CHAPTER 16
He [Louis XIV] gives all his orders as though he were only going on a journey.
– Liselotte Duchesse d'Orléans, 27 August 1715
The peace that Adelaide, true to her dying prophecy, did not see came about in the year after her death. The Treaty of Utrecht of 11 April 1713 led to a general European and North American settlement between France, Spain, England and Holland. Lille and Béthune were restored to France, while Luxembourg, Namur and Charleroi were given to the Elector of Bavaria. Nice (then a Savoyard possession) was restored to Victor Amadeus and Sicily promised to him. Philip V was at last recognised as King of Spain by the Habsburgs, although Philip and his successors had to renounce their rights to the French throne, and the southern Netherlands, scene of so many blood-drenched battles, went to the Empire. An important part of the settlement was the full recognition of Queen Anne as the rightful monarch of Great Britain. This meant that the man known there as ‘the Pretender’, James Edward, had to be asked to leave France. He went to Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine.
Already for Queen Mary Beatrice it was a time of terrible sorrow. Her daughter Princess Louisa Maria, the girl on whom she doted, had died suddenly of smallpox in April 1712 at the age of twenty, two months after Adelaide, who had been her friend. It was yet another blow to the Jacobite cause: some of its supporters had harboured dreams of this delightful girl, whose countenance ‘mixed the noble features of the Stuarts and the d'Estes’, marrying, say, a Hanoverian prince and thus reconciling the two religious sides of the family. Madame de Maintenon told Louis XIV that Louisa Maria had been Mary Beatrice's ‘companion and chief comfort’. Now King and deposed Queen met in a visit of condolence. The two of them wept to see that ‘they, the old, were left, and that death had taken the young’.1
And the toll of deaths in the French royal family was not over. Marie-Élisabeth, the unsatisfactory Duchesse de Berry, failed to redeem herself in dynastic terms by producing a healthy son. The baby boy born in June 1713, created Duc d'Alençon, died after a few days. Apart from that, Marie-Élisabeth, like many self-centred people, did not have a talent to amuse. In vain Louis XIV showered jewels upon her, all the jewels of the crown, so that she could bedizen herself regally in just the way that Adelaide had failed to do. Marie-Élisabeth's extravagant hair-styles were also in contrast to the simple arrangements which Adelaide had adopted towards the end of her life. Her crazy drunken antics – it is kindest to regard Marie-Élisabeth as verging on madness if not actually mad – were not the sort to appeal to the fastidious Louis XIV.
Marie-Élisabeth was pregnant again in the spring of 1714 when Berry himself died at the age of twenty-eight, as a result of a riding accident out hunting at Marly in which the pommel of his saddle pierced a vein in his stomach. His life with Marie-Élisabeth had been more and more wretched as a result of what Saint-Simon called her ‘sudden, swift and immoderate’ love affairs. There was one frightful incident at Rambouillet when, provoked beyond endurance, he actually kicked her backside in public.2 But the rules of Versailles did not permit Berry to be released from his bondage.
Berry's posthumous child – a premature daughter – died on 13 June 1714. Perhaps it was just as well, again from a dynastic point of view, since Marie-Élisabeth's notorious train of lovers, chosen as though on purpose to affront her husband, caused the satirists to make merry on the subject of the baby's true paternity with a list of possible candidates. After that the widowed Duchesse de Berry no longer offered the possibility of a further royal heir to supplement the single life of the little Duc d'Anjou. Yet Louis remained remarkably tolerant towards her: even when she reviewed a regiment dressed in a soldier's costume and made her ladies do likewise, the sad old King only issued a mild protest. He himself had spoken the truest word on his own martyrdom: ‘I shall suffer less in the next world,’ said Louis XIV, since God was punishing him for his sins in this one, and ‘I have merited it.’3
An ageing monarch and a tiny child as his heir meant that barring an accident – such as the death of the child in question – a regency was inevitable. Philippe Duc d'Orléans, the King's forty-year-old nephew, was the obvious candidate because he was next in line of succession after Anjou. Regencies were of course hardly unknown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a series of child-kings succeeding in France, including Louis himself, but the Regent in question had been the Queen Mother. Indeed, Anjou's mother Adelaide might have made a great regent if she had survived Bourgogne – but the truth of that would never be known. Philippe however was on bad terms with Madame de Maintenon, who strongly disliked his openly debauched way of life: it was therefore as some kind of warning to him not to exceed his powers, that the idea of entering the legitimised bastards into the royal succession came into play. Madame de Maintenon's influence in this was surely crucial: her love of Maine, her dislike of Philippe, all added up to an alteration in the rules which Louis would not have countenanced in his prime: it went against every principle of order and legitimacy which he had always maintained.
For all the groans of Liselotte, the moans of Saint-Simon about ‘the golden age of bastards’, these princes and princesses had their role to play. The ‘mouse-droppings’ in Liselotte's crude phrase might fill a rigidly pious man like the late Duc de Bourgogne with horror, but in fact Charles II's bastards were regularly received at the French court. For example, Barbara Villiers' son, the Duke of Grafton, went swimming with the Dauphin, and her daughter the Countess of Sussex attended Appartement at Versailles. James II's son the Duke of Berwick was a brilliant soldier, so that even Saint-Simon had to admit that his genius cancelled out his dubious birth. The position of the Duc de Vendôme, descendant of Henri IV, has already been mentioned. Civilised behaviour was one thing: the Russian Ambassador to Versailles, A. A. Matveev, in his account of French court life, suggested Louis XIV, in his treatment of the Duc du Maine, as a role model for Tsar Peter the Great, who had his own bastards at home.4 But there was a vast difference between the rank Louis had begged for Maine's sons in March 1710, and the potential accession of Maine or his brother Toulouse to the throne – both born when their mother was married to another man.*
Maine's marriage to Liselotte's ‘little toad’, Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, had turned out surprisingly well (although her size did not increase, justifying Françoise's early worry that the weight of her jewels would stop her growing). With her sparkling wit and tireless energy, the tiny Duchesse created quite a different world at Sceaux: it was a place both high-spirited and intellectual, where Plutarch, Homer and Terence were the gods. There was much emphasis on the theatre, the plays of Molière for example being revived. In short it resembled the early court of Louis XIV in the 1660s, if the scale was not quite so grand.
The Duchesse even had her own literary society, the Order of the Fly in Honey, which consisted of forty chevaliers, both male and female; a medal was struck for it in 1703 with the motto: ‘I may be small but beware my sting’. Gradually it became accepted that fun was to be had at Sceaux, but it was innocent and imaginative fun, not debauchery, and thus tolerated by Madame de Maintenon. Even Liselotte brought herself to admire the wonderful new fountains – water was always a status symbol at that time – as once upon a time everyone had gaped at those of Versailles. ‘Her court was charming,’ wrote Marguerite de Caylus of the Duchesse du Maine. ‘One was as much amused there as one was bored at Versailles’. As for Bénédicte's extravagant way of life, ‘she could not have ruined her husband with more gaiety’.5
Naturally the Duchesse du Maine was delighted at the prospect of her husband's elevation.6 Although her Bourbon-Condé nephews were in the line of succession as Princes of the Blood, as were the Bourbon-Contis, Maine had not been. Now he leaped to eighth place, with his two sons acknowledged as Grandsons of France at nine and ten.† Was it quite out of the question for Bénédicte, born a Princess of the Blood, to become Queen of France? Only in her dreams, perhaps, was it a real prospect. And yet she was living in an age when three ranking members of the royal family had been wiped out within eleven months; in England the second cousin of the late Queen Anne, son of Liselotte's recently deceased aunt, Sophia of Hanover, had just succeeded to her throne as George I; that was something which would never have been envisaged at the birth of George of Hanover.
The decree which carried all this out was promulgated in July 1714. ‘If in the course of time all the legitimate princes of our august house of Bourbon die out, so that there does not remain a single one to inherit the crown,’ the legitimised bastards could succeed.7The following May Maine and Toulouse were given the rank of Princes of the Blood, with precedence over the other princes of sovereign houses. More crucial to the present, however, was the testament the King made giving charge of the future child King's ‘person and education’ to Maine and not to Philippe. Once again it was the need to please Françoise which prevailed over the need to placate Philippe (who remained inescapably the future Regent). Such a testamentary condition was a clear slap in the face for the Duc d'Orléans.
In the early summer of 1715 English bookmakers began taking bets on the date of the French King's death. On 16 May the Maréchal de Villeroy wrote to Françoise about his concern over his master's health: he looked ghastly and could hardly walk.8 Louis XIV was visibly fading. He had put on weight in his fifties: now he seemed quite wizened as his flesh began to fall away in the manner of very old people. There was little trace here of the young Apollo, or even the handsome, virile King whose wife Françoise Scarron had once lightly envied. But then who now remembered Apollo? And you would have to be over eighty to remember plausibly the accession to the throne of the child Louis in 1643. The King spent much of his time among women: Françoise's secretary Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale continued to amuse him with her wit and zest for life. And his love of music remained to the last: Louis would be taken to Françoise's room to hear chamber music. The King's final visit to Marly was in June. After that no courtier stepped forward to enquire anxiously: ‘Sire, Marly?'
The last act of the drama took place at Versailles, the palace that Louis XIV had created,* dazzling with mirrors, set around with the fountains and the statues and the orange trees he loved, their silver pots long ago sacrificed to the needs of war.10 On 12 August Louis complained of pains in his thigh. The specific cause of his degeneration was the condition of his leg, which became gangrenous. Dr Fagon did not dare order an amputation, which might have saved the King – although surely not for very long since he was suffering from gout, gravel, and hardening of the arteries. From 17 August onwards, the King no longer left his room, and Fagon slept there too. Throughout the long ordeal of his deathbed, however, Louis maintained all the standards of heroic dignity which he had set himself for so long.
The great national Feast of St Louis on 25 August, for example, had to be celebrated as ever, with drums and fife bands underneath his windows and twenty-four fiddlers in the antechamber before dinner. Yet the farewells were already starting to take place. In an important interview on the same day with Philippe and Maine, Louis confirmed their relative positions as Regent and effective governor of ‘the future King’ (courtiers blenched when their master used these words). In principle the King decided to die as he had lived – in public: ‘I have lived among the people of my court, I want to die among them. They have followed the whole course of my life; it is right that they should witness the end of it’. And he chided those so much younger than himself for their laments: ‘Did you believe me to be immortal?’ asked the King. ‘For myself, I never believed it’.
There was an elegiac quality to these last days which had been singularly missing from the recent unhappy years of military defeat and personal bereavements. The Marquis de Dangeau wrote on 25 August: ‘I have come away from the greatest, the most touching and the most heroic spectacle that men have ever seen’. Liselotte called it in similar terms ‘the saddest and most poignant spectacle that one could witness in this life’.11 (Both of them instinctively used the language of the theatre.)
Louis's control remained awesome despite his agonies. Liselotte praised his serenity: ‘He gives all his orders as though he were only going on a journey,’ she wrote, these orders including the demand for unity among the sparring princesses at court. The Duc d'Anjou, a handsome little boy of five and a half who strongly resembled his mother, with her ‘large pitch-black eyes’ and long black eyelashes, was brought in to see his great-grandfather. ‘Mignon,' said the King, ‘soon you are going to be a great king’. But he also told Anjou, in a memorable phrase: ‘Try to remain at peace with your neighbours: I have loved war too much …'
Louis made altogether three farewells to Madame de Maintenon as his life still lingered on, causing her to return from Saint-Cyr. His alter ego, the giant Enceladus, the silent Titan in the fountain of Versailles, with tormented staring eyes, had still some way to go before his release. The first took place on the day after the discovery of gangrene was confirmed. This exchange was more realistic than gallant and referred to her three years' seniority: considering her age, they would soon be reunited, said the King. Françoise then took refuge at Saint-Cyr.
The second time he apologised to her for not making her happy; lastly he worried about her future: ‘You have nothing, Madame’. It was true: Françoise had never taken any steps to build up a fortune, and exulted in giving away most of her money in charities; she also took pride in the fact that she cost the King very little compared to his other mistresses, as she frequently told Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale: they received more in three months than she got in a year, and anyway she gave it all to the poor … ‘I am nothing,’ she now replied, ‘and I only think of God’. All the same Louis did speak to the future Regent on the subject, a crucial conversation given the ill feeling between Philippe and Françoise. ‘She only gave me good advice,’ said Louis XIV regarding Madame de Maintenon. ‘She was useful in every way, but above all for my salvation’.
Françoise departed for the last time on 30 August, when she was assured by her confessor: ‘You can go, you are no longer necessary to him’. She was not there at the end and did not plan to be. Later Madame de Maintenon was criticised for this, by the standards of another century. The tradition of the time of Louis XIV was different: a deathbed was more for the clergy than the courtier. As Louis had exclaimed over his dying mother half a century earlier: ‘we have no more time for flattery’.
The memoirs of Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale, who was present, are an important source for these last days.12 When Louis reached into the little pouch where he kept his private possessions it was to Marie-Jeanne he gave a little tortoiseshell sweet-box. To Françoise, however, he gave a rosary from the same pouch ‘as a souvenir not a relic’. In keeping with Saint-Évremond's maxim – ‘when we grow old, it reanimates us to have a number of living creatures about us’ – the dogs were ever present.13 For a long time Louis continued to feed tit-bits to a favourite little dog, and when he could no longer do so, he told Marie-Jeanne: ‘Do it yourself. It was Marie-Jeanne who with Françoise helped the King destroy his papers and recorded him laughing at the emergence of a guest-list for Marly: ‘You can certainly burn that’.
On the subject of her departure Françoise told Marie-Jeanne that on the one hand she dreaded not being able to control her sorrow in the presence of the King; on the other hand she lived in genuine dread of Philippe's behaviour towards her once he had assumed power. And there was a question of public insult to her carriage on the road to Saint-Cyr: Françoise, an old woman still concerned by her reputation, feared that too.14
By 31 August the King was unconscious, and he died at eight o'clock in the morning of Sunday 1 September 1715. His last spoken words were: ‘O my God! help me, hasten to succour me’. Louis XIV was four days away from his seventy-seventh birthday and had reigned over France for seventy-two years. ‘He died,’ wrote Dangeau, ‘without any effort, like a candle going out’.* The very next day Louis Blouin, who had succeeded Bontemps as the King's chief valet de chambre and served him altogether for thirty-seven years, sold his position for fifty thousand livres. Blouin's wish was to indicate publicly that he could never serve anyone else in place of the incomparable Sun King. But it was in keeping with the other spirit of Versailles, the materialistic one, that Blouin, who had already built a fine country house on the proceeds of his job, now profited from the end of it.15
The funeral of Louis XIV took place at Saint-Denis on 28 October. Lalande's beautiful and sombre De Profundis, first heard in 1689, was transformed with extended solos such as De Iniquitatis – ‘If Thou, O Lord, did keep account of our sins, who would survive?’ It ended on the awesome Requiem Aeternum, a pinnacle of French baroque music: ‘Grant eternal rest to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them’. The ceremony was deeply spiritual, although demonstrations of hostility at the funeral procession as it passed indicated how far the esteem for the old King had sunk in the popular imagination.
Father François Massillon, the eloquent priest who had spoken at the death of the Dauphin, gave a resounding oration which began with the words: ‘God alone is great, my brothers, and in these last moments above all where he presides over the death of kings’. Louis XIV was saluted for his acknowledgement of the truth: ‘This king, the terror of his neighbours, the wonder of the universe, the father of kings, greater than all his ancestors, more magnificent than Solomon in all his glory, has recognised himself that all is vanity’.16
Nor was the sermon one of unadulterated praise. The Catholic Church had not entirely forgotten those early battles to save the King from ‘the fire of Voluptuousness’. There was an allusion to the time of his youth as ‘a perilous season when the passions begin to enjoy the same authority as the sovereign and mount the very throne with him’.
But Louis was praised for his generosity to James II and ‘a pious Queen’ (Mary Beatrice). And the royal deaths were mentioned, including that of Adelaide, ‘who relaxed Louis from the cares of monarchy’. Most touching of all was the invocation: ‘Go to rejoin Marie-Thérèse, Louis [his son the Dauphin] and Adelaide who are waiting for you. Together with them for all eternity, dry the tears that you have shed over their deaths’. It is a pleasant thought that Adelaide was waiting on the other side, for ever young, to greet the King.
*
Despite the King's deathbed expectation, Madame de Maintenon lived on for several years after him. She spent her time in seclusion at Saint-Cyr, where she was known simply as ‘Madame’. It was here that Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale came to her on 1 September and told her that everyone at Saint-Cyr had gone to the chapel to pray; from this delicate intimation, Françoise understood that Louis was dead. Marie-Jeanne, in her memoirs, described the sobbing procession of Demoiselles who now passed in front of Madame de Maintenon on this, ‘the saddest day in the world’. Françoise also wept, she told Madame de Glapion proudly: ‘It is a fine thing, dear girl, to weep for a king’. This was a man she had seen die ‘like a Saint and a Hero’. Five days later her worries about her future were allayed when the Regent Philippe paid her a visit of courtesy and assured her of a lifelong pension of forty-eight thousand livres (nearly two hundred thousand pounds in today's money). When Madame de Maintenon tried to thank him, Philippe replied that he was ‘only doing his duty’ – which was true enough.17
The new Regent certainly had nothing to fear from the ‘old woman’. The will of Louis XIV concerning Maine's position was quickly set aside and his functions towards the young King Louis XV much diminished. (There was a precedent for this cavalier ignoring of the late King's wishes: the will of Louis XIII had also been set aside, and it has been suggested that the ageing Louis XI V, helpless but not stupid, may even have anticipated this.)18 The bastards, by a second edict, were removed from the royal succession: if the reigning house died out ‘it is for the nation itself that the right goes to repair the danger by the wisdom of its choice’. That demotion made Saint-Simon, for one, an extremely happy duke.
After the death of the King, Madame de Maintenon received letters of condolence from foreign dignitaries which might have been sent to a queen.19 For example Marie Casimir, the Queen of Poland, referred to her ‘extreme affliction’ and ‘great loss': she hoped that God would give Madame de Maintenon the fortitude she needed to support it. The great and good at the French court wrote to her – cardinals, bishops and duchesses – generally addressing their letters to Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale for fear of disturbing her mistress in her ‘sorrow and retreat’. All mentioned Madame de Maintenon's ‘special loss’ following the death of ‘the greatest and best of the Louis who were kings’. The Archbishop of Strasbourg dispatched one of the late King's rosaries: ‘it could not be in better hands'; he sacrificed it so that she should remember him in her prayers. Chamillart, one of Louis's ministers, quoted St John Chrysostom on the subject of an affliction which ‘gives us a new glory’.
In future, memorial services for the late King would be held not only all over the French dominions but also in the Spanish empire, including Mexico, where a sermon was preached in the cathedral: Louis was after all the grandfather of Philip V. Once again, as at Saint-Denis, Louis's help to James II and Mary Beatrice was stressed as part of his ‘apostolic’ work for the true Faith, carried out ‘with enthusiasm and with spending worthy of his royal magnificence’. He had maintained the exiled Stuarts in the same grand style as they used to live in London: doing what could be done to reestablish them in the peaceful possession of their crown so that the Catholic religion could flourish in that realm.20
As for Françoise, she had after all been the visible companion of Louis XIV for twenty-two years – from that moment after the death of Marie-Thérèse when the Duc de La Rochefoucauld urged her to go to the King because he needed her. There can have been few who doubted at the time that some discreet ceremony of marriage, acceptable to the Catholic Church, had taken place. Françoise herself however remained resolute in her refusal either to confirm or deny the fact. ‘She didn't want us to speak about that,’ wrote Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale. If ‘a child or simple person’ questioned her on the subject, her reply was merely: ‘Who told you that?’ When Marie-Jeanne read to her from her own Secret Notebooks, she was stopped before she reached any passage which might concern the King. Much later came the real moment when Madame de Maintenon was ‘treated like a queen’, in the words of her great-nephew the Duc de Noailles: her ashes were disinterred at the French Revolution as a protest against the Ancien Régime, just like those of the official royals in Saint-Denis.21*
To the court of France however the woman that Saint-Simon called ‘that eighty-year-old witch’ was ‘forgotten and already as good as dead’. Living quietly at Saint-Cyr and wearing the plainest clothes, Françoise herself put it more elegantly: ‘I have left the world I did not like’. Yet she retained her agreeable appearance until the end. Ironically, this was true of Françoise, who had never depended on her beauty to make her fortune, rather than the gorgeous Athénaïs, who had lost her looks entirely by middle age. Even Liselotte admitted in 1711 when Françoise was in her mid-seventies that her enemy ‘didn't look her age in the slightest'; to the last she had little if any white hair, according to her relatives.23
It took an intrepid character like the Russian Tsar Peter the Great to penetrate the seclusion. On a visit to France in the summer of 1717, he announced his firm intention of seeing this celebrated relic of the previous reign. According to one account, he first flung open the window, and then pulled back the bed curtains in order to peer in at the old lady lurking within. ‘Are you ill?’ the Tsar was said to have asked, and when she said she was, ‘What's wrong?’ ‘A great age,’ replied Madame de Maintenon. It is a bizarre scene, not made less so by the fact that their dialogue had to be conveyed through an interpreter, the Tsar's minister Kourakin.24
Apart from calls from her beloved Maine, Françoise was solaced by the continuing friendship with Mary Beatrice, which was important to them both. In 1715 James Edward launched another fruitless effort to gain the British throne: the Regent Philippe took care that the French did not support it. The former English Queen was left to pay a weekly visit to Saint-Cyr. Here the two women, sitting in similar armchairs, were served by the young ladies, with a handbell at Françoise's side to speed things along. After coffee, the Demoiselles withdrew. Françoise and Mary Beatrice, the Queen that never was and the Queen that was once, communed alone for two or three hours.
Mary Beatrice had become the heroine of the Jacobite cause: a heroine who was also a saint. She died in 1718 at the age of sixty, her battle with cancer finally lost. Poets saluted her in Gaelic as well as English. Sometimes the language was so hagiographic as tosuggest another grieving mother, the Virgin Mary. An Irish lament for ‘the wife of James II’ was entitled ‘The Grievous Occasion of My Tears’. It began: ‘The Gaels are left in gloom’ at the loss of ‘A woman generous with alms / A beauty, pious, generous and just …’ and went on: ‘This was the greatest Mary / That has yet to come … This was the never-lying Mary / Who died for my life.25
By the early spring of 1719 Françoise was clearly failing: on 13 March she told a Demoiselle: ‘It's all over, dear girl, I'm on my way’. She died on 15 April 1719. She was in her eighty-fourth year. The court paid little attention, but at least Liselotte had achieved her long-held ambition of surviving the woman she resented so much. When she learned the news, Liselotte reacted with characteristic zest: ‘I just learned that old Maintenon croaked last night,’ she wrote triumphantly (die alte Schump ist verreckt – a word usually used for the miserable death of an animal). ‘If only it had happened thirty years earlier!’ In the next world, she suggested, Françoise would have to choose between Paul Scarron and Louis XIV. Nor did Liselotte let herself down when her turn came to die in 1722: ‘You may kiss me properly,’ she said to an attendant. ‘I am going to the land where all are equal’.26
The princesses of the next generation, Marie-Anne Princesse de Conti, Louise-Françoise Madame la Duchesse and Françoise-Marie Duchesse d'Orléans, all lived until their seventies, dying in 1739, 1743 and 1749 respectively.* Bénédicte, Duchesse du Maine, with her agreeable and sophisticated lifestyle at Sceaux, outlived all three sisters-in-law whose bastard birth she had been wont to compare unfavourably with her own: she died in 1753 at the age of seventy-seven. Her imperturbable royal self-confidence caused Madame de Staël to write that the Duchesse du Maine ‘believed in herself in the same way as she believed in God and Descartes, without explanation or discussion’. It was a confidence which extended towards her own acting abilities: none of the professionals who acted with her dared mention the fact that the tiny Duchesse was a remarkably bad if enthusiastic actress. Voltaire wrote his first poetry during his five years at Sceaux as a young man and paid a second visit towards the end of the Duchesse's long life, from 1746 to 1750. He hailed Bénédicte as the ‘Spirit of the Grand Condé’ (her grandfather the great soldier) and saw in her with admiration a true representative of the grand siècle. Yet since Voltaire considered that a fine piece of theatre would do the dying Duchesse more good than Extreme Unction, it is obvious that Bénédicte was in fact far closer to the secular spirit of the Enlightenment.27
There was an exception to these long lives. The widowed Marie-Élisabeth Duchesse de Berry continued her rackety existence, at once immoderate and immoral, into the next reign, to the despair of her father the Regent. She gave birth to a still-born daughter in the spring of 1719 by her lover Rions. Her health, already weakened by excess, never fully recovered; Marie-Élisabeth died in July on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday.
Louise de La Vallière's descendants died childless; Madame de Maintenon left none. It was the fertile marriage of Françoise-Marie and Philippe d'Orléans – six daughters and one son – which spread the blood of Louis XIV and Athénaïs into all the Catholic royal families of Europe. The legitimate blood of Louis XIV, in the direct male French line from his marriage to Marie-Thérèse, died out in 1883 with the Comte de Chambord (although there were and are Spanish Bourbons). But his descendants by Athénaïs flourished, a tribute to the vigour of her stock. They included the so-called Philippe Égalité, Duc d'Orléans in the French Revolutionary era, and – a little more to the Grand Monarch's taste one must suppose – Louis Philippe the King of the French. Thus the present claimant to the French throne, the Comte de Paris, descends from Louis XIV and Athénaïs: a victory of a sort for the supreme mistress.
* Although Athénaïs had been legally separated from Montespan before the birth of Toulouse in 1678.
* The order of the first seven ran as follows: the little Duc d'Anjou; Philippe Duc d'Orléans and his son the Duc de Chartres; three Bourbon-Condé princes, sons of Monsieur le Duc du Bourbon; the Prince de Conti.
* And is for ever associated with his name, despite the many internal alterations during the eighteenth century, Duc in part to the fact that Louis XV had a large family of legitimate children, needing suitable accommodation.9
* Long reigns produce such simple but effective analogies. Queen Elizabeth I was described as dropping like a ripe apple from a tree and Queen Victoria was compared to a great liner going out to sea.
* Since 1969 the mortal remains of Madame de Maintenon have been placed in the chapel of Saint-Cyr, now the Lycée Militaire, after some journeyings in times of revolution and war.22
* Marie-Anne's monument in Paris in the church of Saint-Roch, rue Saint-Honoré, refers to her as the daughter of Louis XIV, and her birth at Vincennes in 1666 is recorded; but there is no mention of her mother Louise de La Vallière.