PART ONE

Spring

CHAPTER 1

Gift from Heaven

They saw in the arms of this princess whom they had watched suffer great persecutions with so much staunchness, their child-King, like a gift given by Heaven in answer to their prayers.

– Madame de Motteville, Mémoires

The first woman in the life of Louis XIV – and probably the most important – was his mother, Anne of Austria. When Louis, her first child, was born on 5 September 1638 the Spanish-born Queen of France was just short of her thirty-seventh birthday.* This was an age at which a royal princess might well expect to be a grandmother (Anne herself had been married at fourteen). The Queen had on the contrary endured twenty-two years of childless union. Anne, as she told a confidante, had even feared the annulment of her marriage, since childlessness was one possible ground for repudiation according to the Catholic Church.¹ In which case the former Spanish Princess, daughter of Philip III, would either have been returned to her native country or possibly dispatched to govern the so-called ‘Spanish' Netherlands (approximately modern Belgium), as other princesses of her royal house had done, most recently her pious aunt, Isabella Clara Eugenia.

The birth of a child, and that child a son – females could not inherit in France under the fourteenth-century Salic Law – meant that the whole position of his royal mother was transformed. It was not only the obvious delight of a woman confronted with ‘a marvel when it was least expected', as the official newspaper Gazette de France put it.² It was also the traditionally strong position of any Queen of France who had produced a Dauphin, an interesting paradox in the land of the Salic Law. This strength derived from the claim of such a Queen to act as Regent should her husband die during the minority of her son; a rule which had applied to Louis XIII's mother when Henri IV had died, and the dominating Catherine de Médicis in the previous century.

It was a situation that had already been envisaged at the time of Anne of Austria's betrothal in 1612. In poetical language the future Queen was described as the moon to her husband's sun: ‘Just as the moon borrows its light from the sun …’ the monarch's death means that ‘the setting sun gives way to the moon and confers on it the power of shedding light in its absence.’³ (The potential bride and bridegroom were then both ten years old.) A quarter of a century later, the reality was less poetical. Louis XIII was not in good health and a Regency in the next thirteen years – the age at which a French King reached his majority – was more likely than not. How long would it be before Anne, like Catherine de Médicis, was promoting herself as an image of revered maternality at the heart of government?

Furthermore the dynastic map of Europe was transformed. The heir presumptive to the throne of France, the King's younger brother Gaston Duc d'Orléans, on being shown ‘physical proofs' of the baby's masculinity, had to accept that his rising hopes of accession had been fatally dashed.⁴ But Gaston himself had only daughters. Next in line were the French Princes of the Blood, notably the Prince de Condé and his two sons the Duc d'Enghien and the Prince de Conti; their hopes were similarly blighted.

On the other hand the birth of a prince not only cut off hopes but also instigated ambitious thoughts of his eventual marriage to a princess. Gaston's daughter by his first marriage, Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, was the richest heiress in France from the fortune of her mother who had died at her birth. She did not allow an eleven-year gap in age to prevent her dallying with thoughts of the Dauphin as ‘my little husband'. Even more significant for the future was another equally august birth in Spain. Five days after the ecstatic Queen Anne gave birth to Louis, her sister-in-law, wife of Philip IV, gave birth to a princess.

These two high-born babies were in fact double first cousins (with identical grandparents), since a brother and a sister of France had married a brother and a sister of Spain. Unlike France, however, Spain allowed females to succeed: Anne of Austria had had to renounce her own rights on her marriage. There was at least a theoretical possibility that the Infanta Maria Teresa would one day succeed to the throne of Spain – or her children would. Another theoretical possibility, always present in the mind of Queen Anne, was that Maria Teresa might one day make a bride for Louis.

Under the circumstances, it is easy to understand how the infant Louis was described as ‘Dieudonné’ or ‘Deodatus’: Godgiven. And even as the years passed, the apparently miraculous nature of his conception and birth was never forgotten. One German diplomat would refer to the King's ‘quite extraordinary birth' over forty years after the event.⁵

How miraculous was this birth, so unexpected and so awe-inspiring for the mother? Certainly a great deal of prayer had been applied to the subject as the years passed. There were pilgrimages to shrines, as befitted a Queen who throughout her life liked nothing so much as to visit convents and holy places. Saint Leonard was invoked against sterility; a hermit who was believed to have founded a monastery near Limoges in the sixth century, his inter-cession was held responsible for many miracles.⁶ (He was otherwise the patron saint of prisoners – and after all the Queen was in the prison of her infertility.)

The Queen was fast approaching the age at which child-bearing itself was felt to be unlikely. This was a period when women were generally held to age faster than men, losing their bloom early – ‘no woman is beautiful after twenty-two' was a popular saying – going further downhill after thirty.⁷ Certainly, by the time of the Queen's thirty-sixth birthday on 22 September 1637 – and thirty-five was often seen as a cut-off point – her relationship with her husband, and also with her adopted country of France, had already had a long and troubled history.

The marriage of the two royal teenagers took place on the feast of St Catherine – 25 November – 1615. It was, it seems, consummated immediately, and after that there was a gap of more than three years. The twenty-fifth of January 1619 was the auspicious date on which the further completion of the royal union was announced in the gazette Mercure Français (it was after all a matter of state, just as the marriage had been). There were certainly rumours of royal pregnancies throughout the 1620s, and Louis XIII himself told the Venetian Ambassador later that his Queen had had four ‘wretched miscarriages'.⁸

If the marriage was not egregiously unhappy by royal standards – notoriously low – it was certainly unhappy enough. Anne was an extremely attractive, even beautiful woman with her full, voluptuous figure, her thick bright chestnut hair, her luminous pale skin and her dark eyes with the green glints which gave them a special sparkle. She had her share of feminine vanity and was especially proud of her much-admired white hands, which seemed made ‘to hold a sceptre'. As for her character, that was made up of contradictions. Anne was certainly pleasure-loving – she adored the theatre and gambling – but at the same time she was extremely pious.

Her piety did not stop Queen Anne from being a romantic, and it was not difficult for men to fall in love with her: ‘her smile won a thousand hearts,' wrote Madame de Motteville, her lady-in-waiting. She was also galante in the crucial French term of the time which shimmers with different meanings throughout this period. In the case of the Queen, it meant flirtatious in the courtly, essentially innocent manner of the well-chaperoned Spanish Infanta she had once been. When the handsome Duke of Buckingham, who was gallant in every sense of the word, had ‘the audacity’ to court her in a famous scene in a garden, the Queen recoiled in horror. Nevertheless, in the opinion of Madame de Motteville, an important source for Anne's intimate feelings because she understood the Spanish world, ‘if a respectable woman could love a man other than her husband, it would have been Buckingham who appealed to her'. The Princesse de Conti had a more cynical view: she would vouch for the Queen's virtue from the waist down, but not from the waist up.⁹

The sexuality of the husband of this romantic and unfulfilled woman was what would now be called troubled. Louis XIII formed lugubrious attachments to both men and women: late in his life, the Marquis de Cinq-Mars became his favourite. But at one point Louis fell yearningly in love with Marie d'Hautefort (his conjugal visits to Anne were said to have increased in consequence). However, when his friend the Duc de Saint-Simon* offered to act as a go-between, the King was shocked: ‘the more my rank as king gives me the facility to satisfy myself,' he said, ‘the more I must guard against sin and scandal.’¹⁰ Low-spirited and willingly dominated by his great minister Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII was one half of an incompatible pair.

Furthermore, if the marriage did not provide a Bourbon– Habsburg heir, it did not bring about peace between Bourbon and Habsburg kingdoms either. Not long after Anne came to France, the slow strangulation of Europe in that long and complicated conflict known later as the Thirty Years War began. In this conflict, at the instigation of Cardinal Richelieu, the French and Spanish found themselves on different sides. Anne rejected the idea that she remained at heart a Spanish princess. Her tastes might be Spanish, from a predilection for late hours to a yearning for Spanish iced drinks and Spanish chocolate, but she prided herself on having become a Frenchwoman. Louis XIII on the other hand was pervaded with suspicions of his wife's disloyalty and over the course of their marriage remained convinced that she ‘had a great passion for the interests of Spain.’¹¹

It was a situation which perennially threatened the daughters of great monarchs married off abroad to further their country's interests. One can therefore appreciate the wise comment of Erasmus on the subject in the sixteenth century. In his Education of a Christian Prince, he pointed out the incongruity of such matches, which never actually did lead to international peace, and advised kings and princes to marry one of their own subjects instead.¹²

Various opposition movements in the country tended to implicate the King's brother – and of course heir presumptive for many years – Gaston d'Orléans. Anne was also suspected of joining with him, and in the ultimate alleged conspiracy before her fortunate transformation into the mother of a son, she was accused of plotting to marry Gaston after the King's death. And for all her French heart, she still wielded a Spanish pen, corresponding with her brother Philip IV, King of Spain. This was a matter which, when discovered, led to her disgrace in the summer of 1637. In Duc course her enemy Cardinal Richelieu secured from Anne a humiliating recantation, signed on 17 August. In the process, one of Anne's servants – her cloak-bearer Pierre de La Porte – was arrested and tortured but refused to implicate his mistress further. It was understandable therefore that La Porte in his memoirs would refer wryly to Louis as being ‘as much the son of my silence, as of the prayers of the Queen and the pious vows of all France.’¹³ It is certainly true that under these unpropitious circumstances some kind of miracle was generally felt to be necessary.

Of course there were, as there always would be, wags who suggested that the miracle had a more human origin. The aggrieved younger brother Gaston d'Orléans said that he was quite prepared to believe Louis Given by God had come out of the Queen's body, but he did not know who the devil had put him there. As to that, popular scandal was quite prepared to supply the name of the King's minister Cardinal Richelieu, simply because of his political power (a ludicrous misreading of the relationship between Anne and the Cardinal), with rhymes suggesting that the King had prayed ‘to the saints, men and women' every day and Richelieu had prayed too but ‘he succeeded much better.’¹⁴*

The religious of all sorts who prayed for the Queen's fertility were many of them, like rainmakers, ready to claim a successful result. A nun, a former favourite of Louis XIII named Louise Angélique de La Fayette, was said to have asked her priest to choose a great feast of the Church – presumably the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December – to remind her platonic admirer of his conjugal duties: the result was the immediate conception of a more earthly sort.¹⁶

One story however does have the particular distinction of being believed by Queen Anne herself, and later by her son. This was the prediction in a Paris monastery of a monk named Brother Fiacre, to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in a vision on 3 November 1637. He was told by the Virgin to inform the Queen that she would shortly become pregnant; then he instructed the royal couple to make three novenas at the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires in Paris – and most importantly at the shrine of Notre-Dame-des-Grâces, an obscure chapel at Cotignac in Provence. (Cotignac may well have been one of the old pagan fertility sites, dedicated to forgotten goddesses, which had been transformed into a place of veneration for the Virgin.)¹⁷

In the end it was Brother Fiacre himself, accompanied by the sub-prior of his order, who made the pilgrimage to Cotignac. By the time Brother Fiacre was actually received by the royal couple on 10 February 1638 the Queen was already pregnant. This meant that it was not so much conception as the desired masculine gender of the baby which was now the object of concern. The importance of Brother Fiacre's mission was signified by the fact that the King gave orders for free board and lodging to be provided for the pilgrim pair on their way.

It is evident that Brother Fiacre's sincerity had made a great impression on Queen Anne when they met. Six years later she called the monk to her presence again with the words: ‘I have not forgotten the signal grace you have obtained for me from the Blessed Virgin who gave me a son. I have had a great picture made where he [Louis] is represented in front of the mother of God to whom he offers his crown and sceptre.’ And the monk duly travelled once more to Cotignac with the picture. Nor was this the end of the connection. Brother Fiacre, even as an old man, was allowed privileged access to Louis, for the role he was believed to have played ‘in the happy birth of Your Majesty'. When the monk died, it was on the orders of the mature King (who paid for the journey) that his heart was taken to Notre-Dame-des-Grâces.¹⁸

That was the supernatural reasoning, one that the pious Anne clearly accepted, given the respect paid to Brother Fiacre. A more down-to-earth explanation was provided by a story involving Louis XIII, a hunting expedition near Paris cut short by an unexpected storm, and given that the King's separate apartments at the Louvre were not prepared, the need to take refuge in those of his wife on the night of 5 December 1637 … The result of this unscheduled propinquity was Louis, born exactly nine months later. Unfortunately the Gazette de France, the official source of royal movements on any given day, does not confirm joint occupation of the Louvre on that particular night (although it is true that Anne was there).¹⁹ The King and Queen were however together at their palace of Saint-Germain from 9 November for six weeks. The couple moved to the Louvre on 1 December, after which the King went hunting at Crône, and by 5 December was at his hunting lodge of Versailles. It was the prolonged period of opportunity in November which led the doctors to project a birth at the end of August.²⁰

Leaving aside the supernatural, and given that the dates of the storm do not fit (unless the King made a speedy and unrecorded stop at the Louvre on his way to Versailles), the truth was surely more prosaic. The conjugal relations of a King and Queen were never subject to the ordinary laws of preference, attraction or even anger and disgust. The need for an heir had hardly diminished, and at some point in the autumn, following the summer crisis, relations were simply resumed with happy results. Yet even if Louis XIII himself irritably if understandably observed: ‘It is scarcely a miracle if a husband who sleeps with his wife gives her a child,’ the circumstances of the conception, followed by the birth of the long-desired son, were widely held to be extraordinary – and above all by the baby's mother. ‘Godgiven': it was a view of himself as someone of special destiny that Anne would impress upon the future Louis XIV.

On 14 January 1638 the royal doctor, Bouvard, informed Cardinal Richelieu of the Queen's condition. Two weeks later the news was broken in the Gazette de France. On 10 February – the occasion of Brother Fiacre's visit – Louis XIII invited the whole kingdom to pray for a Dauphin and placing it under the protection of the Blessed Virgin, commanded the country to celebrate the Feast of her Assumption on 15 August.* The Queen underlined the connection by sending to Puy for a fragment of the Virgin's holy girdle to aid her in childbirth. Other sacred relics, to which Anne was in any case extremely partial, decorated her private oratory.²¹ The royal midwife, Dame Peronne, hitherto sadly under-employed, was installed some months before the expected date with her potions and her pots of pork fat recommended for rubbing during labour. The royal birthing-bed was readied: this was three feet wide, and consisted of two planks between two mattresses, a double bolster for use under the shoulders and two long wooden pegs on either side for the Queen to clutch during her ordeal. Very different from the elaborate great bed with its hangings and embroideries in which the Queen slept, the birth-bed was nevertheless an object of state, kept in a cupboard when not in use and produced for successive royal ladies.²²

The Queen's health was good. There was no threat this time of a ‘wretched miscarriage', in the King's phrase: only the high figure of infant mortality haunted Anne as it haunted all parents at the time – and in this case the whole court. It has been reckoned that roughly one in two children died, and those that survived the birthing process remained statistically at risk until their first birthday and beyond, so that burials of children under five were not recorded in the parish registers. The only irksome moment – one common to all fathers, not only kings – was when the baby failed to arrive according to Louis XIII's precise schedule: he was anxious to leave for Picardy. The King snarled at the Queen, but the dating of childbirth, although calculated then as now from the lastrègles(monthly period), has never been a precise art and it is easily comprehensible that the royal doctors erred on the side of caution.

It was on Saturday 4 September that the Queen finally went into labour at the royal château of Saint-Germain. This wondrous castle, adjacent to the small town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ten miles from Paris, was raised high over the curving banks of the Seine. The air was pure. There were gardens and terraces going down to the river, in which it was fashionable for both ladies and gentlemen of the court to swim. Close by lay the forests so vital to the main royal leisure pursuit of hunting. The old château was of twelfth-century origin but had been completely rebuilt in the sixteenth century by François I; then the adjacent Château-Neuf, a more intimate residence, was begun in 1557 by Philibert de L'Orme and transformed by Louis XIII's father Henri IV. The Queen's labour took place here, in a room overlooking the river.*

The labour took place in public, or at any rate in the presence of the court, as was the royal custom of the time, so as to prevent the possible substitution of a living baby for a dead one – or a son for a daughter. After all, in this case the King and Queen had evidently not made love under the waxing moon, let alone practised the physical constriction of the left testicle from which females were supposed to be generated – two contemporary suggestions for producing males. In view of this attendance, courtiers had to work out a private signal for indicating the vital sex of the child without vulgarly shouting it out. Whatever her use later in the dynastic matrimonial stakes, the birth of a girl was always a source of vivid disappointment at the time; one royal princess of this period, whose husband wanted an heir, volunteered crossly to throw her newborn daughter in the river.²³ Thus arms were to be kept folded for a girl, hats to be hurled in the air for a Dauphin.

It was at 11.20 a.m. on Sunday morning 5 September 1638 that the Queen's ordeal came to an end and hats were hurled violently, joyously, into the air. ‘We have a Dauphin!' declared Louis XIII. It was ‘the time when the Virgin was at her greatest strength', wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in Le: Bonheur de Jour the next year. This was a reference not so much to the Virgin Mary, under whose protection the baby had been placed in the womb, but to the astrological sign of Virgo, which, stretching between late August and late September could indeed be argued to be at its zenith on 5 September. The sun itself was also said to be exceptionally near to the earth, as though to salute the future King, and it was of course the day of the Sun, a traditionally auspicious day. Racine wrote of the galaxy at that moment that it was ‘a constellation composed of nine stars.’²⁴ The sun and stars did indeed look down upon, and the Virgin blessed, an exceptionally strong and healthy baby.*

The boy now shown to the gratified courtiers was the first legitimate male to be born into the Bourbon royal family proper (excluding the Princes of the Blood) for thirty years – that is, since the birth of Gaston d'Orléans. Gaston's daughter and Louis's first cousin, Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, proud of her own Bourbon inheritance, referred to the ‘natural goodness' which ran in the veins of all the Bourbons.²⁶ She contrasted it with the ‘venom’ which she believed ran in the blood of the Médicis – which Louis and of course Anne-Marie-Louise herself would have derived from their shared grandmother, Marie de Médicis, wife of Henri IV and daughter of the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany.

It is true that physically there was an Italianate darkness in all the grandchildren of Marie de Médicis. It appeared most notably in another of Louis's first cousins, Charles II of England, who bore a remarkable resemblance to his ancestor Lorenzo the Magnificent. But there was an equally strong mixture of Spanish and Austrian Habsburg blood in the baby's veins. Anne of Austria was herself the child of a Spanish father and an Austrian mother who was actually her husband's niece. Other uncle–niece unions had occurred within the succession, to say nothing of the repeated marriage of first cousins to insure against outside dilution. A trace of Jewish blood, for example, had entered the royal family of Aragon in the fifteenth century via the mother of Ferdinand of Aragon: constant intermarriage meant that this trace was preserved rather than dissolved.

And so the child who had been mature enough to be born with two teeth – auspicious in a male, less so for his wet-nurses – embarked on his life with cries of joy ringing in his ears: first of the court, then in the little town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, gradually spreading through all France.

*

The infancy of Louis, the Godgiven child, was marked by two features, one common enough, the other anything but common. On the one hand he saw very little of his sickly father. That was not at all unusual by the standards of the time, any more than the increasing prospect of his father's death was outside the norm (Louis XIII had been only nine when his own father was assassinated, and in the previous century the accession of young kings had been the rule rather than the exception). Anecdotes survive of their relationship which designate irritability on the part of the father – but then Louis XIII, often in pain, was an irritable man. One story of the eighteen-month-old boy screaming at the sight of his father, and Anne of Austria's desperate efforts to retrieve the situation by demanding better behaviour from her son in the future, certainly has the ring of truth.

But then men, especially kings in their separate households, did not see much of their young children. Relations between the child's parents continued to flourish in one sense at least, for all Louis XIII's suspicion of his wife, since almost exactly two years after Louis, another boy, Philippe, was born on 22 September 1640; he was subsequently known as ‘Monsieur', the traditional title of the sovereign's second son, and sometimes as ‘Petit Monsieur' in the lifetime of his uncle Gaston.* (This birth has always constituted the best proof that Louis was not some changeling procured from an alien source; and that marital relations continued at least sporadically between the royal couple.)

What was both uncommon and significant was the amount the young Louis saw of his mother. Contemporaries drew the obvious conclusion: that Anne had found the love with her first-born son that she had never found with her husband. The result was, as the ever-present La Porte observed, that Louis not only saw much more of his mother than children of his class generally did, but also loved her much more. In his own memoirs, written mainly in his twenties, Louis confirmed the pleasure he always took in her company: ‘Nature was responsible for the first knots which tied me to my mother. But attachments formed later by shared qualities of the spirit are far more difficult to break than those formed merely by blood.²⁷

It is true that Anne's own mother, Margaret of Austria, also noted for her piety, had seen more of her daughter (before her premature death) than most queens in the remote atmosphere of the hierarchical Spanish court. But Anne's involvement was quite exceptional. One of the Queen's attendants wrote that her mistress hardly ever left the child: ‘She takes great joy in playing with him and taking him out in her carriage whenever the weather is fine; it is her great pleasure in life.’²⁸

When the Queen woke up – at ten or eleven, except on days of devotion, very late by French standards – she went to her oratory and prayed at some length.²⁹ She then received ladies concerned with her various charities, philanthropy being one of the historic roles of a queen. After that, her sons came to her, enjoying their specially commissioned furniture: a little green velvet chair with fringes and gilded nails for Louis and a type of red velvet walker for Monsieur. At his mother's ceremonial rising, a court affair, Louis frequently handed her the chemise, traditionally the prerogative of a high-born lady, not a child, sealing the deed with a kiss.

Except when they were very small, the children took their meals with their mother. Anne loved her food: not only the proverbial Spanish chocolate but bouillon, sausages, cutlets and olla – a rich Spanish stew-pot of vegetables. One result of this happy indulgence was that with the onset of middle age and two late pregnancies, her voluptuous figure swelled. Loyal commentators pretended that it made no difference to her beauty – and besides, the greenish eyes still sparkled, the hair was still abundant, the long white hands were as graceful (and well displayed) as ever. The other result was a positive image of food and eating for the young Louis: in time his appetite would astonish Europe and burden his court.

There are many vignettes of Louis's joy in his mother's company: he would join her in her luxurious marble bath in her Appartement des Bains. This was decorated in azure and gold with the mythological theme of Juno, another great queen, as well as pictures of Anne's Spanish relations by Velázquez. The huge marble bowl had lawn curtains and pillows at the bottom of it, a little wood-burning stove providing hot water. Here the pair would lounge, dressed according to the general custom of the time, whether bathing or swimming, in long grey smocks of coarse linen. La Porte gives a picture of the little boy jumping with joy at the news that his mother was going to her bath and begging to join her.³⁰ No such delight greeted Anne's practice of visiting convents – a Queen of France had the right to visit even closed convents. The adult Louis would recreate the pleasures of the Appartement des Bains in a very different context but he never showed enormous enthusiasm for convents.³¹

A taste for the theatre was however something Anne handed on to her son (even in mourning, her passion was so great that she went privately). The family of the playwright Pierre Corneille was ennobled by the Queen and a pension granted; later a certain witty writer of ‘burlesques' named Paul Scarron would also be granted a pension. In the case of Corneille, whose immortal Le Cid appeared the year before Louis's birth, the romantic yet stern values that he delineated were very much to the point with the Queen. These were recognisable characters to her: Chimène with her strong sense of her own gloire (another important word of the time, with many subtle meanings, in this case perhaps best translated as ‘self-respect') and the message: ‘Love is only a pleasure, honour is a duty.’³² Louis grew up knowing all about Corneille, Le Cid and a prince's impulsion towards noble action. It remained of course to be seen whether like his mother he would accept the contrast between pleasure and honour in favour of the latter.

Queen Anne's love of the theatre accorded easily with the enormous value she placed on her own dynastic inheritance. It was something inculcated in her son. Queen Anne's ‘Spanish pride' – as the French liked to call it – was the subject of much comment throughout her life, variously interpreted as arrogance or resolution, depending on the observer's point of view. Anne herself saw it as an integral part of her position as a great princess: unlike her predecessor Marie de Médicis, daughter of a mere Grand Duke of Tuscany, she was descended from a long line of monarchs including the Emperor Charles V. As Madame de Motteville wrote (obviously echoing the view of her mistress): ‘by birth none equalled her.' Apart from the numerous rosaries made of pearls and diamondswhich Anne collected, there was nothing she liked more as decoration for her apartments than rows of family portraits – her celebrated relations and ancestors.

At the same time Anne understood the obligations placed upon any person, however grandiose their position, by their faith. It was Queen Anne who patronised not only Corneille but also the great apostle of the poor Vincent de Paul, later canonised, known then as ‘Monsieur Vincent'. By making him in 1643 her director of conscience, the Queen indicated her approval of his aim: this was to tap the charitable instincts of ladies who wanted to do good but did not want to become cloistered nuns. It was incarnated in an organisation known as the Daughters of Charity. Appearing at court in an old soutane and coarse shoes, Monsieur Vincent was a striking philanthropic figure, concerned to support the poor.

In general, with a parent who combined royal dignity and Christian goodness with a capacity for enjoying life, it is fair to say that Louis loved his early childhood. His father was no rival; he could be confident that he enjoyed what any son might want: the undiluted love of his mother. Of course this maternal love might have been shared with his brother. There are many theories as to why Anne not so much showed a clear preference for Louis (although she did) but also detached herself from any particularly close relationship with Monsieur.

Was it because Marie de Médicis had favoured her second son, Gaston, over Louis XIII and thus raised him up into inconvenient opposition? Was the delicate Monsieur, a pretty child with the bright black eyes of the Médicis, to be in effect neutered by being feminised, dressed in girls' clothes? Such a ploy is easier to detect with hindsight than for people present at the time. Monsieur did show homosexual leanings quite early in his life – but there is no reason to suppose that he would not have done so in any case. ‘The Italian vice', as it was derogatorily known, existed at the French court at the time as at any other. The real answer seems to hark back to the cataclysmic effect of Louis's birth on the Queen: she simply could not go through those feelings again. After all, the birth of Monsieur was convenient (a second male heir provided security in the succession – and indeed a great many second sons had succeeded in French history including Henri II), but it could hardly be seen as a miracle.

Before Louis was five years old, his life was transformed. The death of his remote and querulous father, probably from tuberculosis, on 14 May 1643 can hardly have appeared as a tragedy to the child.* Louis XIII himself displayed his melancholic temperament to the end: when told he had an hour to live, he replied: ‘Ah! Good news!' The sincere grief that the Queen experienced, at least according to Madame de Motteville, must also have been tempered with relief and even excitement at the new order. Change for Queen Anne had begun late the previous year when her old enemy Richelieu died in December. ‘There is something in this man which rises above ordinary mankind,' a contemporary had written of the mighty Cardinal.³⁴ His designated successor Jules Mazarin was of a very different nature. He showed himself from the first far more accommodating to the Queen, as indeed prudence dictated in the developing situation of Louis XIII's illness.

It was a point made by Queen Anne in her first words to the new monarch, aged four years and eight months, as she knelt breathless before him: ‘My King and my son' – emphasis added. (In her haste to pay him homage she had hurried on foot through the gardens of Saint-Germain.) In the practical fashion of the time, the corpse was then abandoned to its rituals at Saint-Germain while the living set off for Paris, the Queen and her two sons in an open carriage. The wild applause, the expressions of loyal sympathy, meant that the cortège was constantly delayed: it took seven hours to travel the short distance. As Madame de Motteville wrote: ‘They saw in the arms of this princess whom they had watched suffer great persecutions with so much staunchness, their child-King, like a gift given by Heaven in answer to their prayers.'³⁵

This popular notion that a golden age was dawning was dramatically reinforced five days after the death of the old King. It was said that the dying Louis XIII had had a vision of a French triumph over Spain. No one otherwise could have expected the dazzling victory which the twenty-one-year-old Duc d'Enghien secured over Spain on 19 May at Rocroi in the north-east, on the borders of the Spanish Netherlands.

Known to history as the Grand Condé (he inherited the princely title of Condé from his father three years later), this superb young soldier was seen by his detractors as having ‘the air of a brigand' while others thought more admiringly that there was ‘something of the eagle about him'.³⁶ Brigand or eagle as he might be, it was the future Condé's brilliant boldness which enabled him to defeat the Spanish cavalry on the left, leading the charge himself. On the field the Spanish troops, then thought to be the finest in Europe, slightly outnumbered Condé's. But at the end of the bloody day, their casualties far outstripped those of the French. Condé had brought to an end the legend of Spanish military invincibility and could report an extraordinary victory to his child-master.

* The name history has given her – Anne of Austria – is misleading since Anne never visited the country. It marks the fact that her father was one of the Spanish line of the (Habsburg) House of Austria.

* Father of the famous memorialist the Duc de Saint-Simon and an important source for his son's information about the preceding reign.

* The name of Richelieu's Italian assistant, known in France as Jules Mazarin, later to be closely associated with the Queen, did not feature at this date in these scandalous satires, and he was in any case in Italy at the time of Louis's conception.¹⁵

* Still a major national holiday in France.

* Largely demolished during the French Revolution, the château was rebuilt in the nineteenth century and adapted for a Musée Gallo-Romain. The Pavilion Henri IV where Louis XIV was born remains however and is, appropriately enough, the site of a luxurious restaurant. A medallion on the terrace marks the birth of the future King with the inscription: ‘C'est ici que naquit Louis XIV.’ It shows a cradle and a fleur-de-lys.

* For the astrologically minded, an 11.20 a.m. birthtime at Saint-Germain-en-Laye gives Louis, apart from the Sun in Virgo, an ascendant sign of Scorpio, in conjunction with the planet Neptune.²⁵

* Louis's brother Philippe was first Duc d'Anjou, then Duc d'Orléans; he will be designated as ‘Monsieur' throughout to avoid the confusion of name changes.

* There is a story that the dying Louis XIII asked little Louis his name; on being told ‘Louis XIV’ he replied: ‘Not yet, my son'; but it is apocryphal, since kings never referred to themselves by their numeral.³³