CHAPTER 3
‘Good news, Madame! … I bring Your Majesty peace and the Infanta.’
– Cardinal Mazarin to Anne of Austria, 1659
By 1657, Louis XIV, approaching nineteen, was evidently of marriageable age. It could be argued that he was the most brilliant match in Europe: and if that was true, the one bride who was equal to him in her superb rank was his first cousin the Infanta Maria Teresa. This was the marriage for which Anne of Austria had prayed so fervently since the two, virtual twins, were in the cradle. Similarly Maria Teresa's French-born mother Elisabeth had impressed on her daughter the incomparable majesty of the role of the Queen of France: otherwise a great Spanish princess could well be happier in a convent. Unfortunately the two countries of France and Spain had been at war so long – and Spain now harboured the Frondeur rebel general the Prince de Condé – that there were considerable obstacles in the way of these wistful dreams.
Meanwhile there were many other royal parents to whom the young King of France appeared as the ideal son-in-law. For example, Louis XIII's sister, Christine Duchess of Savoy, made delicate enquiries about the prospects of her own daughter Marguerite-Yolande.1 There was always much to be said for a Franco-Savoyard marriage (which is why so many of them took place down the centuries of the Ancien Régime). Savoy's geographical position between Austria north of its capital Turin and the Italian duchies of Modena and Tuscany made it of perpetual strategic significance to France. Another possible Italian bride was from the d'Este family: a daughter of the Duke of Modena whose heir had recently married the Cardinal's niece Laura Martinozzi. To almost any Catholic princess – and perhaps a few Protestant ones prepared as Henri IV had done to find the throne of France worth a Mass – Louis XIV represented a magnificent career opportunity.
One way-out suggestion was made by a French theologian presenting an address to the former Queen Christina of Sweden, who was on a European tour following her abdication.2 Perhaps this maddening, eccentric, brilliant spinster, in her masculine wig looking ‘more of a man than a woman’, nevertheless with a highly feminine décolletage, might be the bride from heaven … Christina maintained a steely silence at the suggestion, although the idea of such a marriage certainly represents a counterfactual delight.
What then of the French royal princesses? The Grande Mademoiselle, now thirty, had been recently welcomed back to court with elegant words from the King: ‘let us talk no more about the past.' (Louis had learned early on the gentle and useful art of public forgiveness.) Her half-sisters, daughters of Gaston by a second marriage, were of more marriageable, or rather child-bearing, age by the standards of the time. Although the Grande Mademoiselle would have preferred the King's fancy to fall on any candidate other than these ‘inferior' princesses, Marguerite-Louise at twelve was already ‘beautitul as the day’.3 Then there was the half-French half-English Henriette-Anne, who if scorned as ‘a little girl' by her cousin Louis, still had to be found a bridegroom. Naturally Queen Henrietta Maria dreamed of what would be the greatest match of all, and Queen Anne, with her feeling for dynastic connection – remember all those family portraits – would have accepted the niece who had been her protégée since babyhood if the Infanta remained unavailable.
However, where Mazarin was concerned, neither the money of the Grande Mademoiselle, the beauty of Marguerite-Louise nor the impeccable royal breeding of Henriette-Anne counted in this situation. What was a career opportunity for a princess was a diplomatic opportunity for a King (and his advisers). The marriage of Louis XIV was destined, surely, to be an awesome matter of state. So his duty demanded.
Yet for a moment, a week, a month, perhaps a little longer, it seemed that the steady flame of duty in Louis's heart, so carefully tended by his mother since his birth, flickered dangerously as the far more exciting flame of romantic love flared up beside it. It was a question not so much of his feelings for the Mancini Cinderella, Marie, but his intentions towards her.
Louis was already showing himself susceptible to a pretty face, a languishing glance, and at court especially among his mother's junior ladies-in-waiting there were plenty of attractive girls glad to throw just such a glance in his direction. One of them was Anne-Lucie de La Motte d'Argencourt, who, while not a startling beauty, had a bewitching combination of blue eyes, blonde hair and naturally very dark eyebrows (black eyebrows, unlike black hair, were much admired at the time). Furthermore she shared Louis's ‘violent passion' for dancing. Naturally the Queen frowned upon the flirtation, and although Louis gallantly offered to ignore his mother's criticisms, this proposal seemed to the girl to cast some aspersion on her virtue. In the end Queen Anne persuaded her son that it was all a matter of sin and he abandoned his romance for a while – before returning and sweeping Anne-Lucie away in a court dance. Anne-Lucie said afterwards that Louis trembled all the time he held her.4
The authority of Anne and Mazarin was however still in the ascendant. Brutally, Mazarin told Louis that Anne-Lucie had betrayed all his secrets, whereas the girl had merely tried to win Mazarin's esteem by discussing the King with him. Nevertheless, a combination of their anger and the jealousy of the wife of the lover Anne-Lucie actually preferred, meant that she was relegated to a convent at Chaillot. It is pleasing to report that unlike many girls thus dismissed in this period, Anne-Lucie found life there very much to her taste, received many visits (she was not an enclosed nun), and spent the next thirty-five years in total happiness.
Where Anne and Mazarin were concerned, Marie Mancini presented quite a different challenge. Contemporary observers agreed on three things about the Cardinal's niece (apart from the fact that in general they disliked her). These were their conclusions: first, that she was not remotely pretty; second, that she was intellectual, even bookish in a way most young girls were not; third, that for a season she was ‘absolute mistress' of the young Louis XIV, in the words of the novelist the Comtesse de La Fayette, having ‘compelled' him to love her.5 Queen Anne also believed that Marie Mancini had woven a spell: furiously she compared it to that by which the enchantress Armide had captured Rinaldo in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and turned him to sensual pleasures.
And yet the pleasures Marie Mancini outlined do not seem to have been particularly sensual, unless taste for high romance in plays and novels be seen as such. What Hieronyma Mancini, the wicked Stepmother – actually mother – of Marie's story had missed was her daughter's originality by the standards of the time. Not only did she appreciate painting and music but she had an ardent love of literature. The heroic plays of Corneille, especially Le Cid, were a particular favourite: a taste, of course, that Marie Mancini had in common with Queen Anne. Here was a heady mixture of love, honour, duty and renunciation as Chimène passionately adores Rodrigue the killer of her father, yet feels compelled in terms of her personal gloire to demand his death. At the same time the proud Infanta Urraque is inspired with an equally unsuitable passion for Rodrigue, but in her case it is the need for royal to wed royal which inhibits her. ‘Heaven owes you a king,' Urraque is admonished at one point, yet ‘you love a subject’.6 A female who was obsessed by Corneille and his lofty chivalric ideals was in a different class from most girls of her age for whom the prayer-book was enough, with the best-selling novels of Madeleine de Scudéry the far horizon of their reading.
The standard of women's education in France was not only low in the seventeenth century but unabashedly so. Even a clever woman like the Princesse des Ursins would boast of merely knowing her catechism and her rosary ‘as good women do' (although she certainly knew a great deal more). Most women were held to have no need of such leisurely accomplishments as reading and writing. Physical weakness was equated with moral frailty to add to the presumed inferiority of the weaker sex: women were by nature disorderly beings not even responsible for their own actions (with of course no status at law).7 What need of education for them?
Estimates of the number of women who could actually sign their own name in this period vary between 34 and 14 per cent. ‘Oh, that I were but a Man, I should study Night and Day,' wrote the English pamphletist Elinor James. But since they were not men, as a whole the female sex accepted its virtually illiterate destiny. For women of the upper classes, a convent education, provided by inspiring individual nuns, offered growing possibilities as the century progressed. But even here a clever woman like Madame de Sévigné looked down on the quality of the teaching supplied: she rejected the idea of a convent for her daughter's child, telling the daughter, Juliette de Grignan, to whom she wrote so constantly and so richly: ‘you will talk to her [the child]. I think that is worth more than a convent.' Conversation, declared the great letter-writer, was better than reading.8
The fact was that, as Madame de Sévigné's remark indicates, there were clever women in France – in Paris – and it was the art of conversation which was their principle organ of expression. In the salons of the brilliant, witty, cultured, refined women later nicknamed by Molière the Précieuses, ideas flowed during conversation. And from ideas came a special kind of excitement, making other more stolid company unendurable. Madeleine de Scudéry, for example, suggested that a woman in conversation should demonstrate a marvellous rapport between her words and her eyes, while she should of course be careful not to sound ‘like a book talking'; she should rather speak ‘worthily of everyday things and simply of grand things’.9 But these women and their male admirers deliberately constituted their own kind of society with their private nicknames and their codes, which had little to do with the court, particularly during the troubled years of the Fronde.* In short, the young Louis XIV did not know many sparkling young women. Thus Marie Mancini constituted his introduction both to the arts, which made a lifelong impression, and to a kind of chivalric love.
It helped that Marie was not entirely preoccupied with things of the mind. She was a wonderful rider, and her slender figure – scrawny, some said rudely – meant that she had a marvellous air dressed up in boy's clothes on her horse, where the plumper beauties fashionable at the time might not have made such a pretty picture. In black velvet edged with fur, including a matching hat above the huge dark eyes which were her best feature, she was irresistible. It was certainly not a coincidence that the King's early loves were all superb equestriennes, able to outdistance the court if necessary, since riding in the forests and glades round the various royal châteaux represented some of the few opportunities for privacy that Louis had.
As for the Cinderella element in the story, the King's eye first fell upon the neglected Marie when her disagreeable mother was dying in late 1657 and he paid a series of courtesy visits to his chief minister's sister. According to Marie, the King appreciated the frankness she showed in their talks: ‘the familiar way in which I lived with the King and his brother [due to the intimacy of Cardinal and Queen] was something so easy and pleasant that it gave me the opportunity to speak my thoughts without reserve.’10
Louis was able to taste the delights of knightly rescue: the beguiling thought that he had transformed Marie's life with his attention. As she wrote much later in her memoirs,11 it was a pleasure for Louis to be so generous to her: the King saw them as Pygmalion and Galatea, the sculptor and the marble statue that he brought to life. In other words, from her own point of view (that of an ordinary young woman of little or no fortune) ‘it was the love of a God'. The Court Ballet Alcidiane and Polexandre of 14 February 1658, founded on a novel by Marin de Gomberville, contained these lines: ‘Your Empire, Love, is a cruel empire / All the world complains, all the world sighs.’12 But in these early months of their relationship, neither Louis nor Marie found Love's Empire anything but delightful.
What Marie Mancini really offered Louis in the heady days before that inevitable royal marriage – or was it really inevitable? – was something totally new to him in an upbringing which had at times been traumatic but in private terms always carefully cloistered. Of course there was her unconditional love for him as opposed to his crown, a tribute which like any young man born to a great position, Louis found immensely seductive. But there was more to her hold over him, the ‘spell' she had cast, than that. Marie, in her ‘witty, bold and wanton' way offered independence from the clearly stated wishes of his mother and the Cardinal.13 Even their disapproval must have been exciting because it was new.
The situation to outsiders was especially baffling since it seems quite unlikely that Marie and Louis ever slept together. Once again contemporary commentators, no friends to Marie, combined to doubt the fact. The abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden spent a week at the court at Compiègne and longer than that – rather longer than expected – in France. She had a low opinion of Marie Mancini's looks: she told the Grande Mademoiselle that it was a shame the King could not be in love with someone more attractive. Nevertheless Christina doubted that ‘he [Louis XIV] has even touched the tip of Marie's finger'. Perhaps it was not quite that platonic: the discreet Madame de Motteville probably expressed the truth when she wrote that the relationship was ‘not altogether without its limits’.14 Subsequent events would show that Marie's nature was romantic and impetuous, in contrast to her frankly carnal and charmingly calculating sisters Olympe and Hortense. A physical affair – however far it went – with Olympe Mancini or the rash Anne-Lucie de La Motte d'Argencourt was something that could be tolerated as harmless (if sinful, as the Queen never failed to point out) and then quietly ended with all the weapons of society at the disposal of Cardinal and Queen. But the winning card of God's thunderous disapproval could hardly be played against a platonic friendship, however intense.
It was when Louis began to reflect dreamily on the possibility of marrying Mazarin's niece that the dangers of the situation came home to the Queen and the Cardinal. In spite of the malicious suggestions of his enemies, there is no evidence that Mazarin ever entertained the idea of the family union seriously and a great deal of evidence that he did not. He loved Louis, who was his godson, his creation, the summit of his gift to his adopted country, and he did not particularly like Marie. While Louis dallied with Marie Mancini, the Cardinal was involved in a series of resourceful manoeuvres aimed at peace between France and Spain – peace and the Infanta.
The serious illness of Louis in the summer of 1658 served to concentrate the Cardinal's mind on the need for a royal marriage. On the surface it was a time of joyous French victories. The shifting alliances of Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century were illustrated well by the fact that in their shared contest against Spain, France had recently joined up with Cromwellian England (despite the close relationship of the French to the exiled English royal family). At the Battle of the Dunes on 14 June 1658, which led to the seizure of Spanish-held Dunkirk, the celebrated commander the Vicomte de Turenne headed the French, aided by six thousand English infantry under Sir William Lockhart. The Spanish forces under Don Juan José of Austria included not only Turenne's former commander the Grand Condé, but also the younger brother of Charles II, James Duke of York.
The French King, who believed in sharing so far as was possible the rigours of a campaign with his troops, insisted on lodging at nearby Mardyck despite the discouragement of Mazarin. The Cardinal pointed out that the courtiers were eating the food from the countryside needed by the army. But Louis would not listen. As Mazarin commented wryly to a colleague: ‘He is the master, but nothing will prevent me from telling him always what I believe would be in his interest.' It was extremely hot and Mardyck was notoriously unhealthy, with the lingering odour of corpses all about, some new (there had been four thousand Spanish casualties alone), but also the half-buried dead of battles long ago. Wrote Madame de Motteville of these unwelcome presences: ‘the dryness of the land’ preserved the bodies.15
Louis fell ill, probably with typhoid fever. Even now he argued with Mazarin about the need to retreat to Calais. But once there his fever flared up hideously and many of those around him – in an age when sudden death from a disease like typhoid was a common phenomenon – feared the worst. For about ten days he was in extreme danger. There was something like panic. (The point has been well made that the contemporary concentration on the eldest son ‘took no account of sudden death’.)16 The sight of this nineteen-year-old royal sun in eclipse led to court attention focusing on the new light on the horizon: seventeen-year-old Monsieur. It was at this moment that the remarkable subjugation of Monsieur's spirit – subjugated since birth – was evinced. For Monsieur himself never wavered publicly and privately in his despair at his brother's illness and his total loyalty to him personally. In turn this critical moment in Louis's life cemented his own feelings of protection and loyalty to his brother. Monsieur's evident homosexuality – for which Louis had no time in others – did not come between the brothers.
Louis XIV recovered. His cure was attributed to doses of wine laced with emetics such as cassia (an inferior kind of cinnamon) and senna. The ecstatic gratitude of the whole country, spared ‘the most grievous loss France could have' in the words of a gazette, left Cardinal Mazarin with two problems.17 One was the need for a suitable royal bride (and royal mother of future kings) sooner rather than later. The other was, of course, the problem of his spritely niece Marie Mancini, who was found weeping at Louis's bedside during his illness. An expedition to Lyon in the autumn of 1658 was intended to solve both problems, although at the time it appeared to solve neither. It was intended to bring together two young people in a very public manner to see if a marriage could be arranged. The people concerned were Louis King of France and – to the unconcealed disgust of Queen Anne – his first cousin, Marguerite-Yolande of Savoy. As the court trailed south to Lyon, Queen Anne was alternately morose and furious (her lovely Spanish or Spanish-accented voice became extremely shrill when she was angry). And Marie Mancini went along too in the great caravan of the court.
Once Lyon was reached, the King continued his ostentatious attentions to Marie. They laughed together. They gossiped: Marie's mocking style made her a good gossip. They whispered conspiratorially. Marie Mancini sang to the music of Louis on his beloved guitar while the Italian-turned-French musician Lully composed airs for her. They danced and rode together. And Queen Anne remained torn between her disapproval of her son's defiant conduct and her dismay at the Cardinal's Savoyard project (so much less appealing to her than that shimmering vision of the Infanta …).
When the French and Savoyard royal families encountered each other, formal kisses were exchanged, denoting Duchess Christine's previous status as a princess of France. Marguerite-Yolande proved to be pleasant enough, if extremely shy: ‘the most demure andreserved person in the world'. Her appearance was derided by the Grande Mademoiselle, who generally found something unpleasant to say about younger women, on the grounds that her head was too big for her body. But she had beautiful eyes, even if her nose was rather large. Marguerite-Yolande's main defect was her ‘sunburnt' complexion. This was an age when a white skin was so highly prized that women of society wore masks outdoors to protect themselves, especially when out hunting: Marguerite-Yolande had evidently not worn a mask. Naturally Marie Mancini, like the Grande Mademoiselle, disparaged her in private to the King.
Nevertheless the solemn ritual dance of seventeenth-century royal encounters was carried out. Other marriages were mentioned. The Grande Mademoiselle for the young Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy? In her teens Anne-Marie-Louise had been attractive enough, given her material endowments, if rather masculine-looking: her appearance had fitted her for her warrior-queen stance at the Bastille during the Fronde. It was true that she was big-boned with a prominent reddish nose and bad teeth in a long face: but she had the fair hair and blue eyes admired at the time. Now she was thirty-one and the fair hair was already greying. It was a trait the Grande Mademoiselle told Queen Anne with characteristic pride of race that she inherited from both noble families from which she was descended: although in principle she saw herself as far more Bourbon than Montpensier, referring to her mother's mother dismissively as ‘my distant grandmother: she was not a queen’.18 Madame de Motteville loyally remarked that the Grande Mademoiselle's pink and white complexion had not faded, but it was hardly surprising that Charles Emmanuel did not leap at the opportunity. Later he married her pretty little half-sister Françoise-Madeleine d'Orléans.
Poor Marguerite-Yolande! Far from being the future Queen of France, she was the present victim of the Cardinal's machinations. He bestowed a present of diamond and black enamel earrings upon her. This was intended as a consolation for the fact that all the time tectonic plates were moving beneath the surface of dynastic Europe, which would not be to her advantage. As the Savoyard match looked ready for conclusion, King Philip IV of Spain acted in dramatic fashion.
‘That cannot and will not be,' he said angrily to his courtiers. The Cardinal had won his game of bluff: the Spanish King refused to contemplate the prospect of a Franco-Savoyard block of territory so hostile to his own interests. Within a remarkably short time, given the bitterness and length of the military dispute between the two countries, an envoy, the Marquis de Pimentel, was sent offering the hand of the Infanta. As for Marguerite-Yolande, some care was taken to gloss over the fact that she had been rejected, since a seventeenth-century princess had a certain market value which was not enhanced by this kind of incident. The fiction was maintained that Savoy not France had ended the marriage negotiations.
There was universal relief in France at the prospect of peace, even though the negotiations for the marriage between King and Infanta which would bring closure to the past were protracted. As one Frenchman wrote of the possible union with Maria Teresa to a friend on 1 January 1659: ‘Everyone who is a good Frenchman wants this very much. That will put an end to the war and she will be the Queen of Peace.'19 These popular feelings were matched by a spirit of hectic gaiety at the court which was on a less statesmanlike level. Anne of Austria's own relief at the ending of the Savoyard negotiations and her hopes for future ones with Spain were marred by her disgust at her son's behaviour. Much later Marie Mancini gave a nostalgic account of the revels which ensued: every lovely lady had her cavalier and every gallant cavalier his lady: ‘we were all easily persuaded that love was the only thing that mattered, which was the spirit of these festivities.’20 So in various allegorical ballets Marie played the character of Venus, a Summer Star, a Fairy, a Goddess and even on one occasion ‘my Queen', as Louis murmured in her ear.
One incident left a special impression on all the courtiers who witnessed it. ‘His Majesty wishing to give me his hand,' wrote Marie later, ‘and mine having struck against the pummel of his sword, hurting it slightly, he drew the sword briskly from the sheath and threw it away.' She added: ‘I will not try to tell with what an air he did this; there are no words to explain it.’21
Was Louis XIV still dallying with the unthinkable: marrying for love a girl from a modestly noble Italian family, who owed her social prominence entirely to the fact of being the niece of the King's unpopular adviser? At one point Mazarin told Anne that Marie was boasting that her hold was so great she could actually force the King to marry her. At this, Anne of Austria positively screeched at the Cardinal: if the King was capable of such a ‘despicable' action, all France would rise up against the Cardinal and I would head the rebels’.22 But was he capable of it? The answer seems to be the proverbially indecisive yes and no.
On the one hand the Queen's agitation is only explicable in terms of Marie Mancini's demonstrable power over Louis, that Armide-like enchantment she was said to have exercised. On the other hand Louis always knew in his heart of hearts that his mother and the Cardinal were there to rescue him. Voltaire put the situation eloquently in his history written in the following century: Louis XIV ‘loved [Marie] enough to marry her and was sufficiently master of himself to separate himself from her’.23 This however was with the benefit of hindsight, full knowledge of the famously self-controlled man Louis would become. But perhaps it was not so much Louis's mastery over himself at this point, as Anne and Mazarin's mastery over him, the training in duty which he could not and finally did not want to cast aside.
The spring and summer were spent by Mazarin in peace negotiations, accompanied by parallel discussions for the hand of the Infanta. Certainly the Cardinal, in failing health, tortured by gout, saw the ‘Peace of the Infanta' as his ultimate gift to his adoptive country. Anything less advantageous either to his own reputation or France's future than marriage with his niece was hard to imagine. It was a crude, cruel truth: great kings simply did not marry girls like Marie Mancini, however bold, however amusing. They made them their mistresses.
Still Louis rejected this alternative – which was probably not on offer anyway – and spent the summer racked by tears, by hopes and by his mother's reminder of his obligations. The two vital scenes which put an end to the crisis both had their symbolic element. Anne of Austria, taking a flambeau, conducted Louis into her Appartement des Bains, her intimate chamber of relaxation to which the King as a little boy had run so eagerly and where he had romped so happily. (The Appartement had a secondary purpose, as a private retreat; for example, it was there that Anne received Don Juan José, the illegitimate son of her brother Philip IV, on an unofficial visit to France.) Mother and son spent an hour alone together. Later Queen Anne, confiding in Madame de Motteville, gave vent to that classic parental prophecy: ‘One day Louis will thank me for the harm I have done him.’24
As for Marie Mancini, her final desolate words when she realised the romantic game of love was over – that the empire of love was indeed a cruel one, in the words of Alcidiane – were simple: ‘You love me, you are the King and I go.' They were later to be adapted by Racine in his play Bérénice. The Emperor Titus referred sadly to the ‘inexorable’ need for glory which pursued him and was ‘incompatible' with his marriage to the foreign Queen. As Bérénice understood that her tearful royal lover was dismissing her, she exclaimed sadly: ‘Vous êtes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez.’ (‘You are the Emperor, Sire, and yet you weep.')
Louis's own view was perhaps best expressed by the celebrated aphorist of the period, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who declared ‘the greatest admiration for noble passions, for they denote greatness of soul … they cannot rightly be Condémned'. Louis had exhibited what he saw as his greatness of soul in his noble passion and did not think he should be Condémned. Now he moved on. The Comtesse de La Fayette wrote that having broken with the spellbinding Marie, for ever after Louis remained master both of himself and his love.25
Marie's last interview with the King at which these sad words were spoken took place on 13 August 1659. She was dismissed with the wonderful pearls of Queen Henrietta Maria which Louis got Mazarin to purchase from the poverty-stricken widow – surely an unlucky gift. More endearingly Louis gave Marie a spaniel puppy bred from Queen Anne's favourite Friponne with ‘I belong to Marie Mancini' engraved on its silver collar. Marie went to the country and awaited what marriage her uncle would now provide for her. The eventual choice, an extremely grand Italian, Prince Colonna (proud Marie did not wish to linger as damaged goods at the French court), was surprised to find his wife a virgin. As the Prince said, he did not expect to find ‘innocence among the loves of kings'.
*
The Treaty of the Pyrenees between France and Spain was signed on 7 November 1659. By it, France gained territories such as Gravelines, most of Artois, part of Hainault and some places south of Luxembourg as well as Roussillon including Perpignan. Just as important was the state of peace between the two countries, and the opportunity for recovery from the inevitable depredations of war on both sides of the Pyrenees. The Grand Condé returned to the French court in January 1660, doing homage at Aix while Queen Anne and King Louis were making a southern tour. Once again, as with the Grande Mademoiselle, Louis showed himself master of the graceful words of reconciliation which promised forgiveness and even forgetfulness. Another relic of past troubles, Louis's uncle Gaston, died in February. This allowed Monsieur to assume the Orléans dukedom, traditional title of the second Bourbon son as well as its wealthy apanages or territories. As ‘Monsieur' he was already the first man in France after the King; just as any future wife would be known simply as ‘Madame', in its very simplicity the most honorific female appellation of all, barring that of the Queen.
In the course of this tour Anne and Louis visited the shrine at Cotignac to which his mother attributed the ‘gift from heaven' of his conception – and his male gender. Together mother and son knelt for a long time in silent prayer in the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Grâces before placing a blue ribbon of the Saint Ésprit at the foot of the statue of the Virgin. Queen Anne also paid for six masses to be said in perpetuity. Then they passed through Carcés on their way back to Brignoles.*
Meanwhile many positive reports were being disseminated by the Cardinal about the character of the Infanta Maria Teresa. She was after all a major part of the deal, as the Cardinal's dialogue with Queen Anne demonstrated:
‘Good news, Madame!'
‘What! Is there to be peace?'
‘There is more than that, Madame. I bring Your Majesty peace and the Infanta.’26
The girl's childish attachment to the idea of her cousin was stressed, and how that youthful hero-worship had ripened into something more tender with the years. Here was a young woman who blushed at her cousin's portrait, and the allusions of her ladies-in-waiting, half joking, half prurient, to her possible future with him. The fact that Louis had shown an early predilection for an intelligent, spirited woman, not a great beauty but one who understood the new art of agreeable conversation, was quite forgotten. But it provided a valuable clue for his behaviour in the future: this was a man who needed, no, expected to be amused. Infantas, after all, did not amuse people: that was not their role, and certainly not this sweet-natured, secluded girl who had been brought up according to the ruthless etiquette of the prison-like Spanish court. The restrictions placed upon her can be deduced from an anecdote told about the Infanta some years later. When a nun asked her if she hadn't wished to please the young men at her father's court, the former Infanta replied: ‘Oh no, Mother! For there was no king among them.’27
In family terms it had been more of a desert than a prison. Her mother Elisabeth de France died when Maria Teresa was six, her only brother Don Balthasar Carlos when she was eight. After that Maria Teresa was heiress presumptive to the Spanish throne (it will be remembered that females could inherit it) until the birth of a half-brother Philip Prosper from her father's second marriage in 1657; there was also a half-sister Margarita Teresa born in 1651, famously painted as a little girl by Velázquez. Unfortunately this second marriage to Philip IV's own niece, Marianna of Austria, did not offer Maria Teresa the harmony for which her affectionate nature craved. Many stepmothers at this time of high maternal mortality stepped easily into the real mother's place and provided loving support for the existing family. The new Queen, only a few years older than Maria Teresa herself, was lazy and rather greedy: she was also resentful of her stepdaughter's position and her father's tender feelings for her.28
Under the circumstances, it was touching how the young Infanta, in her formal interviews with the French plenipotentiary, emphasised her respect for her future mother-in-law Queen Anne. ‘How is the Queen my aunt?' was the first thing Maria Teresa asked the Duc de Gramont in Madrid. This was the message she wished to send: ‘Tell my aunt that I will always be obedient to her will.'
Maria Teresa's references to Louis XIV were a great deal more formal. The young couple had already been allowed to exchange portraits, and Louis was now permitted to write to Maria Teresa. Addressed ‘To the Queen', Louis's letter began: ‘It was not without constraint that I yielded up till now to the arguments which prevented me from expressing to Your Majesty the sentiments of my heart.' Now that matters had fortunately changed, ‘I am delighted to begin to reassure her by these lines that happiness could not arrive at anyone who more passionately wishes for it… nor anyone feel themselves happier in possessing it.’29
The sheer rigidity of the Spanish court may be judged by the fact that Philip IV pronounced it ‘too soon' for this respectful if stilted letter to be delivered. A coy interview between the Infanta and Louis's emissary, the Bishop of Fréjus, resulted in the latter whispering in her ear that he had a secret to tell her. And he displayed the banned letter which had been hidden in his hand. Maria Teresa made no attempt to establish its contents (as many young women, including princesses, might have done) but merely repeated that her father had forbidden her to receive it. The most she allowed herself to say was that the King her father had assured her that everything would soon be arranged.
Yet with Marie Mancini gone from his side, no longer whispering sweet and malicious nothings in his ear, unable to denigrate the Infanta, Louis seems to have adopted the idea of his marriage with some enthusiasm. With that sense of his own grandeur inculcated since birth, he was glad to be marrying a great princess. The fact that Maria Teresa was said to have long been in love with him (and France) was also very much in her favour. In getting married, a state of which he officially declared himself in urgent need, Louis was also abandoning sin. On the contrary, he was happily adhering to the rules of the Church which wanted young people of suitable degree to get married and procreate children: exactly what Mazarin and Anne wanted him to do. In terms of Church teaching, he was getting peace for his conscience, peace and the Infanta.
According to the custom for European royals, there were to be two marriages. A proxy marriage, at which a Spanish dignitary Don Luis de Haro played the part of the bridegroom, took place at Fuenterrabia inside the borders of Spain on 3 June 1660: the venue was a simple church, although distinction was lent to it by the fact that the décor, including specially imported tapestries, was arranged by the ageing Spanish court painter Velázquez. The King of Spain, giving away his daughter, was pale and dignified in the sombre colours – grey and silver – favoured by the Spanish court. The most remarkable thing about the bride's appearance, as she was transformed from the Infanta Maria Teresa into Queen Marie-Thérèse,* was her bizarre (by French standards) bouffant hairstyle. Many jewels and a mass of false hair, topped by a further disfiguring ‘sort of white hat', completely extinguished one of her great advantages, which was her marvellously thick blonde hair. The description was that of the Grande Mademoiselle, who chose to attend the proxy wedding incognito and left a satisfyingly malicious account of it.30
Apart from her hair, Marie-Thérèse had another much-praised beauty of the period, translucent white skin, the protected white skin of a supreme aristocrat on which no ray of common sun would fall. Her forehead was rather too high and her mouth rather too big. However, her protruding ‘Habsburg' lower lip, a trait believed to be inherited from the great heiress Margaret of Burgundy which would plague the Habsburg family for generations, was not considered a disadvantage at the time; more of a badge of royal descent. Her eyes, if not large, were of a particularly brilliant sapphire blue. But although charitable observers did discern in Marie-Thérèse a resemblance to Queen Anne, still beautiful on the verge of her sixtieth birthday, the fact was that this new Spanish bride lacked that preeminent quality of her predecessor which struck everyone, friend or foe: her queenly dignity.
Marie-Thérèse, like Anne, tended to plumpness, but being much shorter than her aunt, she appeared dumpy. The enormous wide skirts she wore, extended by padded and boned petticoats called farthingales but described by a Frenchwoman as ‘monstrousmachines', did not help matters. Just as she had not been taught French – a shockingly insensitive omission for an innately shy and bewildered girl – she had not been brought up to understand the importance of dance, an increasingly vital element of the French court, given the King's passion for it. (And incidentally one of the few public occasions when men and women could act in conjunction.) Marie-Thérèse was not badly educated, but it was teaching which had never encouraged any true interest in the arts that her future husband was beginning to love. With her jewels, her false hair and her huge touch-me-not skirts, Marie-Thérèse was a hieratic figure; but she was neither a graceful nor an alluring one.
By the time of her proxy marriage, Marie-Thérèse as future Queen of France had already renounced her rights to the Spanish throne in a document which took one and a half hours to read. Among those present, some certainly took note of one particular clause in the marriage treaty demanded by the French: if the Infanta's dowry of 500,000 écus d'or was not paid by Spain, these rights of succession would revert to her … But few would have predicted the ominous long-term consequences of this apparently not-unreasonable provision.
In early May the royal party of France had set out southwards for the second, ‘real' marriage scheduled to take place at St Jean-de-Luz, near Bordeaux, on 9 June.* A visit paid along the way pointed respectively to the future and the past. A courtesy call was paid to the château of Blois, where the King was much admired by his three young cousins, the beautiful Marguerite-Louise and her younger sisters Elisabeth and Françoise-Madeleine. One of their attendants, a fourteen-year-old girl called Louise de La Vallière, also gazed in awe at the man she had been brought up since childhood to regard as close to a god, and whose portrait dominated the salon of her family's home. But while the Orléans girls were encouraged to accompany their cousin onwards, the awe-struck Louise remained at Blois.
By now Queen Anne was in a state of great happiness: she was on the verge of a triumph for which she had hoped and prayed for so long. She had written a letter to Maria Teresa in March (the lnfanta was allowed to receive this one) which began with the salutation: ‘Madame, my daughter and my niece' and went on ‘Your Majesty can easily believe the satisfaction and the joy with which I write to her, giving her the name [i.e. daughter] which I have desired to give her all my life.’31 Like Simeon in the temple, Queen Anne saw herself as departing in peace from the duties of the Queen of France she had carried out for so long, in favour of her hand-picked successor.
The first sighting that the young couple had of each other demonstrated that Louis XIV had not forgotten every lesson of romantic courtship inculcated in him by Marie Mancini (herself still languishing in France at this point, waiting for her Italian marriage to be finalised). The sighting came about as the result of the formal – extremely formal – meeting at Fuenterrabia on 4 June between brother and sister, King Philip and Queen Anne. They had not seen each other for forty-four years, during which time their respective countries had for a long period been at war.
It was another testimony to Spanish rigidity that King Philip merely inclined his head, instead of giving the embrace that Queen Anne, with her stiff Spanish years long behind her, might have expected, although both of them had tears in their eyes. When it came to the question of the war, however, King Philip provided a satisfactory, even theological explanation: ‘It was the devil that did that,’ he pronounced in Spanish.32 From this position, however, the brother and sister (who had themselves married a sister and a brother) moved happily on to a discussion, also in their native Spanish, of the future which was a great deal more relaxed.
‘At this rate,' said Philip, ‘we shall soon have grandchildren.'
‘Yes indeed,' replied the Queen. ‘But I want a son for my son more than I want a bride for my nephew.' She referred to Philip IV's son and heir by his second marriage, Philip Prosper, now three. It was all quite jocular, and there was even badinage on the subject of patriotism.
‘I am sure Your Majesty will pardon me for being such a good Frenchwoman,' remarked Anne, referring to the recent war. ‘I owed it to the King my son and to France.' To which Philip replied that the Queen, his late French wife, had been just the same in reverse: ‘only wanting to please me'.
In the meantime Louis had been given permission to ride past the windows of the great chamber where all this was taking place, so that bride and groom could inspect each other: at a distance and in silence. Instead Louis sent a message to Mazarin that he was coming to the door of the conference chamber in the guise of ‘an unknown man'. Queen Anne readily agreed to this apparition, but once again King Philip intervened heavily: Marie-Thérèse was not even to acknowledge the unknown's salute. ‘Not until she has passed through that door.' The mischievous Monsieur did however secure the admission from a nervously smiling Marie-Thérèse that ‘the door looks to me very fine and very good'.
Nevertheless the pseudo-encounter was a success. Louis declared that Marie-Thérèse would be ‘easy to love' and Philip pronounced him a fine-looking son-in-law. As for Marie-Thérèse, in public she contemplated life in another country with ‘the door' in silence; but in private she admitted: ‘He is certainly very handsome …'
For all that, Marie-Thérèse departed from Spain on 7 June in floods of tears, moaning to her chief lady the Duchess of Molina: ‘My father, my father …' Like Philip, the newly designated Marie-Thérèse knew that they were unlikely to meet again in their lifetime. It was not customary for foreign princesses to revisit the land of their birth: emotional ties were supposed to be severed. Marie-Thérèse's return to Spain would only be in exceptional circumstances, such as the failure and annulment of her marriage.
Two days later, the ‘real' or French marriage took place in the little thirteenth-century church of St Jean-de-Luz which had recently been rebuilt. So august was the event felt to be, that the main portal through which the bridal pair passed was blocked up afterwards.* Marie-Thérèse, already technically Queen of France, wore a gown covered in the royal fleur-de-lys; her uncovered hair proved so thick that it was difficult to attach a crown to it. Her train was carried by two of the younger Orléans princesses. Louis looked both dashing and dignified in black velvet, richly jewelled. Having played his part with the aplomb demanded by custom and his own growing feeling for royally appropriate behaviour, Louis was now keen to cut, as one might say, to the chase: consummation of a royal marriage was quite as important a part of the ceremony, if not the most important, as the religious rites and the courtiers' agreements.
Immediately after dinner, he suggested retirement. Marie-Thérèse gave vent to a few maidenly demurs – it was too soon – but on being told that the King was waiting for her, changed her tune and begged her ladies – ‘Hurry, hurry!' – to speed up the elaborate rituals, dressings and undressings thought necessary for a Queen to meet a King for the first time in bed. Appropriately enough, it would be Louis's mother who closed the bed-curtains on bride and groom before departing.33
The wedding night was a success, unlike most royal wedding nights throughout history. The marriage so ardently desired by Anne of Austria for over twenty-one years looked set fair to fulfil all her hopes.
* The name Précieuses was first used for these preternaturally clever women in 1654, not in denigration but descriptively. It should not therefore at this date be identified with the English word ‘precious' or affected. Molière's play of that name which poked fun at young women with highfaluting ideas about their own accomplishments (not women's education as such) dates from 1659. Its success had the effect of changing the meaning of the word to something humorously critical.
* A visit still commemorated in a vivid fresco of the royal party opposite the Mairie. Apart from King, Queen and Cardinal, it shows a musketeer – perhaps d'Artagnan – and two Mazarinettes, presumably not including Marie.
* By which name she will be designated in future.
* At roughly this date, Charles II was Duc to be restored to the throne of England on his thirtieth birthday (29 May by English reckoning, which lagged ten days behind that of the Continent in the seventeenth century). Unlike 1648, 1660 was a good year for kings.
* And remains blocked up to this day, with a plaque stating the reason.