CHAPTER 2

Vigour of the Princess

The vigour with which this princess sustained my crown during the years when I could not yet act for myself, were for me a sign of her affection and her virtue.

– Louis XIV, Mémoires

Ihave come here to speak to you about my affairs; my chancellor will tell you my wishes.' These carefully prepared words were pronounced in a small high voice by the four-year-old Louis XIV on 18 May 1643. The occasion was the so-called lit de justice of the Parlement de Paris, taking its name from the cushioned bed from which medieval monarchs dispensed justice: this was the ceremony by which the sovereign personally enforced the registration of edicts. The King was so small that he had to be carried into the chamber by his chamberlain, the Duc de Chevreuse, and he was wearing a child's apron. But he had learned his lesson well. At his side, the new Regent, Anne of Austria, was draped in the deepest mourning, and it was for the sake of her future – or, as she would have seen it, for his – that she had brought her son to the Parlement.

In the end the dying Louis XIII had not denied his wife her right as a Queen who had given birth to a Dauphin to act as Regent, even if that Queen was as so often a foreign princess and in this case a native of the country France was currently fighting. But he had attempted to circumscribe her power with a Regency Council, including his brother Gaston Duc d'Orléans, no longer heir presumptive to the throne but the senior adult royal male. This limitation Anne proceeded to get removed with the agreement of the Parlement; furthermore she declared Cardinal Mazarin to be officially her chief adviser. With French victories accruing, and Mazarin at his mother's side to guide her – and perhaps as the years passed offering love as well as guidance? – in 1643 it looked as if Louis would have as happy a childhood as any healthy young prince could expect.

Mazarin, a year younger than the Queen, had in fact been recommended as chief minister to the late King by Cardinal Richelieu as he lay dying. He was an attractive man who had once been described teasingly by Louis XIII to his wife as bearing some resemblance to Buckingham: ‘You will like him.' Born Giulio Mazarini and brought up in Rome, he came of a family that had served the princely house of Colonna; he himself had been used by Pope Urban VIII for diplomatic missions when quite young. Early on in his French service he had shown sympathy for Anne of Austria during her period of disgrace which had preceded Louis's birth. Be the resemblance to Buckingham as it may, Mazarin, who was made a cardinal in 1641, was civilised and courtly: he could speak Spanish with Anne, and indulge her femininity – always an important aspect of her character – by procuring her jasmine-scented gloves (for those famous white hands) from Rome.

It can never be known for certain what his true relationship was with the Queen, and there are many divergent theories.¹ If it became in time sexual (without marriage) then this apparently pious woman who continued to take communion frequently was an outrageous hypocrite: for she lived day by day in a state of mortal sin by the rules of the Catholic Church.* It is for this reason – the psychological implausibility in terms of Anne's known character – that historians have preferred the explanation of a secret marriage.

Such marriages were very much of the period, as we shall see: valid in the eyes of the Church because they were held in an oratory or chapel in the presence of witnesses and blessed by clergy, they permitted all the intimacies of marriage, even if they were ignored in civil terms. It is true that the Cardinal had not actually taken priests orders (which would obviously have prohibited any marriage) but was merely of clerical status: this was a position which was rare but not unparalleled at this date. However, a modern scholar has provided evidence that Mazarin had begun to think very seriously of being ordained before his death, something that a secret marriage would rule out.²

In any case, both these explanations ignore the third possibility that Anne, now in her early forties and with the experience of being unhappily married at fourteen, was not in such desperate need of sex as the cynics and balladeers determined that she must be. What she needed was advice, loyalty, protection and that precious gift amitié or even amitié amoureuse, a friendship which, as it grew, developed within it a great deal of love. Mazarin took a lot of trouble to aid the Queen in her duties as Regent – for which she was hardly trained – and to educate her into being the dignified figure who came to fill the role with such aplomb. The result was that Anne the Regent was a far more serious person than Anne the scorned and often controversial Queen. It was a change of personality noted by her intimate friends, such as the Duchesse de Chevreuse, who had been exiled at the time of the Queen's disgrace and was now allowed to return. It was motivated by Anne's passionate love for her elder son, but it was orchestrated by Cardinal Mazarin.

The crudeness of the balladeers was extreme and in certain instances, as satire often is, contradictory. Mazarin, on grounds of his birth, was accused of ‘the Italian (homosexual) vice', which meant that his couplings with the Queen – their ‘dirty frolics' – had to be of an unnatural sort.* On the other hand, a rhyme entitled ‘The Queen's Keeper Tells All' stated exactly the opposite. The admonition ‘People, don't doubt that it's true that he f *** her' was followed by explicit detail; Louis was supposed to remonstrate against the suggestion of castrating the Cardinal: ‘Maman still has a use for them [his private parts].⁴

In contrast to these, the distasteful snipings from which great persons can never be entirely free, the correspondence of Mazarin and Queen Anne, of which eleven of her handwritten letters have survived, bears witness to tenderness, devotion – love indeed, but with no discernible hint of sex. There are numbers as codes – Anne is fifteen or twenty-two and Mazarin sixteen, while Louis is known as ‘the Confidant’. There are signs as symbols: Anne as a line with cross-bars, like an extended cross of Lorraine, and Mazarin as a star. There are endings of letters which betoken real love: Anne signs off: ‘I will live’ and adds the symbol for herself.⁵

How did the Queen react to the public slurs on her private conduct? Madame de Motteville for one believed that the Queen was too ‘lofty’ by nature to contemplate the interpretation which might be put upon her relationship with Mazarin (just as she had been naïve in her innocent addiction to ‘gallantry’ when she arrived in France). Anne knew the vulgar charges to be untrue – ‘people who have done nothing wrong, have nothing to fear’ – and she simply maintained the intimacy which was so essential to her, both personally and in terms of government. The regular evening meeting between the two where Mazarin gave his advice was, finally, what mattered to the Queen.

Against this background of domestic companionship, Louis spent the first ten years of his life. Much later he would criticise his education – as people often do look back with a reproof for the previous generation which is not necessarily justified. He remembered his governesses as an idle lot who simply enjoyed themselves, leaving his care to the humbler waiting-women. But other people who were present remembered things differently. In any case, by the time of his adolescence he spoke and wrote elegant French, could manage Italian and Spanish, and even knew enough Latin to read the dispatches of the Pope.⁶

Detailed instructions for Louis's daily routine, the Maxims and Directives for the Education of Boys, were drawn up at Anne of Austria's request and dedicated to her (she was compared to the noble Roman mother of the Gracchi).⁷ For example, he was not to sleep in an overheated atmosphere, since the brain needed cold air in order to develop. Classical allusions abounded. It was explained that Socrates had compared a child to a young horse, and at different points Aristotle, Plutarch and St Bernard were cited as well. Nevertheless the advice was all very practical. Plato had sent his disciples and his children to sleep with the aid of music: a gentle chant would help Louis to relax. He should be accustomed to sleep with the light burning, so as not to be frightened if he woke up. Hair should not be allowed to grow too long (Louis had ‘the most beautiful hair imaginable’, wrote his cousin Anne-Marie-Louise, thick, curling and a rich golden brown). As for washing, ‘cleanliness is a quality to be much recommended in a young prince’: nails were to be clean, and hands washed regularly with a wet cloth impregnated with eau de Fontane, a perfume. Swimming was highly recommended, just as the Greeks swam when fishing, and that role model of energy Henri IV owed his health to frequent swimming.*

Instructions for reading reflected the prevalent political climate. An interest in history was to be deliberately encouraged by Louis's reading matter. He must also study books about the provinces and towns of England and Spain – in case of future conquest – but written in French. Louis however never developed a particular taste for reading: what he loved even as a child were activities which he could practise himself. The royal passion for hunting was inculcated early (Anne had been ‘an Amazon in the saddle’ when young). So was the passion for sport generally: at the age of four Louis was chasing ducks with his dogs.

Then there were military matters. It was a militaristic age and it was not unusual for a royal or noble child to be obsessed with soldiers: Louis had a taste for silver and lead soldiers and toy forts. Combat was after all the obsession of most of the adult males who surrounded him: not only the nobles who generally went through a form of military service, but also the guards who surrounded him twenty-four hours a day. There was a cult of the warrior at the French court (where the great Henri IV was remembered as a warrior who had brought harmony). As the aphorist the Duc de La Rochefoucauld declared, no man could answer for his courage ‘if he had never been in peril’.⁸

Another many-sided figure of the period, like the galant, was that of the honnête homme; this term essentially referred to the civilised man. One of his virtues was to be brave. Even before Louis had discovered for himself – or thought he had – that ‘war … is the real profession of anyone who governs’, in the words of Machiavelli, many of his amusements had something of the military about them. At five Louis drilled other children, and before he was seven he was reviewing real-life guards' regiments. Nor was there an implicit distinction between the masculine sphere of war and that of feminine domesticity: in the summer of 1647 Louis's beloved mother took him to the war front in Picardy to encourage the troops, an image of female presence on military campaigns which presaged his behaviour in adulthood.

All this concentration on the person, the health, the education, the welfare of the young King was further enhanced by Anne's continuing determination that her younger son Monsieur was to defer to Louis in games and treat him, in effect, as a ‘Petit Papa’. This was a phrase sometimes employed of elder brothers, and Louis himself used it to sign his letters to Monsieur. This constant reiteration of the pecking order did not prevent the brothers from having fights: one particular incident was related by the valet de chambre Du Bois in which a boyish romp turned into an equally boyish scatological contest, and Monsieur gave as good as he got. But in essence Monsieur was as firmly trained to occupy the second place as Louis was to rejoice in the first.

On the surface, the religious life of the child Louis was completely conventional. He was confirmed in November 1649 according to the custom of the time and made his first communion at Christmas. Only in the shadowed corners of his life, the dark places in his mother's oratories hung with crucifixes and saints' relics, did an absolutely contradictory sense of his worth prevail. On the one hand Louis was born to be a great King, with glorious possibilities: someone to whom all his subjects from his brother (his heir) downwards must bow according to the will of God. At the same time he himself must bow down to God, in whose eyes his soul was no more precious than that of the humblest peasant in the kingdom.

Mazarin sometimes criticised the Queen for the excessive nature of her piety – ‘God can be worshipped everywhere, including in private, Madame,’ he said, referring to her addiction to public rituals, to convents and chapel-visiting. But it was sincere. The several hours a day she spent in prayer meant a daily accounting of her spiritual state. Therefore when she educated Louis to believe that kings, however powerful, would one day have to account to God for what they did, it was a lesson he was not likely to forget. Evil, declared the Maxims … for the Education of Boys, was to be pictured in a child's mind as ‘a black stain’ on a fine piece of cloth: and the cloth in this child's case was of the finest.⁹

In September 1645, political events, in particular the pressure of the war against Spain and others, expensive if successful, meant that it was thought necessary for Louis to appear again at the Parlement de Paris where the Regency had been decided in Anne's favour two years earlier. This time there was no need for the Duc de Chevreuse to carry him. At seven years old Louis walked boldly, although still dressed in the short jacket of a little boy. What he lacked in stature was however fully made up for by the appearance of the Queen Regent. She was the ‘leading lady’ of the show – and the show was carefully staged.¹⁰ Anne was still draped in black, including a black veil (it was over two years since her husband's death but black suited her, quite apart from establishing her ceaseless mourning as a widow). Through the veil however gleamed a huge pair of earrings, gigantic diamonds mixed with equally vast pearls, all evidently of great worth. A large cross over her heart was equally impressive and equally ostentatious.

Mother and son had been escorted to the Sainte-Chapelle by a panoply of guards and courtiers, with soldiers lining the road from the palace of the Louvre. There they were received by four Presidents of the Parlement de Paris and heard Mass. The seating at thelit de justice was carefully arranged by the Queen. On her right she placed her brother-in-law Gaston, beside him the Prince de Condé, whose warrior son had been involved in another great victory at Nördlingen. Dukes and marshals of France were in their appointed places, as were Cardinal Mazarin and various princes of the Church. The Chancellor of France was there and other senior officials, while on the other side were royal ladies such as Condé's wife, the first Princess of the Blood, and the Queen's attendants. The only concession to the King's tender age was the presence of his governess Madame de Sénéce, one of Anne's supporters whom she had appointed on her husband's death; she stood at his side throughout the ceremony.

The grace with which the young King spoke at his mother's signal – everyone saw him glancing at her for approval before he began – caused a surge of prolonged applause. He made the same short introductory speech as he had made in 1643. What followed was a good deal less anodyne. The Chancellor, in ‘an eloquent discourse', proceeded to set forth the needs of the state: the campaign against the Spanish must be pursued more strongly than ever, despite a series of splendid victories and despite the Queen Regent's understandable desire for peace.

The best way to secure this peace however was to impress the enemy by conquest. And for conquest, money was needed. At this the First President, Mathieu Molé, responded with lavish praise of the Queen, before holding forth on the needs of the suffering people of France. The Advocate-General Omer Talon also spoke of their tribulations in even more emphatic terms.

Later the Queen Regent, closeted as usual with Mazarin, asked Madame de Motteville whether the King had not done well – had she noted the tender way he turned towards her? – before furrowing her brow over the Advocate-General's speech. She herself cared very deeply for the common people, but all the same perhaps he had said a little too much … The Queen then returned to discussing the question of peace with Mazarin, accepting his contention that peace, as so often, could only be secured by further fighting.

From the point of view of a boy of seven, such an appearance, such criticisms of his mother's (and Mazarin's) regime, such needs for money, meant that the apparently rock-like security of his home life was crumbling. Was there perhaps an unpleasant lesson to be learned from the presence at the French court of certain close relations who were in effect political refugees? The troubles of Charles I with his own Parliament – which had begun with resistance to taxation – had driven his wife, the former French princess Henrietta Maria, back to her native country. She arrived in the summer of 1644, destitute except for French charity, and was housed in the old quarters at Saint-Germain.

Two years later her youngest child, baptised Henrietta in July 1644 in Exeter Cathedral, was smuggled out of England by a faithful lady-in-waiting. It was symbolic of these unhappy royals' dependence on the French crown that the name of Anne was immediately added to that of Henrietta as a tribute to her aunt the Regent. The two-year-old princess became in the French fashion Henriette-Anne, appropriately enough since French would be her first language, and her first cousins Louis and Monsieur the stars of her childish firmament.* And she was also brought up a Catholic despite that Protestant baptism.

The arrival of Henriette-Anne's sixteen-year-old brother Charles Prince of Wales in June 1646 presented a more acute political problem than his helpless mother and baby sister. He was a tall, swarthy, gangling youth who met his difficulties with the only weapon at his disposal, a sense of humour – ‘wit rather more than became a prince, wrote Halifax disapprovingly later.¹¹ Charles now attempted to solve his own financial problems by courting his first cousin Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, the celebrated heiress. It was doubtful whether the wary Mazarin would have allowed such a vast fortune to leave France for the sake of solving the difficulties of the English King (Charles I was currently held by the Scots and would be handed over to Parliament in January 1647). In any case Anne-Marie-Louise herself was too conscious of her own position to waste herself on a penniless Protestant who might not even have a throne to offer in the future. Sentimentally she was more inclined to dwell on a future with her little husband, as she had laughingly designated Louis in childhood.

With Mazarin ambivalent about aiding the English King with French troops, it was not until mid-August 1646 that Charles was formally received by Louis XIV, half his age. He rode in a coach on his cousin's right hand: ‘no point of honour being forgotten and nothing omitted that could testify the close ties of consanguinity'. After that it was back to Saint-Germain, and from Charles's point of view a hateful dependency on his mother's meagre financial allowance. Unfortunately Anne of Austria, deeply charitable as she might be towards her sister-in-law and little Henriette-Anne, was far more interested by the news of the death of her nephew Philip IV's only son than by events in England. This death meant that in November 1646 the eight-year-old Infanta Maria Teresa became heiress to the throne of Spain (with interesting possibilities for her future husband and children). Looking at the Spanish succession from another angle, Anne's ambitions were also aroused on behalf of Monsieur, half-Spanish by birth and now a possible candidate for the Spanish throne in his own right.

As it happened, the implementation of these hopes – or were they snares? – lay far ahead. What the Regent and the Cardinal had to deal with immediately was protest from the Parlement de Paris against the burden of taxation, something that the pretty speeches of the puppet-King could no longer curb.* In August 1648 the Grand Condé secured another brilliant victory at Lens, northwest of Arras, against the invading Austro-Spanish army. So the interminable shifting hostilities which had become the Thirty Years War ended for the most part with the Peace of Westphalia. That is to say, France settled its accounts with the Austrian Empire although remaining at war with Spain. In theory the French forces not occupied against Spain were now freed to deal with dissension at home. In practice the Queen's ineptitude (against the advice of Mazarin) in ordering the arrest of three popular members of the Parlement, led by the distinguished elder Pierre Broussel, resulted in widespread rioting. The Queen and her children were forced to take refuge in the Palais-Royal, none too secure a place compared with the fortress of the Louvre, while barricades were put up all around them.

Worse was to follow. On 13 September 1648, a week after his tenth birthday, Louis had to be taken away from Paris itself by his mother. The Queen's coolly resolute behaviour in the midst of many challenges to her authority impressed observers: she certainly justified her own pride in her descent from great rulers. The little family, with Monsieur recovering from smallpox, went first to Rueil and then to Saint-Germain. When members of the Parlement followed her in protest, Anne blandly explained that the Palais-Royal needed a thorough cleaning (not quite such a feeble excuse as it might sound, since royal palaces were generally vacated so that cleaning could take place). Besides the boy King wanted to enjoy the last of the summer in the fresh country air.

An accord with the Parlement, negotiated by Gaston d'Orléans in Paris, was signed by Anne at the end of October, and the Queen brought her children back to the capital. But this agreement, although signed by Anne on Mazarin's advice, outraged her sense of royal authority with its concessions, while in the event solving nothing. The next stage was from Louis's point of view still more alarming. The Queen and Mazarin were determined not to allow the young King to become the hostage of the Parlement. In an incident very far removed from the glorious circumstances of his birth, Louis and his brother with the Queen and a few trusted attendants were smuggled out of the Palais-Royal on the night of 5–6 January. They were taken to Saint-Germain once more, but this time the château was ill-prepared to receive them, since for secrecy's sake the news of their arrival could not be spread abroad, nor could any baggage accompany them. The first flight might have been presented to Louis, as to the Parlement, as a perfectly reasonable expedition; four months later it was impossible to put any such cosy gloss on what was clearly a desperate measure.

Yet it was still the Queen's high spirits in the face of danger which struck those present. At Christmas the satires against the Queen pinned up on the Pont Neuf had caused her much pain: she found the iniquity of the content deeply distressing and the credulity of the people in believing them horrifying. Now that there was need for action, Anne could not have been happier ‘if she had won a battle, taken Paris, and hanged everyone who had crossed her'. Thus she celebrated the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in traditional style with cakes and little games, laughing heartily when she was the one to be crowned ‘queen of the bean’.¹² The King and his brother were duly put to bed. It was only when all was silence and darkness that they were awakened, taken to a wicket gate, placed in a closed coach and transported away out of Paris. Whatever the trauma of the occasion for Louis, there were lessons to be learned from his mother's behaviour: the need, not only for calm in the face of danger but also for utter secrecy when a bold plan was to be carried out.

This first stage of the many-stranded revolt later known as the Fronde (from the French word for catapult, weapon of choice for the Frondeur mob) was settled at the Peace of Rueil in March 1649, with compromise on the subject of taxation. Two months earlier Charles I had been executed in Whitehall, and the exiled Prince of Wales, greeted with the faltering words from his attendants, ‘Your Majesty', had understood that he was now King. Thus the little French Queen of England, cowering in the old quarters of Saint-Germain, had become a widow, the four-year-old half-French Princess an orphan with little to commend her as a marriage prospect except her rank. As Madame de Motteville observed, 1648 had not been a good year for kings: it seemed that ‘divine justice menaced’ them all across Europe.¹³*

Much of the popular venom now focused on the Cardinal, in a series of pamphlets or ‘Mazarinades' which mixed scurrility with violent protest. The second stage of the Fronde consisted of serious armed uprisings in the provinces, notably Normandy, Guyenne and Provence, whose effect was to devastate the countryside. An appalling harvest led to soaring grain prices and only exacerbated the sufferings of the people. Then there was the popular hero, the Grand Condé, whose personal courage (courage attended by a series of victories) made him the ideal leader of noble dissent, coupled with the wealth and vast properties which gave him an enormous clientele. At first Mazarin had dealings with Condé which enabled the court party to defeat the Frondeurs. But Condé's personal arrogance infuriated the Queen. In January 1650, with his brother the Prince de Conti and brother-in-law the Duc de Longueville, Condé was committed to prison for a year.

As an expedient, once again it did not work. Condé had to be released, Duc to fierce agitation, and it was Mazarin who temporarily withdrew to Brühl, near Cologne. He left an agonised Queen, who poured out her suffering heart in that correspondence ending in coded symbols of affection to which allusion has already been made.

In the intricate pavane of changing alliances – and multiplying challenges to the royal authority – Gaston d'Orléans now moved across to the Frondeurs, and in a dramatic incident his defiant eldest daughter, the Grande Mademoiselle,* heroic as she stood at the head of her men, ordered them to fire from the Bastille. For brave, foolish Anne-Marie-Louise this was a defining moment in which she deployed all those great qualities she felt to be within herself, daughter (actually granddaughter) of kings: she satisfied her sense of her own glory. Later the Grande Mademoiselle tried to justify her disobedience to her sovereign by citing the superior patriarchal claims of her own father.¹⁴

Unfortunately the incident was also a defining moment for her young cousin Louis. The Grande Mademoiselle had robbed herself of her little husband, said Mazarin coarsely. That was probably true: in the scales in which her wealth was neatly balanced against the eleven-year gap in their ages, the Grande Mademoiselle's Frondeur stand certainly weighed against her heavily. She would pay for it by five years of exile from the court, just as her father was dispatched to his château at Blois with his wife, his three younger daughters and their attendants.

And there was more to it than that. In his adulthood, Louis evinced a pronounced dislike of ‘political' women. He went on record on the subject: ‘the beauty who dominates our pleasures has never had the liberty to talk to us of our affairs.'¹⁵ (Whether it was always true is another matter: Louis believed it was true.) The distasteful heroics of his older cousin, in virago-like opposition to Louis himself, set him on this course: women were undesirable elements in politics. There was one honourable exception: his own mother. In his praise for Queen Anne after her death, Louis made the point: ‘The vigour with which this princess sustained my crown during the years when I could not yet act for myself, was for me a sign of her affection and her virtue.¹⁶ In short, total public and private support was acceptable, public defiance definitely not.

September 1651 marked a significant date: it was the young King's thirteenth birthday and, by the royal rules, his majority. The occasion was marked by a great procession through the heart of Paris. It was witnessed by the English diarist John Evelyn, who had fled the ‘unhandsome' troubles of his native country, and he watched it from the balcony of another exile, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Evelyn noted ‘the whole equipage and glorious cavalcade' including the Swiss Guards, led by two cavaliers in scarlet satin. Most glorious of all was the King himself, ‘like a young Apollo' in a suit so richly covered in embroidery that nothing could be seen of the stuff beneath it: ‘he went almost the whole way with his hat in his hand saluting the ladies and ambassadors, who had filled the windows with their beauty, and the air with Vive le Roi’.¹⁷

But Evelyn, in all the lushness of his description, also put his finger on an aspect of Louis's character, the Louis who lived through the complicated vicissitudes of the Fronde. His ‘countenance' was sweet, but at the same time it was ‘grave'. The impenetrable public composure which was to be such a marked characteristic of the mature Louis XIV was already in place.

The troubles of the Fronde were finally put to rest when the brilliant French soldier the Vicomte de Turenne, originally under the command of Condé, helped to defeat his former master on behalf of the court. In February 1653 Condé retreated to the service of Spain, and Cardinal Mazarin returned. A halcyon period lay ahead, in which the young Apollo was displayed by his mother in a series of godlike appearances, symbolic of peace not war. They also, of course, symbolised the power of the crown.

Dancing was the key element in all this. The importance of the dance at this time, as vital to young men as fencing, was considered to be so great that even the Jesuits saw it as necessary to instruct their pupils in the art. Among the various genres, that of the Court Ballet, developed in Italy and brought to France by Catherine de Médicis, needed a ceremonial dignity, at which Louis XIV had a natural talent: already by the age of eight he was described as dancing ‘perfectly'. As a young man he excelled at the grave so-called Slow Courante and could perform the necessary turn-out of legs and feet with supreme elegance.*

In the Ballet of the Night at the carnival of 1653, Louis wore for the first time the costume of the rising sun, while one of the lines spoke of the ‘coming marvels' to be expected of this glittering vision. Alongside him danced a young musician of twenty, born in Italy, now French, who had recently been in the service of the Grande Mademoiselle, Jean-Baptiste Lully. Professional dancers posed as beggars with bandaged wounds so that they could be ‘cured' in the Court of Miracles. A few months later, in a ballet calledThe Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, Louis played Apollo himself, surrounded by the first ladies of the kingdom dancing the nine muses. Henriette-Anne, at the time of the Fronde reduced to shivering in her bed for lack of heat and food, was now thought suited to the role of Erato, muse of erotic poetry; she was not yet ten years old but her position as the first princess in France after her aunt and mother entitled her to the role. In case anyone missed the significance of these government exercises in propaganda, Louis, playing a sorcerer in the Ballet of the Feasts of Bacchus, was hailed with these lines: ‘He is indeed the Master of the Future: / You only need to look upon his eyes and his countenance.’¹⁹

For once in royal annals, there was actually no need of exaggeration to hail the fourteen-year-old King in this manner. All contemporary accounts agree that he was astonishingly handsome at this stage. The beautiful, long, curling hair, sentimentally praised by the Grande Mademoiselle, was only one of his physical assets, but it was much prized at the time. (Queen Anne struck many a graceful attitude combing thick locks which her son had inherited.) Louis's figure was described as ‘tall, free, ample and robust' while his bearing was characteristic of ‘those whom we speak of as having the blood of gods.’²⁰* This particular eulogy went on: above all this nonpareil had to be seen dancing the ballet; then he appeared as ‘Heaven's masterpiece, the gift of God to France'. It did not need the indulgent eyes of his mother and the court, relaxing at last after the divisive horrors of the Fronde, to see in the juvenile grace of Louis a triumphant presage – once again as at his birth – of a golden age.

On 7 June 1654 Louis XIV was consecrated King of France, according to the custom of his ancestors, in the cathedral at Rheims, north-east of Paris. Those princes present did not include his uncle Gaston, in exile at Blois, nor the Grand Condé, now serving his erstwhile enemy in Spain. But the array was magnificent, the ceremony prolonged, beginning at six in the morning, and the whole ritual ostentatiously holy and historic.† Seated in a specially constructed box, Queen Anne was radiant with her son's public triumph; only the presence of the widowed Henrietta Maria beside her provided a kind of memento mori.

But Louis XIV did not only look a romantic ideal at this point: he himself felt full of romance towards women. He loved to play the guitar, the plucked stringed instrument introduced from Spain (where it had been brought by the Arabs).²³ He was originally influenced by his mother and the memories of the Spanish court of her faraway, idealised youth. But it was Cardinal Mazarin who saw to it that Louis had the best available teacher, a fellow Italian, Francisco Corbetta, who by the mid-century had published two guitar books for the rulers of the cities of Bologna and Milan, and probably another for the King of Spain.

Playing the guitar was a notably less ceremonious occupation than dancing in the formal Court Ballet: at the same time, what was the Spanish guitar if not a weapon of courtship in the hands of a gallant? It was significant in this context that the return of Mazarin meant the institution once again of a kind of home life, as had been enjoyed before the Fronde, but it was now a home life which included a host of Mazarin's female relations, a lively collection of Italian girls. For the Cardinal had a desire, laudable by most family standards (if not those of the jealous French), to surround himself with his own blood, and arrange ambitious marriages for them.²⁴

These Mazarinettes, as they were known, were seven strong, plus three brothers, and had started arriving in court in 1647. They included the Martinozzis, children of Mazarin's eldest sister; Laura, a few years older than Louis, would marry the heir to the Duke of Modena. Anna Maria married the Prince de Conti who was the younger brother of the Grand Condé.

The Martinozzis were blonde and pliant. The same could not be said of the Mancini girls, five of them altogether, whose ages in 1654 ranged from nineteen to five. These were the children of Mazarin's second sister Hieronyma, who had married up into a higher degree of the Italian nobility. With their zest for life, their combative high spirits, their intelligence and their dark ‘Roman' looks, the Mancinis were very far from being the contemporary ideal, at least in theory. It was not so much that they were dark – although it was female fairness which was constantly praised as representing perfection. It was more the Mancinis' general disdain for conventions. Every preacher, every philosopher preached the need for feminine passivity and submission. As Hortense Mancini, the acknowledged beauty of the family, wrote in her memoirs: ‘I know that the glory of a woman consists in never talking of herself.’ Or as a certain governess would sum it up later, a woman born Françoise d'Aubigné: ‘modesty should be the lot of women … your sex obliges you to obedience. Suffer much before you complain about it.’²⁵ The Mancinis on the other hand were active and early on entered the courtly business of fascination.

The eldest was the sweet-natured Victoire – ‘the only wise one' – who married the Duc de Mercoeur. Olympe, Louis's exact contemporary, was a famous charmer, quite as determined as her uncle to make the best of her chances. The beautiful Hortense, born in 1646 following two boys, looked ‘like an angel'; she was easygoing but wayward; the novelist the Comtesse de La Fayette noted acidly that Hortense, unlike her sisters, had no wit but to some people at court ‘that was yet another mark in her favour’.²⁶Marianne, the youngest, who would marry the Duc de Bouillon, loved poetry and later saw herself as the protectress of poets, including La Fontaine.

There was however a Cinderella in the family, to quote the ancient folk fairy story which would be published in its French version towards the end of this century in Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose. This particular Cinderella was the middle child, a year younger than the sparkling Olympe. And the role of the vindictive Ugly Sister was played in her life not by Olympe or Hortense – the Mancini girls were always strongly supportive of each other – but by her own mother.

Marie Mancini was the darkest of all the girls and very slender. With her long thin arms and her wide mouth (at least she showed the contemporary rarity of perfect white teeth when she smiled), Marie appalled her mother with her lack of classical looks. The lethargic and anxious Hieronyma Mancini, inspired by a horoscope which predicted that Marie would cause trouble in the future, demanded on her deathbed that the Cardinal should shut Marie up in a convent and keep her there.

Surrounded by these young women in a pleasant domestic atmosphere, it was inevitable that Louis would fall in love with one of them. Or more than one. It was not a question of sexual initiation. There was a tradition among sophisticated European royals that this was the task – or privilege – of an accommodating older court lady. When Louis was hardly in his teens, the enchanting Duchesse de Châtillon, known as Bablon, was alleged to have set her cap at him. A dismissive rhyme was written on the subject by the sharp-penned Bussy-Rabutin: ‘If you are ready / The King is not … / Your beauty deserves more / Than a minority.' Now fifteen, Louis was ready. Just as Charles II, while still Prince of Wales, had been seduced by the opulent Mrs Christabella Wyndham, Louis is always supposed to have been initiated by one of his mother's most trusted ladies-in-waiting (she had taken part in the flight from the Palais-Royal on that fateful night). ‘One-eyed Kate', as the Baronne de Beauvais was nicknamed, was about twenty-four years older than Louis, much closer to his mother's age than his own. The incident was said to have taken place as Louis was on the way back from the baths – ‘she ravished him or at least surprised him' – and to have been enjoyable enough to be repeated on several more occasions.²⁷

The evidence for this is, it is true, based on later gossip. Primi Visconti and the Duc de Saint-Simon both mention the story with confidence, although the former first arrived in France in 1673 and the latter was only born in 1675. Nevertheless there seems enough support to give the story plausibility. Madame de Beauvais was rewarded with a house and pension – conceivably for services to the mother rather than the son, or possibly both. More cogently, the young Saint-Simon remembered her, wrinkled and by this time almost entirely blind, being treated with great respect at Versailles by Louis XIV and accorded that ultimate mark of favour, a talk with the King ‘privately’.²⁸

Where romantic flirtation as opposed to sex was concerned, Louis was originally captivated by Olympe Mancini, with her delicious fossettes or dimples and her ‘eyes full of fire'. Olympe had a dubious reputation: she was described as having a nature ‘little touched with Christian maxims', and there were rumours that Louis slept with her. It was certainly possible. It is true that this was an age when in the marriage-market all girls had to enter, virginity was highly prized and virgins closely watched: the Cardinal's men were after all everywhere. Yet Olympe's subsequent career would show her to be a bold and even amoral woman, not afraid to barter her physical charms for her own advantage – or for her own pleasure. There were always those who took the risk of breaking the rules, and Olympe was certainly among them. In the course of time she was rewarded with a semi-royal match to a Savoyard prince who became the Comte de Soissons. Olympe's condition was that she should remain at the French court. Here her Italian zest and voluptuous looks continued to be generally admired – not least by the King.

Olympe Mancini knew the rules – the rules of the court as laid down by Queen and Cardinal. Yet already Louis was beginning to challenge his mother's authority, especially where his own pleasures were concerned. In 1655, at a so-called Petit Bal held by Queen Anne in her apartments to honour her niece Henriette-Anne, the Queen instructed her son to open the proceedings by dancing with his cousin. Instead of agreeing, as protocol demanded, Louis made it quite clear that he preferred to dance with Victoire Mancini Duchesse de Mercoeur and took her hand, muttering something about not wishing to dance with little girls (Henriette-Anne was nearly eleven but small for her age). Her appearance, in Louis's graceless expression, reminded him of the bones of the Holy Innocents.²⁹

It was a calculated affront not only to the English royal family but also to Queen Anne's own authority. Furious, she yanked Victoire de Mercoeur from her son's grasp. In vain poor Queen Henrietta Maria ran after Queen Anne with the polite fiction that her daughter had a bad foot and thus no wish to dance. Queen Anne insisted. Louis sulked but in the end the mother's will prevailed. The question must however have been in her mind as in that of other observers of the sullen seventeen-year-old boy: for how long?

* Not only did sexual relations outside marriage constitute a mortal sin by the rules of the Catholic Church (putting the sinner in danger of hell if she/he died without repenting), but taking communion in such a state was a further grave offence. Anne however was noted for being a frequent communicant in an age when not many people were.

* In France there was a contemporary obsession with the idea of homosexuality being ‘Italian’; Primi Visconti, born in Piedmont, was once told, to his great indignation, that ‘in Spain the monks, in France the nobility, in Italy everyone’ was homosexual. Primi Visconti's racy memoirs of the French court where he arrived in 1673 are a useful source, given that he was frequently in the company of Louis XIV.³

* It was a type of breaststroke which was in question, with the face out of the water: proposed by the German professor Nicolas Wynman in his Colymbetes of 1538, as a protection against drowning.

* The close family connection of the European royal families at this date is demonstrated by the fact that the young princes and princesses of France, England, Spain and Savoy were all first cousins, descended from the five children of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis: Louis and Monsieur (Louis XIII); Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier and her Orléans half-sisters (Gaston); Charles II, James, Henriette-Anne and Mary wife of William II of Orange (Henrietta Maria); Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain (Elisabeth); Charles Emmanuel and Marguerite-Yolande of Savoy (Christine).

* The Parlement de Paris was not a parliament in the English sense of the word but a High Court with jurisdiction over a third of the kingdom; there were other provincial Parlements.

* In addition, the sudden death of Ladislas IV of Poland precipitating a crisis in the monarchy, the death of Christian IV of Denmark at a critical moment for his country and a revolt in Moscow against the Tsar Alexis meant that her comment of 1648 was fully justified.

* The term ‘the Grande Mademoiselle' will be used in future here to denote Anne-Marie-Louise, although it was in fact a title used later to distinguish her from her senior half-sister, meaning ‘the Elder Mademoiselle', not a reference to her stature, moral or physical.

* The turn-out of Louis XIV's time was 90 degrees, i.e. each leg turned out 45 degrees from the centre-line, rather than the 180 degrees which has become the norm.

* Louis XIV is always mentioned as being tall by those who knew him, like the Grande Mademoiselle: in another account he was mentioned as half a head taller than Cardinal Mazarin, whom no one described as being short. The myth of the small King elevating himself on high heels is based on a misconception about fashion at the time. Charles II for example, who was well over six feet tall, also wore high heels. Historians now think that Louis XIV was probably about 5'9”.²¹

† The attention paid to the mere fact of consecration in this period may be judged by the earnest dilemma of a young English Royalist, Mary Eure, in 1653. Needing to be touched for the King's Evil, as scrofula was termed, she could not decide between Louis XIV (as yet unconsecrated) and Charles II (a king without a throne).²²