PART FOUR

Winter

CHAPTER 14

Gaiety Begins to Go

Even my gaiety is a little bit diminished.

– Adelaide Duchesse de Bourgogne, 1700

‘Iam no longer a child,’ wrote Adelaide the married woman to her grandmother in Savoy, on 16 November 1700.¹ Adelaide was in fact on the brink of her fifteenth birthday. She was not yet a mother: an inspirational Holy Water stoup containing a carved white coral baby sent to her from Savoy by the Princesse de Vaudémont had not yet done its work – or the austere Bourgogne had not yet done his, despite his passionate love for his wife. Or perhaps they were both just too young.

The Comte de Tessé had accompanied the coral baby with an admonitory letter: ‘I devoutly believe that she sent it so that the coral baby may reawaken you, every evening and morning, to the thought that you owe one to us, and that no other thought, not of your lovely figure, nor of anything else compared with that is of the slightest importance.' He ended: ‘I am your old servant whom you sometimes deign to call old fool.'² For all the mock-modest salutation, Tessé's message was quite clear: this was Adelaide's prime purpose. At all events she did conceive her first child towards the end of 1702, but suffered a miscarriage. Another miscarriage followed a year later. Her first living child – a son, to the general ecstasy of King and court – was born in July 1704 when Adelaide was eighteen. Instantly created Duc de Bretagne by Louis XIV, this important great-grandson lived only till the following April, when he died very suddenly. Liselotte as usual blamed the doctors. Adelaide on the other hand wrote a correct letter to her mother on the workings of the Divine Will: ‘If we did not receive all the sorrows of this life from God, I do not know what would become of us. I think He [God] wants to draw me to Him.'³

So Adelaide was still without a family when she reached her twentieth birthday on 6 December 1705. For this and other reasons, she began to show increasing signs of melancholy and tension – ‘even my gaiety is a little bit diminished' – interspersed by bouts of hectic celebration and constant movement. She would parade on her donkey, drive her little cart round the gardens of Versailles, or clamber like a cat over the rocks at Fontainebleau. Adelaide adored riding: a delightful portrait of her in a red riding-dress (a favourite colour) shows off her tiny waist and shapely if slender figure. Like her grandmother Henriette-Anne, Adelaide never seemed to sleep and loved to roam about at night, which she described as ‘one of her greatest joys'. At the same time she had to preserve the ingenuous quality which charmed the King. That was part of the trouble. Adelaide felt that her girlhood was passing – ‘I am no longer young,' she bewailed once again in 1702 in what was becoming a familiar theme – but her childhood was not.⁴The King would not let it go.

On the one hand she struggled to fulfil her most important womanly role and add to the dynasty as was expected. On the other hand she had to maintain that mischievous sweetness which had entranced Louis XIV in the ten-year-old child and captured his heart. She was also capable of feeling jealousy for another sweet little girl (of much less august birth) who teased and entertained the King. Jeannette Pincré was the youngest of eight children who entered the Maintenon household when her widowed mother flung herself on Françoise's charity; the King insisted that Jeannette stay there.

Of course Adelaide, no fool, did make her childishness work for her. It was not entirely done to please the ageing King. Her inquisitiveness was proverbial at the court (and caused much disgust in observers such as Liselotte). The King's papers, to say nothing of those of Madame de Maintenon, were deemed to be fair game, and a good deal of playful rummaging took place: Adelaide could be a naughty squirrel as well as a mischievous monkey. In this manner she chanced upon a list of men who were about to be created Maréchaux de France by the King, and was shocked to find that her favourite, the Comte de Tessé, hitherto only a Maréchal de Camp, had been omitted. She ran to her ‘grandfather' in floods of tears. This flagrant nosiness and interference was almost too much for the King – almost but not quite. To prevent his little sweetheart being upset, he decided that he would make no marshals at all on that occasion. (Tessé was made a Maréchal de France in 1703.)

The sudden death, from a stroke, of Monsieur, Adelaide's biological grandfather, in June 1701 brought her further sadness; it was after all Monsieur not the King who was the connection to her absent mother. Poor Monsieur! It was bizarre that his dramatic end should follow a blazing row with the King over the conduct of his son Philippe. It was true that Philippe at twenty-five was a byword for debauchery, spending all night with the whores of Paris, impregnating his wife Françoise-Marie but also producing children by his mistress at roughly the same time. According to Liselotte, Monsieur's favourites acted as Philippe's pimps. But when the shocked Louis remonstrated, Monsieur chose (unpardonably from Louis's point of view) to remind his brother of bygone days when the King had run Louise and Athénaïs in tandem …

The great King's reaction to Monsieur's death was that of any human being robbed of a sibling, the irreplaceable connection to distant childhood. ‘I don't know how to accept the fact that I shall never see my brother again.' Liselotte's attitude to her husband's death on the other hand was resolutely unsentimental. She protested strongly at the idea that she might have to retire to a nunnery according to her wedding contract. ‘No! No convent for me!' she was heard to cry in a loud voice. And so she was spared to continue her life at Versailles. Then, in the process of burning Monsieur's numerous love letters from his favourites, she declared herself nauseated by their perfume…⁵ Liselotte also sneaked into theatrical performances incognito, although conventional mourning dictated a two-year abstinence.

In the course of the arrangements for Liselotte's widowhood, Françoise was able to taste a sweet revenge. Not all of Liselotte's highly uncomplimentary letters about ‘the old strumpet' and her relationship with the King had escaped attention in an age when international correspondence was routinely intercepted. The King passed the letters to Françoise and asked her to deal with the situation. This she did by accosting Liselotte in her apartments. Rashly the widow complained of the King's recent coolness only to have Françoise blandly display the correspondence. A humiliated Liselotte, in floods of tears, could only apologise profusely. It was Françoise who promised to intervene with the King.

Thereafter Louis, in his accustomed mode of forgiveness, was graciousness itself. He even laughed when Liselotte, in her own words to her aunt Sophia, ‘artlessly' explained the whole thing as follows: ‘If I hadn't loved you, I shouldn't have hated Madame de Maintenon when I thought she was depriving me of your kindness.'⁶ (Which was probably the truth.)

He also showed benevolence towards the dissipated Philippe, now Duc d'Orléans in succession to his father, when his first son by Françoise-Marie, after a string of daughters, was born on 4 August 1703. Philippe asked for the title of Duc de Chartres, which had previously been his, for the baby.* Louis asked if that was all he wanted. Philippe admitted that his household had urged him to press for more ‘but it would be tactless in these hard times'. ‘Then I myself will anticipate your request,' replied the King genially, ‘and grant your son the pension of the first Prince of the Blood.'

The death of Monsieur and the substitution of Philippe, with a seemingly flourishing house of Orléans around him, was a matter for the rearrangement of the court. It also marked the emergence of a new problem, Duc to the longevity of the present monarch – by 1703 Louis had reigned longer than any previous French King. There was one surviving Child of France, the Dauphin. Then there were Grandchildren of France, in the shape of his three sons, also Philippe Duc d'Orléans and his sister, now Duchess of Lorraine. In each case the use of the word ‘France' signified direct descent from a ruling monarch. Might there now be a new rank of Great-Grandchild of France? In which case that would apply to the infant Duc de Chartres.

The claims and counterclaims for precedence, the squabbles between dukes, Princes of the Blood and royal princes, would only grow fiercer as the years passed. For example Françoise-Marie was naturally zealous in support of her large brood of daughters who, like their brother Chartres, should surely enjoy the rank of Great-Grandchild of France, and she was anxious that her eldest daughter Marie-Élisabeth should be granted the simple honorific title of ‘Mademoiselle' instead of ‘Mademoiselle d'Orléans'. This was after all a society in which, however farcical to outsiders, the vital distinction between ‘Madame, Duchesse d'Orléans' and ‘Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans' was seen as quite crucial: whereas the former was married to a Child of France, the omission of the comma, the addition of the article, indicated that the latter was married more remotely to a mere Grandchild.⁷

The long-anticipated death of the former King of England, James II, from cancer took place three months later on 16 September.* Every article in the royal apartments at Saint-Germain was removed, to be replaced with violet mourning for James Edward, as the new King, grey for Mary Beatrice and Louisa Maria. Furnishings apart, the event had immediate and serious political consequences. In 1697 Louis XIV had tacitly agreed that William III was the de facto King of England, even though he refused to banish James, Mary Beatrice and their children. Unfortunately for the military destinies of France, if fortunately perhaps for Louis's moral character, he now proceeded to acknowledge James Edward as King James III. In England, however, James Edward was ‘the pretended Prince of Wales' or merely ‘the Pretender', guilty of high treason by an act of Parliament of 1702. Under the circumstances, Louis's decision to ignore this was, as Saint-Simon noted, a policy more worthy of the generosity of a Louis XIII and a François I than his [Louis XIV's] wisdom'.⁸

It was a question of a deathbed promise given to James himself: the exiled English King could die happy since his son would be acknowledged as his successor. At the time the dying James gave hardly a flicker of recognition of what had just been communicated to him. The real point of the French King's noble gesture was achieved later when he told Queen Mary Beatrice what he had done. After the French naval defeat at La Hogue in 1692 Louis had refused to accept the disastrous consequences for the cause of James II. On the contrary, he had boasted to Mary Beatrice that he would be the one to give her ‘the last embrace' before she boarded the ship which took her back at last to England. Justice and ‘your piety' would ensure Heaven's blessing on the enterprise. Heaven might have been laggard in its blessing, but nine years later the King of France did not waver in his support for the English Queen. Subsequently he announced his decision to the court at Marly and all applauded him (although many shared Saint-Simon's practical doubts).⁹

Undoubtedly Louis's tender admiration for Mary Beatrice, and Françoise's similar affection, transformed into a close friendship, was the major factor in this ‘Jacobite' decision. How much simpler from the point of view of French foreign policy to have let the subject rest! Once again, when William died in 1702, Louis could have by default acknowledged James Edward's Protestant half-sister Anne Stuart as Queen: the little girl who had once spent happy times in France with her first cousin Marie Louise d'Orléans. As it was, Louis refused to allow court mourning for the death of William, even for those who were related to him – including Liselotte, who had wanted to marry him.

It was the pleading of Mary Beatrice which had brought this about: if James Edward was not acknowledged in France, his lack of any proper status would remind the world once more of the malicious slurs concerning his birth in 1688, those ludicrous warming-pan stories so prejudicial (and comical) to Whig ears, so painful to her own. Thus Mary Beatrice continued to enjoy her privileged if fundamentally sad situation at the French court. To Françoise she was ‘this great Queen whose state is so worthy of pity that I can hardly express it'. Celtic poets sang of ‘Mary, the ‘languid-eyed / The beautiful branch of the pure palm of Modena / … The alms-giving Queen / Religious and charitable, prudent and sensible'.¹⁰ Her intelligence was much respected. The King among others commented on her shrewd judgement, and her dignity in difficult circumstances was equally admired.

Naturally the satirists sniped at her moral character (Mary Beatrice was still a very beautiful woman in her forties): she was portrayed as Messalina and accused of lovers including the Papal Nuncio the Archbishop of Paris, any passing page and of course Louis XIV himself.¹¹ Most of this list was obviously ridiculous, but the King might have been another matter. However, even Liselotte had to admit that Mary Beatrice's friendship with Françoise made the tempting notion impossible. Indeed, Françoise's support of Mary Beatrice's wishes regarding her son was the most direct example of her political influence so far.

So the little court-in-exile at Saint-Germain survived and Mary Beatrice formed an important part of Louis and Françoise's intimate circle. James Edward played with Adelaide, three years his senior, and she in turn made friends with the young Princess Louisa Maria. Perhaps the girl might even make a bride for Bourgogne's brother, Berry, currently the most eligible parti at the French court. Queen Mary Beatrice, with a survivor's quality that her appearance belied, even overcame a bout of cancer in 1705. As for James Edward, he was allowed to fight with the French armies, although 1708 brought yet another failed expedition in pursuit of ‘his' throne. With time he adopted the convenient appellation of Chevalier de Saint-George, which called for no particular commitment of loyalty while making his identity clear.

It was Victor Amadeus of Savoy who had supplied the French-born Philip V with his wife, none other than Adelaide's sister Louison, now transformed into Queen Maria Luisa of Spain. Louis XIV had approved the choice for his grandson of this girl who was ‘past her twelfth birthday' and supposed to have a body as beautiful as Adelaide's: ‘important for a woman and for the children one expects'. Two daughters who were or would be on two great thrones were however not enough to keep the mercurial Victor Amadeus on board the French (and Bourbon-Spanish) ship. First he allied in secret with his cousin Prince Eugene of Savoy, the brilliant general in the employ of Austria, in early 1702. His treachery was suspected at Versailles where, as Tessé put it, everyone was aware of Victor Amadeus's characteristic desire to have ‘a foot in both boots’. But it was not known for sure¹² In 1703 however Victor Amadeus announced publicly that he had joined the (new) Grand Alliance which consisted of England, Holland and the Austrian Empire. His motive was palpably opportunistic: he did not believe any longer that the War of the Spanish Succession would lead to a quick French victory.

Now it was Adelaide's turn to endure the agonies of a foreign-born princess caught on the wrong side of the hostilities – ‘my unhappy destiny’ – much as Liselotte had done.¹³ In Adelaide's case she suffered not only for her father but for the future of her mother and the two young brothers born to her after Adelaide's departure, as also for her grandmother. Unlike those of Liselotte, however, Adelaide's sensibilities were treated with great tenderness by Louis XIV. The subject of her father was not discussed between them, this bland disdain for the situation being symbolised when the King went ahead with the full carnival festivals of February 1704, with Adelaide the central attraction, as though the war with Savoy was simply not taking place.

It was Madame de Maintenon who had to deal with Adelaide's increasing misery. Françoise had become involved – encouraged by the King – in a correspondence with a remarkable lady known in France as the Princesse des Ursins (from the Italian Orsini, the princely name of her second husband). This imposing, brilliant woman, born into the French Frondeur aristocracy, had been put in charge of Adelaide's sister, the young Queen of Spain. As camerera-major, in the Spanish phrase, or senior lady, the Princesse des Ursins performed every known function for Maria Luisa and Philip V, down to holding candles, chamber-pots, and even on occasion the King's breeches when he wished to resume them.

Maintenon and Ursins were now dealing with ‘two incomparable princesses', the daughters of the renegade Victor Amadeus; but their correspondence also provided Louis XIV with an important private link to Spain. A visit to France from the Princesse in 1705 cemented the friendship. Louis had taken the opportunity of Philip's marriage to give one of his little sermons on the need to avoid any feminine influence, as he had done to his son the Dauphin: ‘the dishonour that such feebleness brings … One does not pardon itin individuals. Kings, exposed to the public view, are even more scorned.'¹⁴ But it is noticeable that he was quite prepared to use an alliance of two intelligent and discreet women to his advantage, and even to foment it, as he had once employed Henriette-Anne over the Treaty of Dover in 1670.

To the Princesse des Ursins, Madame de Maintenon confided the tumultuous feelings that were tearing at Adelaide: above all it was the unhappiness of her beloved grandfather which tormented her. Her very seriousness on this subject upset Françoise, although in other ways the ever-present governess in her had been trying to school Adelaide away from frivolity.

Every now and then her high jinks went too far. A crude practical joke played on the aged Princesse d'Harcourt, whose skirts and sleeves were fastened to her stool before a page put a firework under it, still raised a smile from the King. However, when Adelaide amused herself making faces behind the back of a peculiarly ugly musketeer she got a sharp reproof from Louis. Personally, he said, he found the man one of the best-looking in his kingdom because he was one of the bravest. To counteract this tendency, Françoise suggested to the Marquis de Dangeau that Adelaide should be presented with a picture of some historic princess as a role model: modest and delicate in character for preference. Simply to give her a history book, which might have seemed the obvious solution, was thought to be ‘a risk’.¹⁵ (What was feared? The life of Joan of Arc? Catherine de Médicis?)

Perhaps it was inevitable that this child-woman, the centre of the indulgent attention of the whole court – almost the whole court – should be tempted by the grown-up world of gallantry. She was not in love with Bourgogne, who was in any case dispatched by his grandfather campaigning according to the practice by which royal princes were supposed to prove their leadership qualities in war (supported by more experienced generals). The ambiguity inherent in the whole subject of gallantry has already been noted: the word covered anything from platonic friendship, via mild flirtation to a full-blooded physical affair. The names of three men, very different in character, were linked with Adelaide's at this period. That is, they were linked with her name by Saint-Simon, writing at a safe distance of forty years; Liselotte, writing at the time, remained silent on the subject, which is one cogent reason for doubting the depth of Adelaide's involvement, since Liselotte did not love the King's little favourite. While Marguerite de Caylus, Madame de Maintenon's relation and confidante, thought it was unlikely that there was much in it.¹⁶ Adelaide's turning to these three men seems in fact to tell us more about her own feelings of melancholy and frustration at Versailles than about her sexual nature.

The Marquis de Nangis, born the same year as Bourgogne, had ‘a pleasant enough countenance' and carried himself well, but physically he was nothing out of the ordinary. It was his special gift of intimacy which appealed; he was said to have learned the knack of pleasing the ladies from his mother and grandmother, famous intriguers both, and ‘past mistresses' in the arts of love. As it happened, Nangis had a mistress of his own, the Marquise de La Vrillière, but he certainly seems to have found time to enjoy a delightful flirtation with Adelaide, especially when he returned to court from campaigning as a wounded man, a subject therefore for both pity and admiration.

The Marquis de Maulévrier was a much more dangerous prospect: coarser than the easygoing Nangis but also cleverer. Ten years older than Adelaide, a nephew of Colbert, he was married to one of the daughters of Tessé, the former Ambassador to Savoy. Maulévrier seems to have been stung to envy by Nangis's ease of access to the Duchesse, and contrived to ‘lose' his voice, thus enabling him to whisper sweet but hoarse nothings in Adelaide's ear. It all ended in tragedy: Maulévrier, an unbalanced character, became violently jealous of Nangis, whom he abused. Angered by rejection, he threatened to tell everything to the King and Madame de Maintenon. In the end he committed suicide at Easter 1706.

So far Adelaide had had a little crush on Nangis (who was in any case committed emotionally to another woman) and a foolish involvement with Maulévrier which went wrong. The third man in her life, the Abbé Melchior de Polignac, at forty-five was a sophisticated older man with an interest in the sciences and religion. It was notable that Bourgogne liked his company for this reason. He also knew how to be utterly charming to all the world. Famous for his egregious flattery, he was the author of the immortal remark to Louis XIV on the subject of the rain at Marly, when the King feared that the courtier's fine clothes were being drenched: ‘Sire, the rain of Marly does not wet.' It could not last. Polignac was dispatched to Rome, out of harm's way (and Adelaide's); similarly it was discovered that Nangis's wounds were healed, and it was time for the court gallant to become a gallant soldier again. Adelaide wept all day at the departure of Polignac: but she wept on Tante Maintenon's bosom, rather than alone.

The ever-watchful presence of Françoise, to say nothing of the numerous ladies-in-waiting and at another level the Swiss Guards roaming the King's palaces, is the real reason why Adelaide cannot plausibly be accused of adultery or anything near it: ‘She was too well guarded,' in the words of Marguerite de Caylus.¹⁷ Françoise would simply not have given her the opportunity. She understood exactly how to handle Adelaide: for example, she took advantage of the young woman's proverbial nosiness to teach her a lesson. Riffling through Françoise's papers, Adelaide was horrified and embarrassed to discover a letter from a certain Madame d'Espernay relating a great deal about her ‘intrigue and imprudence' with Nangis. This discovery can hardly have been the result of pure chance. Certainly it had a salutary effect. As part of the subsequent ticking-off that Adelaide received from Tante, she was told that she must never betray what she had read in the presence of Madame d'Espernay herself.

As it turned out, it was the lamentable progress of the war, already so grievous a subject for Adelaide, not the lectures of Tante, which brought her to long-delayed adulthood and, in the most painful way, aroused in her proper protective loyalties towards her husband. Such changes, of course, could not help threatening the artificial but effective nature of her relationship with Louis XIV, on whose lap Adelaide was still expected to sit in her mid-twenties.

A litany of terrible French defeats, with high casualties and vast numbers of wounded, marked this progress. On 13 August 1704 the daring English commander Marlborough snatched a brilliant victory at Blenheim, a Bavarian village on the Danube. He had the assistance of Prince Eugene who, as the son of Olympe Mancini, was regarded at Versailles as some kind of spiritual traitor even if, as a Savoyard, he was not technically one: ‘I hate Prince Eugene in the most Christian way I can,' observed Madame de Maintenon some years later.¹⁸ The surviving French were decisively pushed back and Bavaria was out of the war. The next catastrophic defeat was on 23 May 1706 at Ramillies in the Spanish Netherlands, when Marlborough smashed the fifty-thousand-strong French army under Maréchal de Villeroi; the latter was subsequently replaced by the Duc de Vendôme, who had been campaigning against Victor Amadeus in the south. For while nearly all Flanders was now outside French control, things had gone better in Piedmont.

The French siege of Turin naturally brought agony to Adelaide, although it is noticeable that never at any point did she show sympathy for the Savoyard cause. As she wrote to Duchess Anne-Marie: ‘I confess the truth, my dearest mother, that it would be the greatest pleasure in this life if I could see my father brought back to reason.' To Victor Amadeus himself, she managed more restraint: ‘I own that affection may be somewhat wounded at seeing you arrayed against both your daughters …'¹⁹ When the Duchess and her two young sons had to flee from the French threat of invasion, Adelaide suffered for them – but she suffered as a loving daughter who had nevertheless totally identified herself with the French cause.*

Then Vendôme was ordered to Flanders. On 7 September 1706 the siege of Turin was raised with the help of Prince Eugene and the French were driven out of Italy, leaving Victor Amadeus himself to invade France the following year when he besieged Toulon. Matters were hardly better in Spain, where the English general Lord Peterborough marched on Madrid, so that Philip V and Maria Luisa had to flee to Burgos. There would be a five-year period when the rivals for the Spanish throne, Philip V and the Habsburg Archduke hailed as Charles III by his supporters, contended inconclusively for the throne, with periodic advances and retreats as in some solemn dance.

Adelaide was by now pregnant once more. In November 1706 she announced the care she was taking in frank terms: ‘I have no wish to lose the fruit of all my pains.' Her child, mercifully another boy, was born on 8 January 1707; the King seems to have had no hesitation in instantly granting him the same title as his dead brother: Duc de Bretagne. But there were to be no lavish celebrations for the successful birth of this great-grandson, as there had been in 1704. The hardship of the times did not permit it, nor did the atmosphere at court, where the rising casualty list meant that family members were beginning to vanish; others returned wounded, often visibly mutilated.

It would be pleasant to believe that Adelaide found in the intimacy of motherhood some kind of solace for the restrictions and frustrations of her life. Unfortunately, where a great Princess was concerned there was very little possibility of this kind of relationship: a household and a host of servants stood between the Duchesse de Bourgogne and the Duc de Bretagne. Adelaide's letters to her grandmother did dutifully report on the appearance of teeth and so forth, and she boasted of having ‘the most beautiful baby in the world'; but she also criticised the royal governess the Duchesse de Ventadour for spoiling the little boy and making him unnecessarily peevish and ill-behaved. Very rarely did royal mothers in this period break through the apparently unassailable cordon of etiquette which held mother and child apart; Anne of Austria had been one of the few, but Marie-Thérèse and the late Dauphine had definitely not been. A sad letter from Adelaide to Madame Royale made the point: ‘I only go and see my son very rarely in order not to be too attached to him.'²⁰

Madame de Maintenon, for all her criticisms of Adelaide's behaviour – her gambling, her secret addiction to the bad company of Madame la Duchesse with her drinking and tobacco-smoking – continued to adore her. Increasingly the secret wife depended on female company to sustain her in her own arduous existence as the consoler and supporter of the King. As she told Madame de Glapion, she, Françoise, was the one who had to succour him: ‘When the King returns from hunting, he comes to my room; the door is shut and nobody is allowed to enter.' Alone with Louis, Françoise ‘listened to all his cares and woes' and staunched the tears he sometimes could not control.²¹

It was to her confessor however that Françoise confided that another aspect of her duties had not ceased: the King still made sexual demands upon her; she described these occasions as ‘penibles' (burdensome). Perhaps she hoped that the confessor would sympathise with this problem of a woman in her seventies; instead, he told her quite sharply that this was still part of her chosen destiny: ‘It is at the same time an act of patience, of submission, of justice and of charity.' As it was, Françoise was Louis XIV's ‘Madame Solidity': ‘Kings have majesty,' said Louis, ‘and Popes have sanctity but you have solidity.' He sometimes addressed her as such in the presence of his ministers, meeting in her room, when he enquired what ‘Your Solidity’ might think on a certain topic.²²

To the country at large, particularly the soldiers in the French armies, Madame de Maintenon was increasingly regarded as a possible source of help. For example, the soldiers at the new French fortress of Fuenterrabia on the borders of Spain wrote to her in December 1705 under the grandiose title of ‘Protectress of the Realm': they wanted pay and also clothing, jackets and shirts – ‘our sergeants, Madame, are no happier than us', and in general implored her ‘glorious protection’.²³

In all this Madame de Maintenon herself suffered increasingly bad health. Rheumatism beset her, cold increased it (but the King could see nothing wrong with having all the windows open), and her chamber was often so crowded with men on official business that she could hardly retire to bed. She sat in her ‘niche', a covered chair, to ward off drafts. By November 1704 she was describing herself as ‘sick and old'; the following May things were worse: ‘The life we live here kills me, I am no longer made for this world.'

The flood of petitioners who sought her patronage also caused her pain, as she confided to Marguerite de Caylus. If the King honoured her wishes, he would have less to dispose of elsewhere. If he refused, ‘he will upset me. If he upsets me, he has too much feeling for me not to be annoyed, so I become a sadness in his life. Do you think this was God's plan in bringing me close to him?' Françoise told Madame de Glapion that she felt like someone backstage at the theatre where ‘the enchanted palace' was revealed as mere canvas: in short, ‘I see the world in all its ugliness.' She would even return to America (that is, the West Indies where she was raised) if she was not told that God wanted her to stay.²⁴

Did it ever occur to Françoise, weary and often racked with pain, that Athénaïs had had the better deal out of life? The Marquise de Montespan had begun with supreme beauty, given and received much sensual pleasure and ended with a life full of good works. At Oiron, a magnificent Renaissance building Athénaïs bought with money given to her by the King, she created a hospice in 1703 for 100 poor men and women. She died in May 1707 at the spa at Bourbon which she had once visited at the height of her powers asmaîtresse en titre, with every royal governor trying to greet her on her way. Athénaïs was sixty-seven. Her will testified to her deep and practical interest in charities; the possessions she left included two pictures of herself as Magdalen, plenty of pious books, some miniatures of the King – and thirty pairs of corsets. Before her death, the King had reduced her pension among his other economies: Athénaïs accepted the deprivation with equanimity on the grounds that all her money went to the poor anyway.

Montespan, that saturnine and tortured man, had rejected her request for pardon, which had been inspired by Athénaïs's Jansenist-inclined confessor. (Father de La Tour did rather better in persuading her that it was her Christian duty to eat less.) Yet when he died in 1701, from whatever motives, last-minute possessiveness or generosity, he made her executrix of his will. Her own death was, according to d'Antin, her son by Montespan, the only one of her children present, ‘the most firm and Christian death one could witness'. The funeral was delayed by rows between various local clergy and did not take place until July; then Athénaïs was interred in the church of the Cordeliers at Bourbon with a simple square stone plaque in the wall engraved as follows: ‘Here lies the body of Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, marquise de Montespan.'²⁵

At least d'Antin had not suffered from the maternal deprivation of his childhood (to say nothing of his disagreeable father Montespan). He was a popular and successful courtier, a Maréchal de Camp, made Governor of Orléans in 1707. He had inherited something of his mother's taste for grand gestures. This was the year in which he entertained Louis XIV on his estate at Petit-Bourg, choosing to remove an entire chestnut avenue overnight because it obstructed the view from the King's bedroom; in the morning nothing was to be seen, not even cart-ruts, ‘as if a fairy had waved her wand'. Now Louis was told the news of Athénaïs's death in a letter from d'Antin as he was about to go hunting. He did not cancel the expedition but on return adjourned to his own room, indicating that he wished to be alone. The courtiers heard him pacing late into the night. But when the bold Adelaide asked him whether there was to be no outward show of grief, the King merely replied that the Marquise de Montespan had been dead to him ever since she had left Versailles.²⁶

Louise de La Vallière – Sister Louise de La Miséricorde – lasted another three years. She was not quite sixty-six when she died in June 1710, and had spent over half her life as a Carmelite nun. On hearing this news, Louis repeated virtually the same words with which he had greeted the death of Athénaïs: from the moment she found God, Louise had been dead to him. He did however have a long talk with his confessor and take Communion the next day.

Like many women whose allure owed much to youthful freshness, Louise had long since lost her early prettiness. The extreme penances she imposed upon herself did not help and she was positively emaciated by the time of her death. By 1701 Liselotte wrote that ‘not a soul' would now recognise the former Duchesse de La Vallière. Louise was buried, according to the custom of the Carmelite Order, under a simple mound of earth, a small stone indicating her name in religion and the date of her death.²⁷

In contrast to the illegitimate children of Athénaïs, who were largely indifferent to their mother, Marie-Anne de Conti had been faithful in her visits to Louise. There was therefore some justified satisfaction for Marie-Anne in the fact that she alone was allowed to wear mourning for her mother: the miasma of the Double Adultery still hung about Françoise-Marie and Madame la Duchesse; to their annoyance, mourning was forbidden to them.

Madame de Maintenon, while complaining (quite a lot) of her daily round, found increasing comfort in the company of the young. Her love of the company of small children was no affectation while, unfashionably for the period, she had no time for pets. When the Marquis de Villette offered her some rare birds, she replied that she much preferred children. So a human pet, a little Moor named Angola, was substituted for the birds. Angola was educated and also converted to Catholicism: he died young, blessing, we are told, the name of his protectress. A young Irishwoman who was also a protégée proved luckier: she went back to her native country and, blessing Maintenon equally, married a rich man.²⁸

A typical lament from Françoise of 1709 – ‘One has either to die or be alone on earth for I have scarcely any new friends' – ignored the reality of her cosy circle. There were the sympathetic women of the next generation to her own such as Sophie de Dangeau, who was forty in 1704. Sophie had begun life at court as a maid-of-honour to the Bavarian Dauphine, being herself descended from the Bavarian royal family by a morganatic marriage. She married the journal-keeping, high-rolling Dangeau as his second wife. Family feeling from Marianne-Victoire went just so far: she threw a hysterical fit when she heard of the signature ‘Sophie de Bavière' at the wedding and the more plebeian ‘Sophie de Lowenstein' had to be substituted. It was, wrote Madame de Sévigné, a ‘brilliant and ridiculous scene'.²⁹

Poverty, noble birth and the blonde looks of ‘the angels' all made Sophie utterly suitable from Françoise's point of view – and also the King's. In fact Sophie rather resembled the late Angelique de Fontanges, except that she was modest, spiritual and virtuous; all this and a graceful dancer too. One has glimpses of the kind of female intimacy in which the King was wrapped in the notes exchanged between Françoise and Sophie. For example, Françoise told Sophie that the King wanted her to come to dine with them tomorrow and play brelan, a game of cards. This was an advance warning so that Sophie should not take the famous incapacitating medicine for a purge that day. ‘And pip, pip our stomachs!' scrawled Sophie on the note in return. ‘I shall come, I shall find health and money, two great miracles.'³⁰

Then there was Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale, who was roughly Adelaide's age and acted as Françoise's confidential secretary from 1705 onwards.³¹ Coming from an ancient family of Picardy, Marie-Jeanne lacked looks but was clever, well read and industrious. She was also a lively correspondent: witness her description of the royal doctor Fagon, whose wig fell so far over his face when campaigning that if his nose had not been so big ‘no one would have known which was the front and which was the back of his head'. Thenthere were her droll farming reports about ‘the pearl of cows' who gave four and a half pints of milk a day, or the duck who met an unfortunate end and had to be replaced by three others to avoid the displeasure of ‘Madame'. The merits of liveliness in entertaining not so much Madame de Maintenon but the ever-present Louis should never be underestimated.

Meanwhile Marguerite de Caylus, her marriage a disaster and her husband now dead, had been languishing in Paris receiving strict advice from Françoise on her conduct. This was the tenor of her remarks: ‘Bring up your children, look after your affairs, do my commissions and above all satisfy your parish priest [of Saint-Sulpice].'³² Doing Françoise's commissions was a work in itself, since the former governess was fond of a bargain, especially if Marguerite was there to hunt it out. Marguerite was advised to establish a relationship with some good second-hand clothes dealers: she should look out for bargains in skirts, petticoats and gloves because Françoise had heard that things in Paris were cheap: a grey-brown damask sample was wanted, not too thick so that it would not be too expensive. The tone is also sometimes sanctimonious, and there was indeed that side to Françoise: ‘A costume can never be correct if it might lead to sin,' for example. Yet the femininity of her youth creeps in too: ‘If we take Barcelona I'll wear green and pink if the Archduke Charles [the rival candidate for the Spanish throne] falls into our hands.'³³ (Neither thing happened.) In 1708 Marguerite returned to Versailles and occupied an apartment above Françoise, so that she could be summoned to her side via a convenient shared chimney.

Françoise-Charlotte d'Aubigné, transformed into the Duchesse de Noailles by the excellent worldly marriage arranged by her aunt, was also part of the support group: Maintenon, no longer part of the elder Françoise's way of life, was donated to her niece two weeks before her wedding on 30 March 1698. Françoise-Charlotte's aristocratic future made up for the lifelong disappointment afforded by Charles d'Aubigné. He died in 1703 having been finally confined to a rest-home for elderly gentlemen of good family. Charles's bourgeoise wife Geneviève, so much disliked by Françoise, was – more or less against her will – confined to a similar establishment for ladies. There were the maréchaux of the army too, with most of whom Maintenon was on excellent terms, and with whom she corresponded, discussing the King's wishes.

This satisfactory network of alliances was unfortunately matched by the Cabal, as it became known, at Meudon, home of the Dauphin. Here Madame la Duchesse, Marie-Anne de Conti and others including Athénaïs's son the Duc d'Antin told malicious stories about Tante – and looked to the time when the Dauphin would become King. It was hardly surprising that they should do so: Louis XIV would celebrate his seventieth birthday on 5 September 1708, and at such times, as Saint-Simon duly noted: ‘the thoughts of everyone are turning towards the future.’³⁴ The viciousness of the Cabal would be seen at its height in the events of 1708, and the chief victim would be the Dauphin's son Bourgogne.

The year began well enough with celebrations at which the sixteen-year-old English Princess Louisa Maria in yellow velvet and diamonds was among the beauties. She opened the ball with her brother in a gallery lit by two thousand candles.³⁵ An incident in February was however a presage of disaster: Adelaide miscarried while at Marly. She was in the early stages of a new pregnancy (little Bretagne was just over a year old) and it seems that her ladies had not wanted her to make the journey, given her difficult gynaecological history. The King's will was however absolute, and he wanted her with him. Then, as he was feeding the carp in his fish pond after Mass, awaiting Adelaide in order to go on to Fontainebleau, a message was whispered in his ear: the Duchesse de Bourgogne was ‘injured' (the contemporary euphemism for a miscarriage). After a short pause, the King made a brief announcement as to what had happened. Then a group of gentlemen with more temerity than tact made noises to the effect that this was ‘the greatest misfortune in the world', since the Duchesse had already experienced such difficulty in bearing children and might now not be able to have any more.

The King exploded. ‘What do I care about who succeeds me? Even if the Duchesse de Bourgogne never has another child, the Duc de Berry is of an age to have children. As to the miscarriage, since it was going to happen, thank God it is over! I shall no longer be nagged by doctors and old women. I shall come and go at my pleasure and be left in peace.' An appalled silence fell; in modern terms the courtiers were gob-smacked. Saint-Simon put it more elegantly: ‘You could hear an ant walking …’³⁶ After a while the King leaned over the balustrade and made some remark about the fish.

This episode does of course primarily illustrate the frightful selfishness of Louis XIV these days where his own routine was concerned; it is thus on a par with the icy fresh air from open windows which tortured rheumatic Françoise, or the hideous journeys court ladies were obliged to make, compulsory eating and drinking throughout, with no comfort stops provided since the King majestically never needed them. (In one notorious episode, the wretched Duchesse de Chevreuse scarcely endured the journey, such was her agonising need for relief; on arrival she rushed to the chapel and made speedy use of the font.) But there is also something in it of his frustration where Adelaide was concerned: why could she not be the perfect little girl of the past, at his beck and call with no womanly duties to distract her? The little girl who never had a cold when it was a question of going out with the King … As well as somehow providing healthy heirs on the side … Why did she gamble so recklessly with unwise gentlemen who risked Louis's disfavour? Why did she hunt, go to parties …?

In the early summer of 1708 the King took a step which at the time seemed to offer Bourgogne, his shy and austere grandson, an opportunity to shine in the conventional manner for a royal prince, that is in the field of battle. Louis told Adelaide of his intention in a special courtesy visit after stag-hunting, and then announced it to the court on 14 May. Saint-Simon noted rather gloomily that the day marked the anniversary of the death of Louis XIII and the assassination of Henri IV; but that was after the event. At the time the real problem lay not in the coincidence of unfortunate anniversaries but in the tricky problem of royal princes' authority versus that of commanders in the field. Bourgogne was being sent to Flanders, where Vendôme was now in charge. It was not a match made in heaven, nor was it likely to work on the battlefield. Bourgogne was young, untried except for a brief venture to war a few years earlier, and, as has been noted, lacked confidence.

Nevertheless he greeted the news with delight; he would no longer ‘have to stay idle at Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau'.³⁷

Vendôme, now in his fifties, was seasoned and successful, in fact the most successful living French general.* He was immensely popular with the army, while at court he leaned towards the Dauphin and Meudon set. He was also exceptionally debauched (some found Sodom a convenient rhyme for Vendôme), and in the past had needed a cure for syphilis.

It can never be known for sure – since much obfuscation ensued – whether the third colossal French defeat at Oudenarde on 11 July was the responsibility of Bourgogne, of Vendôme, or of some innate problem of communication between the two of them. With what the Princesse des Ursins once described to Madame de Maintenon as ‘l'audace de Milord Marlbouroug' (sic), the English commander had moved his forces from Brussels with such enormous speed that he took the French by surprise.³⁸ Vendôme launched straight into battle on the right wing. But Bourgogne, whether owing to cautions advisers or to ignorance of Vendôme's intentions, failed to support him on the left. He stayed entrenched. Six thousand French were killed or wounded, seven thousand taken prisoner. Afterwards Vendôme, smarting with military humiliation, and forced to order a retreat to Ghent, accused Bourgogne of cowardice in failing to follow his commands.

The news of the defeat itself reached Versailles on 14 July. Previous rejoicings over the taking of Ghent died away. Madame de Maintenon told the Princesse des Ursins in Spain that the King was enduring this latest mischance ‘with full submission to the will of God’, displaying his usual calm courage.³⁹ The recriminations between Vendôme and Bourgogne were much more difficult to endure. Vendôme's point of view, which was quickly expounded in a plethora of highly combative correspondence, backed by the Cabal at Meudon, was dogmatic: had Bourgogne advanced to support him, as he had the right to expect, a great French victory must have followed. Thus Bourgogne was delineated as a coward and also as a failure. He suffered in particular from his grandfather's lack of faith in him, believing that Louis XIV was taking Vendôme's version of events for granted with all too much ease.

Adelaide was the one who sprang to Bourgogne's defence. Their relative characters can be judged by the fact that Bourgogne wondered whether it was not ‘un-Christian' for her to do so. She might have gone ‘a little too far' in certain speeches. Maybe Madame de Maintenon should rein her in? At the same time he was charmed by her ‘affection and trust'; Adelaide was not a troublemaker by nature; she lacked what Bourgogne called a mischievous ‘woman's spirit'; she had on the contrary ‘a solid mind' – masculine, presumably – ‘much good sense and an excellent and very noble heart'.⁴⁰

Certainly Adelaide was forthright in her opposition to Vendôme. And she refused to be reined in: Vendôme was ‘a man for whom she would always feel the greatest loathing and contempt'. Adelaide the frivolous, who had loved nothing so much as to gamble, now spent hours in vigils in the chapel when she was supposed to be asleep. In the meantime Lille fell to Marlborough on 23 October, increasing the dismay at court. When Bourgogne himself returned to Versailles it was to the sound of ribald verses from Madame la Duchesse with lines like this: ‘For he's a coward / And a bigot too …' As Françoise commented to the Princesse des Ursins: ‘He [Bourgogne] will need all his religious faith to sustain the unjust attacks of the world.'⁴¹ Moreover, Vendôme was back too, but he was the centre of a very different kind of attention.

The lauding of Vendôme, both by the King and at Meudon, was a source of terrible anguish to Adelaide. She wept in Françoise's arms: ‘Oh, my dear Tante, my heart is breaking.' Finally she prevailed over Vendôme, but not before the King had criticised his darling sharply for not showing the usual relentless gaiety which was demanded as of right at Versailles. Depression in public was not an option: ‘The King was irritated and more than once harshly reprimanded her for displaying ill-humour and chagrin.' Nevertheless Adelaide continued to earn the plaudits of Saint-Simon (who was an admirer of Bourgogne) for being ‘indefatigable' and ‘full of strength'.⁴²

It was at Marly that Adelaide got her revenge. Invited to make up a table for the game of brelan in which Vendôme was taking part, she pleaded to be excused: Vendôme's presence at Marly was sufficiently distressing already, she explained, without playing cards with him too. In the end, with the aid of Madame de Maintenon, a deal was brokered by which Vendôme was allowed to Marly one more time, but then understood himself to be excluded. Presently Adelaide also managed to eject him from Meudon, too, on the grounds of her distress (the Dauphin was after all the humiliated Bourgogne's father). As Saint-Simon wrote in admiration: ‘One saw that huge monster blown over by the breath of a brave young princess.' It was Liselotte who commented that the years after 1708 saw at last Adelaide truly in love with her husband.⁴³ The protective instinct turned out to be the strongest one in her nature – she who had been protected, often artificially so, most of her life.

Adelaide began, in the nicest possible way, to dominate the unassuming Bourgogne. He nicknamed her ‘Draco' after the famously severe Athenian legislator with his ‘Draconian' code, but gallantly saluted his subordination: ‘Draco, how sweet it is to be your slave …'⁴⁴ When it was decided – not before time – to give Bourgogne a proper military education, Adelaide was included in the lessons: there is a vignette of the two of them poring over maps. All this was a good omen for the time in the distant future when Bourgogne, a good weak man, would be King of France: but he would have his Draco beside him as a far more redoubtable Queen than anyone had supposed. It was unfortunate that Bourgogne never actually received his new command: the need for economy meant that it was out of the question to pay for the expensive trappings needed when a Child of France went to war.

In the meantime a sudden spell of bitter cold, its severity ‘beyond living memory', gripped the country at Twelfth Night 1709 and lasted for two months. Adelaide told her grandmother that it was 102 years since there had been such devastating weather in France. Every river was frozen, and what no one had ever seen before, the sea itself froze hard enough ‘to bear transport all along the coasts'. Worse than the original frost was the sudden complete thaw, followed by another big freeze which, if not quite so long as the first, kept the vegetables, the fruit-trees and the crops totally icebound. Indoors, even the bottles of eau de cologne froze in the cupboards and the ink froze on Liselotte's pen as she wrote.

Outdoors, as she reported, ‘as soon as you leave the house, you are followed by the poor, black with hunger'.^45*

There was a bleak parallel here with the fortunes of France and her King. A further defeat at Malplaquet in September 1709 saw nearly five thousand Frenchmen killed and eight thousand wounded. All the ladies at court were weeping on behalf of husbands and sons. Adelaide was among those whose ‘huge eyes' frequently filled with tears. The court prayed the whole day of the battle: alas, their prayers were not heard. Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale's brother was wounded with ‘everything to be feared'. Also wounded, hanging ‘between life and death', was Philippe Marquis de Courcillon, son of the Marquis de Dangeau and Sophie.⁴⁶

Although the King might choose to go hunting, leaving the lists of casualties to be read only on his return (gross insensitivity or magnificent aplomb according to taste), he could not avoid the sight of the Dangeau son and his like on their eventual return. While there began to be a noted contrast in the complexions of the courtiers: ‘black and red' indicated those who had fought, while skins ‘too white' were frowned upon as betokening lack of service. Unfortunately all too many of the noble ‘black and red' brigade were visibly mutilated.⁴⁷

‘Princes never want to envisage anything sad,' wrote Maintenon bitterly to the Princesse des Ursins. The selfishness of men, especially royal men, was a persistent theme in her correspondence by this time: since she could not let go in front of the King, she took refuge in her letters for a continuous kind of moan. Courcillon however stood for the many members of the court who had been mutilated: at the age of twenty-two, following two operations, he returned without a leg. Courcillon's irrepressible high spirits saved him: he made little pantalonnades (farces) with his wooden leg. But he had to be pardoned the omission of his sword and hat at court, since he could not manage them.⁴⁸ And there were many other Courcillons in what Maintenon described as ‘this tragic year'.

* This male birth was important in the Bourbon dynasty: with Adelaide still childless, the infant Duc de Chartres ensured the continuation of the Orléans branch of the dynasty. The baby was of course Louis's great-nephew, but also his grandchild, via his legitimised daughter Françoise-Marie.

* The fine memorial to James II displaying the royal arms of England, still to be seen in the church at Saint-Germain, was erected in 1824 by George IV, who had a sentimental attitude to his Stuart relations, now beyond claiming the throne. The text, in French and English, describes James as ‘welcomed to France by Louis/Lewis XIV’.

* It is important to note Adelaide's ‘French' patriotism, displayed throughout her correspondence, and her total lack of political support for Victor Amadeus, in view of the French historian Michelet's hostility to her in the nineteenth century, including accusations of treachery for which there is absolutely no evidence.

* His grandfather was César Duc de Vendôme, Henri IV's bastard, who had been legitimised; Vendôme was thus the first cousin once removed of Louis XIV.

* It has been estimated that 800,000 people died of cold and famine.