moment of kerfuffle over a matter of etiquette, when Monsieur, her biological grandfather, bustled forward to greet the Princess only to find that the Dauphin, as her future father-in-law, took precedence.

What did the King see? Fortunately his letter back to Madame de Maintenon, waiting with the rest of the royal family (including the fiancé Bourgogne) at Fontainebleau, has survived. The new Princess, he reported, had ‘the greatest charm and the prettiest little figure I have ever seen … the more I see her, the more I am satisfied'. She was in fact doll-sized, and when the King first appeared with her, the impression was given, wrote Saint-Simon in a memorable phrase, that he actually had her in his pocket. Louis's description was of course written to the woman who was going to take charge of this little doll, and he therefore dwelled on her faults. She had ‘very irregular teeth' (and teeth generally would always be a problem for Adelaide). Her lips were very red but also rather thick. On the other hand her pink-and-white complexion was superb. Despite a natural grace Adelaide curtsied badly ‘in the Italian manner' – never a term of praise in France – and altogether there was ‘something slightly Italian' about her appearance. Yet Françoise would be enchanted, as he had been, by her modesty.¹⁰

Adelaide's ‘Italianate' look was partly Duc to that Médicis strain which her tragic aunt Marie-Louise of Spain, for example, had shared. Her eyes were huge and black, her notably long eyelashes also very black. But it was partly Duc to the fact that her hair seems to have been sprayed darker for the meeting, to make her skin look whiter. Liselotte described her as having ‘pretty blonde' hair, while taking the opportunity to sneer at Adelaide's ‘real Austrian mouth and chin’.¹¹ From the portraits the answer seems to be that Adelaide's hair was a kind of bright chestnut which darkened later – she was after all only ten years old at this point. Certainly everyone agreed that her hair was wonderfully thick and lustrous.

What the King did not mention in his letter to Françoise was the measure of his enchantment with this little ‘doll or plaything' – the term often used by observers – but a walking, talking doll with the prettiest ways imaginable and a plaything who had been educated to respect his wishes in every single matter. No wonder Françoise told Adelaide's mother that the little girl had ‘all the graces of eleven years and all the perfections of a more advanced age'. For when Françoise tried to ‘deny the caresses' Adelaide gave her, saying she was too old, the girl replied charmingly: ‘Not at all too old.' (Although it is true that Françoise was ageing well; at sixty-one she had hardly a grey hair; her eyes were still ‘very fine', as an English visitor wrote, and there was about ‘her whole person' an indefinable charm which old age could not destroy.) After this bit of childish blarney, Adelaide sat on Françoise's lap and uttered the perfect expression of her training: ‘Teach me well, I beg you, what I have to do to please the King’.¹²

It is plausible to argue that Louis XIV loved Adelaide of Savoy more than he loved anyone in his life, with the possible exception of the strong love he felt for his mother. It is more difficult to get at Adelaide's feelings for this kindly, all-powerful grandfather-figure. Marguerite de Caylus, who observed the scene, did not doubt that she genuinely loved him, but added the rider that Adelaide was by nature ‘coquettish’ and easily influenced by those around her.¹³ What is remarkable about Adelaide's correspondence with her father, mother and grandmother is the prominence it gives to Louis XIV and the scarcity of mentions of the Duc de Bourgogne. She reiterates her love for the King, his kindness to her – but of Bourgogne there is hardly a trace.

Perhaps this was hardly surprising, since the two young fiancés were being carefully kept apart, with meetings not only strictly chaperoned but rationed to one a fortnight (his brothers, Anjou and Berry, could meet Adelaide once a month). Bourgogne himself was hardly a glamorous figure. His misanthropic temperament had led to the nickname of ‘Alceste’, and with strong religious convictions he would probably have been happier as a younger son who could have become a Cardinal Prince of the Church, as in bygone days. His pious austerities were notorious as when he refused to attend a ball at Marly because it was the Feast of the Epiphany. Even the holy Fénelon had to reason with him that ‘a great Prince should not serve God in the same way as a recluse'. The counterpoint to this piety was a violent temper which Bourgogne was unable to control: he was, wrote Saint-Simon, ‘born furious'. A favourite method of relief was smashing clocks.¹⁴

Nor was his physical appearance prepossessing. Bourgogne was quite short, with a raised shoulder that gradually turned to a hump. His face was dominated by a beaklike nose, which together with his receding chin and pronounced upper jaw made him look positively odd. As against that, Bourgogne enjoyed music, the opera and the theatre. He was insecure but he was not mean-spirited. And of course, like his grandfather, he fell madly in love with Adelaide, despite the strict prohibitions which would not let him kiss so much as the tips of her fingers.

The general enchantment of the population, King downwards, by ‘the Princess' had a curious effect on what had become a somewhat stultified society. Of course she was an object of intense interest from the start, not only in terms of lucrative appointments to her household. There was such a crush on her first arrival at court that there was a danger of the whole company collapsing ‘like a pack of cards' as grand ladies such as the Duchesse de Nemours and the Maréchale de La Motte pushed their way relentlessly to the front; according to Liselotte, Maintenon herself would have been felled if she had not personally held ‘the old woman's' arms upright.¹⁵ Quite apart from Bourgogne, there was trouble about who might and who might not kiss ‘the Princess', with the Duchesse de Lude like an eagle of etiquette, ever on the watch against an unlawful buss.

Saint-Simon wrote of Adelaide that her youth and high spirits enlivened the whole court. Liselotte, describing how she had joined in a jolly game of blind man's bluff, which she had to admit she had much enjoyed, commented that everyone was busy ‘becoming a child again'.¹⁶ When Adelaide admitted that she missed the Savoyard dolls which had not been allowed to accompany her, special dolls were sent for from Paris, more gorgeous than anything mere Savoy could imagine. Games of spillikins were also pronounced beneficial by Madame de Maintenon because they promoted ‘dexterity'.

There is a vignette of the little Princess ‘sledging', that is to say, being whirled down the polished corridors of Versailles, which is curiously touching when one thinks of the awe in which this establishment was held by the whole of Europe. An English visitor about this time, Dr Martin Lister, gaped at what he saw: ‘it were endless to tell all the furniture of these gardens, of marble statues, and vases of brass and marble, the multitude of fountains, and those wide canals like seas running in a straight line from the bottom of the gardens as far as the eye can reach. In a word, these gardens are a country …' To Adelaide however, frolicsome to a fault, skipping, chattering, ‘rumpling' the King and Tante Maintenon, these gardens were her playground.¹⁷

Louis might now be a man in late middle age plagued by gout, who wore unromantic galoches* when the weather was wet: reflected in the child's eyes he saw himself in quite a different light. As Marguerite de Caylus reported, the King was so ‘completely bewitched' by Adelaide that he could not bear to be parted from her for a single moment and even took her to council meetings. As for Adelaide, Dangeau reported significantly that the little girl ‘never had a cold' when it was a question of going out with the King.¹⁸

It was true, as has been mentioned, that Adelaide was not well educated: but how convenient that she could be enrolled in Tante's nearby Saint-Cyr three times a week! (Even if she had to be in a class of those below her own age.) Here she formed a friendship with Françoise's niece Françoise-Charlotte d'Aubigné, and she also acted a ‘little Israelite', part of the young chorus, in a production of Esther; subsequently she played Joas's bride Josabit in Athalie, although there was some heart-searching about her participation in this controversial play.¹⁹ Her handwriting remained childish – at the age of thirteen she was still vowing to improve it – but at least Saint-Cyr gave her some opportunities for youthful society in an otherwise highly ceremonious life.

All this innocent fun made such a pleasant change from the louche young royals of the court with their drinking, their endless shrieking and above all their gambling. It was hardly to be expected that these attractive, spoilt princesses, mated – one has to use the word – at an early age for reasons of state, would ignore the opportunities for gallantry around them. Marie-Anne de Conti, the eldest, had led the way; Madame la Duchesse eventually settled into a long affair with the Marquis de Lassay; Françoise-Marie's ‘discretion' in handling her affairs was, for once, praised by her mother-in-law Liselotte.²⁰

Liselotte's real gripe was less against the morals than the sheer laziness of the princesses. They were such layabouts and so debauched that they could hardly be bothered to dance any more. (This critic was the Liselotte who had thoroughly enjoyed an impromptu farting competition within her family circle, won by Philippe, who could make ‘a noise like a flute'.) Worst of all, at any rate for those around them, was their daring use of tobacco. Although tobacco was used as a curative in certain cases of great pain – Catherine de Médicis administered it to the young François II for migraine – that was a case of taking the tobacco in powder form as a drug. Rakish gentlemen might indulge themselves by handing it round in elegant boxes (Don Juan's valet Sganarelle opens Molière's play by reflecting that ‘there's nothing like tobacco'). But it was regarded as a disgusting habit for a lady to smoke tobacco in a pipe as sailors did. On the other hand inhaling tobacco caused ‘dirty noses', in the words of Liselotte, as if the ladies had rubbed their fingers in the gutter, or rummaged in a man's tobacco pouch. Nevertheless the princesses did it, for all the complaints.²¹

Madame de Maintenon's take on tobacco was similarly disapproving – although to the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr who had to make their way in the world and could not risk giving offence, she advocated more pragmatic behaviour: avoid tobacco altogether, unless it was offered by ‘a person of importance', in which case a girl should take a little and let it drop ‘imperceptibly' to the ground. Further measures against what would now be called date-rape were the avoidance of wine, and the wearing of a corset at all times.²²

The marriage of Adelaide and Bourgogne was ordained to take place on her twelfth birthday, 6 December 1697, roughly a year after her arrival. Adelaide did not allow her coming grandeur to go to her head: when the aged Bishop Bossuet, appointed her Almoner, knelt before her, she protested strongly. ‘Oh, Monseigneur, I am ashamed to see you thus.' The King however was in an extravagant mood, although he had recently dressed very simply, curtailing expenditure Duc to the demands of the War of the League of Augsburg just concluded. He ordered ‘some fine clothes' for the occasion and he indicated in addition that his courtiers would please him with a certain deployment of splendour. Sure enough the Duc and Duchesse de Saint-Simon between them spent twenty thousand livres on their outfits (nearly seventy thousand pounds in today's money).²³

Having decreed splendour, the King should not have been too surprised when the usual chicaneries of Versailles society, based on rivalry, took place. Louis himself chose the embroideries for Adelaide's costume but stipulated that the embroiderer should not immediately abandon all his other clients for the royal commission. Madame la Duchesse, with no such scruples, kidnapped the tailors of the Duchesse de Rohan to work on her own robes exclusively but was obliged to give them back. At the ceremony itself Bourgogne wore black velvet lined with rose-coloured satin and Adelaide wore silver, dotted all over with so many rubies and diamonds that the total weight, together with that of her bejewelled coiffure, was said to be more than her own. The heavy cloak flowing from her shoulders was blue velvet strewn with the golden fleur-de-lys of France.

The wedding night which followed was a purely formal occasion according to the dictate of the King. James II and Mary Beatrice, as the senior royals present, handed the young couple their chemises. There was some chat by the Dauphin and after that the ceremony was over. Bourgogne did daringly kiss his bride, despite the deep disapproval of the Duchesse de Lude, and that was all. But it was the Duchesse who had correctly interpreted the King's instructions: he was furious at the news since he had expressly forbidden contact. Only ‘that naughty little rogue' Berry, ten years old and already livelier than his brothers, said that he would have attempted far more …

The next stage – the consummation of the marriage – did not come for nearly two years. In the meantime the young Bourgognes were carefully introduced to a limited and asexual married life. It included visits to the theatre. In October 1698 for example a trip to see Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme produced uproarious laughter from both Duc and Duchesse. There was a ballet to celebrate Adelaide's birthday in 1698 at which Bourgogne danced Apollo and Adelaide danced a Muse. Perhaps there were courtiers present who recalled the grace of Adelaide's grandmother Henriette-Anne dancing the same kind of role forty years earlier (although few would care to have compared poor bent Bourgogne to the magnificent young Louis XIV).

Adelaide also learned the routine of attending military occasions: where Françoise, with no taste for glory, had not liked these outings and still did not, Adelaide had an enjoyable time. ‘I am a good Frenchwoman,' she told her grandmother when she expressed joy over a French success.²⁴ Of course Savoy was at this point on the side of France and the sorrows of a princess hearing the ‘good news' of her native country's destruction, such as had torn Liselotte apart, had not yet come the youthful Adelaide's way … Yet in spite of this, in spite of Bourgogne insisting on nightly visits to his wife in November, after an original stipulation of every other night, Adelaide did not for the time being get pregnant. The ascendancy of Adelaide over both Louis and Françoise had the happy effect of consolidating a relationship which had recently come as near as it ever did to foundering. How strange that trouble developed over the matter of religion, the very subject which had welded Louis and Françoise so closely together! The temporary cloud and its vanishing demonstrate how little, if at all, the King was prepared to compromise in anything in order to please his secret wife, and how irresolute, even timid, Françoise herself became when there was any kind of clash. The central Catholic Church in France was threatened – as it believed – by any doctrine which assailed the conventional view of the Church as the essential mediator between individuals on earth and God. One of these doctrines was so-called Quietism, a mystical practice of the Catholic religion somewhat akin to modern meditation, in which prayer, even repetitive prayer, was everything.

Françoise did not exactly dabble in Quietism but she did become a friend of the brilliant, charismatic Jeanne-Marie Guyon, a widow with four children, and allowed her to have contact with Saint-Cyr. Madame Guyon's book on ‘short and simple Orisons' which could be practised daily, printed in 1687, got her arrested the next year; Madame de Maintenon managed to secure her release. But Madame Guyon's second arrest, her incarceration in the fortress of Vincennes and her interrogation by La Reynie found Françoise either unable or unwilling to help.

The influence of the Abbé Godet des Marais was important, because he urged Françoise strongly to side with the orthodox and severe Bossuet on the subject of Quietism: something Bossuet Condémned in a sermon at Lent 1696. Along the way Fénelon became a victim too. Now Françoise abandoned the man who had been her friend and sat by, helpless, while Fénelon was forbidden contact with Bourgogne and all the Quietists were purged from the young Duc's household. Françoise's abandonment of her former friends was seen as cowardice – although she would probably have justified it as part of her essentially pragmatic attitude to religion. In any case Louis became subtly cold towards Françoise, suggesting that Fénelon had been ‘a bad shepherd' who had been wrongly appointed to tend his grandchildren. As for poor Bourgogne, he was heartbroken, pleading in vain to be allowed at least to write to Fénelon: there was to be no further contact between Fénelon and his ‘little Louis' till 1701.²⁵

The whole protracted episode caused a degeneration in Francoise's health which may have been at least in part psychosomatic. It was significant that her reconciliation with the King occurred when he came and stood beside her bedside with the words, which had something of love but also much of impatience about them: ‘Well, Madame, are you going to die of this then?' And so the way was prepared for an apotheosis. At a military review at Compiêgne in September 1698 the King leaned ostentatiously on the open window of Madame de Maintenon's sedan-chair. He took off his hat and left it on top of the chair in order to describe the proceedings to her in full view of troops and courtiers alike. Louis hardly spoke to anyone else, and even Adelaide found it difficult to get him to answer her questions. It was as open a declaration as he ever made on the subject of her status, and left a profound impression on all present, including Saint-Simon.²⁶

It was however an apotheosis which had only occurred at a certain cost. Although Françoise had busied herself using her influence to secure bishoprics for her friends – Godet des Marais was made Bishop of Chartres and her ally Antoine de Noailles Archbishop of Paris – she now discovered that the price of influence was orthodoxy plus submission to the King's will, should she happen to cross it. As Madame de Maintenon confessed to the Archbishop when she had failed to bring about a particular Church appointment: ‘I see that the King was not as docile as I thought.'²⁷ She was very far from being the strong-willed manipulator of Liselotte's and Saint-Simon's depiction: more the pliant ‘Thaw’ of the Sévigné nickname. In the upbringing of Adelaide, however, Françoise clearly had her role, which was not that of Queen precisely, so much as grandmother-cum-governess. Adelaide needed Françoise and Louis needed Adelaide: order was restored. So the unacknowledged but painful rift was healed.

Did Maintenon hanker after the full role of Queen in public? Naturally her enemies said she did, but there is no evidence of it beyond their prejudices. Equally there is no evidence that Louis XIV ever seriously contemplated giving it to her: dynasty was sacred to him, royalty too, as had been impressed upon him from his earliest years by Anne of Austria, a mighty Princess. While he had chosen a discreet and virtuous private life with Françoise, it was not within his imaginative range to see her sitting on the throne once occupied by his mother (and by Marie-Thérèse, another mighty Princess). What would have been the point? With the increasing selfishness of the ageing, particularly in a man trained from the start to be self-centred as a form of duty, the King knew that he had what he wanted.

It did not occur to him to question seriously whether Françoise was equally content … He treated her at all times with scrupulous politeness. Although Françoise burned the King's letters after his death, a few little notes do survive about daily arrangements, in which the language is formal and above all considerate, with the reiteration of phrases like ‘if you approve' and ‘I shall conform to your wishes'. There is certainly no hint of command. ‘If you would like to take a promenade with me at three or four o'clock,' wrote the King on one occasion, ‘come to the Basin of Apollo, where I shall be with a chair for you'; but ‘please don't feel obliged to do this'. And probably in most ways Françoise was content, reflecting passively on ‘the enigma' of her destiny in the words of her confessor Godet des Marais: God had put ‘the salvation of a great king' in her hands … ‘You are his refuge, remember that your room is the domestic Church where the King retires.'²⁸

So long as her reputation was secure, Françoise was satisfied (as she had said of herself), and pace Liselotte nobody really thought of her in the 1690s as an ‘old whore' – old, yes, since she was in her sixties, but whore seemed very wide of the mark. It is true that the scurrilous pamphlets got going on her as they did on everyone of note. Despite the restrictions of censorship (which could be overcome by printing in Holland), mockery was widespread and lewd: no one was spared.

For example, it is to this period that a satirical pamphlet suggesting that the true father of Louis XIV was actually the Comte de Rantzau belongs. Rantzau, a Maréchal de France originally from Holstein, died in 1650; there was of course no contemporary evidence for this wild surmise.²⁹ If the King's past was smirched, so was his present. A medal of 1693 showed Louis being tugged away from the front line by four women, with a legend on the subject of unsuccessful invasion that was a rude adaptation of Caesar's famous aphorism: Venit, vidit sed non vincit (He came, he saw but he did not conquer). Eight years after its erection, the equestrian statue of 1686 in the Place des Victoires was adapted for a scurrilous engraving showing a new pedestal with the King in chains to four mistresses, Louise, Angélique, Athénaïs and Françoise, in place of his military triumphs. The printer, bookseller and his boy assistant were all hanged for their efforts.³⁰ But the satires did not cease.

Françoise therefore could hardly expect to be spared. She was said to have been seduced long before she met Scarron, ‘the breach already made' by the Marquis de Montchevreuil, featured inaccurately as the Duc de Montchevreuil. There was a ridiculous rumour that while still very young she had given birth to an illegitimate child called Babbé. Despite the tone of these attacks on ‘the old she-monkey', in which age was a prominent feature, the worst accusation was that which had her doing a deal with the Jesuits: her own secret marriage to the King in exchange for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.³¹ None of this was true.

It was Louis XIV however whose feelings constituted the real enigma to the outside world. There was a celebrated moment when Pierre Mignard was about to paint Madame de Maintenon in the role of St Frances of Rome; the King's permission was sought to drape her in ermine robes, the style of a Queen. (Something that was incidentally done in other portraits of great ladies, other than queens.) ‘Certainly St Frances deserves ermine!' replied the King laughingly, leaving no one much the wiser as to his precise meaning. But he did love the picture: a miniature based on it was something he carried with him in his waistcoat pocket till the day of his death.*

The Treaty of Ryswick, signed in September 1697, which brought to an end the nine-year War of the League of Augsburg, was hailed by a loyal courtier like the Marquis de Dangeau in glowing terms: ‘The King gave peace to Europe upon conditions which he wished to impose. He was the master ….'³² It is true that if he lost Lorraine, ‘the master' retained French Hainault and Lower Alsace including Strasbourg; in the West Indies, Santo Domingo (since the 1790s Haiti) was an important acquisition for the future. Yet there was much he had also acquired – at enormous cost in casualties – which Louis did not retain. The French armies which in the popular imagination had succeeded the Spanish armies of his youth as Europe's invincible warriors were no longer to be seen in quite that light. William III, once merely the modest Prince of Orange, was Europe's foremost martial leader.

By implication, the Treaty also acknowledged William for the first time as King of England. Here Louis XIV did act with some spirit: he refused to banish the former King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, with their children, from France. Furthermore he showed his sensitivity to the ordeal which the Treaty represented for these unhappy exiles by ordering that there should be no triumphant music and celebrations in their presence. Since the finalisation of the Treaty coincided with their traditional autumn visit to Fontainebleau, foreign news was not to be brought to him unless he was alone. And Louis pressed William for the payment of Mary Beatrice's jointure of fifty thousand a year, settled upon her by Parliament.

Part of this support for the exiles was Duc to Louis's genuine reverence for Mary Beatrice, in every way the dominant character of the pair these days, as ex-King James's conversation, never scintillating at the best of times, centred more and more upon his impending death. But neither he nor any other European could be unaware that the question of the eventual English succession remained unsolved. William and Mary (who died in 1694) had no children. Her sister Anne seemed to be unable to raise a healthy child, the only survivor from infancy of her huge brood, the young Duke of Gloucester, a virtual invalid with a hugely swollen head, was to die at the age of nine in July 1700. Under these circumstances, it would need the certainty of hindsight to rule out the chances of ten-year-old James Edward succeeding. Still styled the Prince of Wales, Mary Beatrice's son was a happy, healthy child, and lived under the protection of France.

Not the English but the Spanish succession now threatened this lull of European peace. On 1 November 1700 Carlos II of Spain, that monarch whose demise had been predicted since his birth, did actually die at the age of thirty-nine, and of course he died childless. In a bold gesture of contempt for the various rulers who had been notionally sawing up his empire over the years, Carlos left his entire dominions to his half-sister's grandson on condition that they were kept together: this was none other than the Duc d'Anjou, second son of the Dauphin of France. It was perfectly possible to argue that Anjou was Carlos's nearest heir (Anjou's elder brother Bour-gogne, like the Dauphin himself, was ruled out as being a future King of France). Equally the descendants of Carlos's full sister Margarita Teresa, who had married the Emperor, could mount a claim: her grandson Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, a prince but not a threateningly powerful one, was a suitable choice: unfortunately he died in 1699. The next imperial choice was more openly Habsburg: the Emperor's younger son the Archduke Charles (he who had once been proposed as a bridegroom for Adelaide).

In assessing Louis XIV's decision to accept the throne on behalf of his grandson, once again, as with the fate of James Edward Stuart, one must avoid hindsight. It was not in Louis XIV to reject such a great dynastic prize for his dynasty – and of course deprive the Habsburgs of it at the same time. He did not need the urging of Madame de Maintenon (who in any case did no such thing as urge but merely sided politely with the favourably inclined Dauphin).³³ The man who placed the need for glory at the centre of his youthful ambitions was not going to reject it on behalf of Anjou now, even if common sense must have told him that the crown would not be surrendered by the Austrian party without a struggle. Where Louis failed was in not seeing further into the anxieties of Austria: he should, at the same time as accepting on behalf of Anjou, have made it clear that Anjou would never succeed to the French throne himself. (The Bourgognes at this point had no children, so that this was within the bounds of possibility.)

Who knows? Perhaps secret imperial dreams also excited Louis, and the thought of the two crowns of France and Spain united was not totally inimical to him. As it was, he broke the news of his decision to his grandson as Anjou was playing cards. The boy stood up respectfully, took the news with ‘the gravity and coolness of a king of eighty years' and then sat down at once as though weighed back into his seat by the cares of a heavy crown.³⁴

‘I hope Your Majesty will sleep well tonight,' said Louis XIV. Anjou, who was not quite seventeen, was a sober, intelligent lad without the tiresome piety of Bourgone or the mischievous nature of fourteen-year-old Berry. Whether Anjou, now transformed into Philip V, did sleep is not related. Liselotte as usual had something livelier to say. Out hunting with the new monarch, she ostentatiously let him pass: ‘After you, great King,' she said. The Duc de Berry ‘almost died laughing’.³⁵

But the accession of the French candidate to the throne of Spain was to prove no laughing matter. The War of the Spanish Succession which followed would be described by Winston Churchill in his life of Marlborough as ‘the first world war' because it involved other continents as well as Europe. In the course of it, every kind of ruin would encompass France.

* A form of clog with a wooden sole and leather upper from which the modern word ‘galosh' derives.

* Now preserved, appropriately enough, at the château de Maintenon.