CHAPTER 4
Our court rediscovers its laughing face.
– La Fontaine, ‘Ode to Madame' (Henriette-Anne)
On 26 August 1660 the King and the new Queen paraded through the streets of Paris in the traditional ceremony of the Royal Entry. It was a magnificent display of panoply and power, both spiritual and temporal. That is to say, it was the Church which led the procession: priests and monks brandished crosses and chanted the litanies of the saints, before the soldiers and courtiers followed. Marie-Thérèse was borne along in a chariot drawn by six grey horses, her person draped in gold, so richly embroidered, every inch of the cloth covered in precious jewels, that she dazzled the eye. Since the Queen would have no separate coronation – it was considered unlucky because Henri IV had been assassinated immediately after the coronation of Marie de Médicis – this was her introduction to her husband's subjects. Marie-Thérèse smiled graciously, acknowledging the cheers. The handsome figure of Louis, riding on a spirited bay horse whose harness also sparkled with jewels, left a deep impression on the multitudes who witnessed the parade.
Amongst these, watching from a balcony, was the twenty-five-year-old Françoise d'Aubigné, wife of the playwright Paul Scarron. ‘I don't think there could be a finer sight in the world,' she wrote the next day. ‘And the Queen must go to bed tonight well content with the husband she has chosen.’1 Her last remark may have been an unconscious reflection on her own very different marriage to the invalid playwright (who would die six weeks later). But it was also an allusion to Louis as the symbolic bridegroom of France,marrying a bride from Spain who brought ‘peace as her dowry': an allegorical arch at the beginning of the Pont Notre-Dame, one of many such, had as its theme the conquest of Mars, the God of War, by Conjugal Love. Another young woman, Louise de La Vallière, still in attendance on the Orléans princesses, gazed in silent rapture at her hero.
If Conjugal Love had not exactly conquered the God of War for ever – as Louis's subsequent history would amply demonstrate – it was certainly holding sway in the first months of his marriage. The wedding had been followed by a leisurely two and a half months' progress from the south. During this time and in the seasons to come, Louis paid assiduous court to his young wife, as indeed he continued to do in his own fashion for the rest of her life. In the previous century, the celebrated ancestor of Louis and Marie-Thérèse, the Emperor Charles V, had seriously advised his son Philip II to ‘keep a watch' on himself and not indulge too much in ‘the pleasures of marriage' lest he damage his health. This was not the advice which was tendered to Louis XIV, nor would it have been welcome to his bride. There is a story that Marie-Thérèse used the opportunity of the wedding night to make the King swear never to abandon her but to sleep every night at her side.2 While it would be surprising if the former Infanta had at this point sufficient worldly knowledge to extract such a brilliantly aimed promise, it is true that the King did end up almost every night – including some very late ones as time went on – in his wife's bed. In the morning he would depart for his own official lever or dressing ceremony, leaving Marie-Thérèse to that longer, lazier Spanish sleep so beloved of Queen Anne. When love-making took place, Marie-Thérèse made it clear that she was ‘well content with the husband she had chosen', in Françoise Scarron's phrase: blushing, rubbing her little white hands together, and accepting teasing the next morning. She would also ritually take communion to indicate a royal conjunction the night before, with prayers that the result might be a child in nine months' time.
The marriage therefore did not go wrong in the bedroom. And at first Louis basked in the general approval for his course of virtue, headed by that of his mother and the Church. As Madame de Motteville, observer of all this, noted: he enjoyed ‘the legitimatepassion that his wife felt for him.3 (The passion that Marie Mancini had felt for him was not ‘legitimate', nor was the adolescent rebellion connected to it.) A few years after his marriage, Louis, drawing up instructions for his baby son for the future, told him to ask of God ‘a princess who was agreeable to him’.4* In this sense at least, God or Louis's advisers had certainly succeeded. The trouble was that Marie-Thérèse was dull. Uninterested in the arts, she formed a little Spanish-speaking Castilian world of her own, with her pet dogs and her equally pet dwarves, the traditional companions of a Spanish infanta as seen in Velázquez's portraits. Her one enthusiasm, for gambling, although a frequent pastime at all courts – both Anne and Mazarin gambled – could hardly be called inspiring.
In time she would display a possessive and jealous streak, so perhaps that wedding-night demand was actually true, but Louis XIV was perfectly capable of interpreting such jealousy as flattering to his ego. It was Marie-Thérèse's innate reluctance to accept the public role of Queen of France in its fullest implications which weakened her in her husband's eyes. (It is ironic that she would actually have made a very good Queen of Spain.) Louis XIV did not as yet know quite what he did want in his first lady – some kind of star to reflect the light of his radiant sun – but the instinct to explore the situation was there.
As it was, the person whose highest hopes were actually fulfilled was Anne of Austria. Just as Marie-Thérèse found the mother to whom she was determined to submit, so Anne found her royal ‘daughter', that name she had desired to give Marie-Thérèse all her life, as she wrote in March. Both immensely devout, the two Queens had an excellent time visiting convents, praying together and taking part in other religious practices. There was, it turned out, no question of Anne's Simeon-like retirement. They formed a kind of pious unit, speaking to each other entirely in Spanish (as a result of which, Marie-Thérèse's French never really improved, so that it was fortunate that the King could speak some Spanish). All of this could of course have been far worse. The Queen duly fell pregnant in early 1661, thus fulfilling what many, if not Louis XIV, might have thought was her only function. The pregnancy however left her young and active husband with a lot of energy to spare.
Providentially, as it seemed at the time, royal protocol was about to furnish him with a playmate. Furthermore, she was one ideally equipped to act as the First Lady of the Court: although she was in fact only the third lady at the court in the lifetime of Queen Anne. This was Henriette-Anne, married off to her first cousin Monsieur in March 1661; one of those alliances, like the ending of a Shakespeare play, intended to solve the destinies of the remaining unattached characters in the drama. (One of the other major players, Marie Mancini, finally got married to Prince Colonna a few weeks later and departed for Rome: even here she was an instrument of her uncle's policy, for Marie by this time would have preferred Prince Charles of Lorraine, but it was not to be.)6 As the wife of the King's brother, Henriette-Anne was now styled by the proudly simple title of ‘Madame'.
At sixteen Henriette-Anne, Duchesse d'Orléans, rated the best dancer at the court, was a very different creature from the little waif of a princess once scorned by her cousin Louis. No one would scorn Madame now, not so much because they would not dare, but because no one would wish to. Everyone now was falling chivalrously in love with Henriette-Anne: she herself would say wryly of this period that even Monsieur had been in love with her for six weeks. The Comtesse de La Fayette commented that the court was amazed by the sparkle of the young woman who had once been a silent child in the corner of her aunt's room.7
Where her looks were concerned, youth certainly played some part in her allure: versifier Jean Loret, author of The Historic Muse, described her as ‘this springtime beauty'. Madame de Motteville waxed lyrical about the natural bloom of her ‘roses and jasmine' complexion, her perfect teeth, the sparkle of her eyes, dark like her mother's (her fair hair had darkened too).8 Henriette-Anne had grown tall, and her slender figure had filled out, her natural grace helping to conceal the fact that her back was slightly crooked. She was a wonderful rider as well as dancer, with a passion for swimming which was perhaps one of the few things she owed to her English heritage. Charles II, the elder brother she reverenced and had recently visited in England to mark her future marriage, was a fanatical swimmer. Somehow she never seemed to need sleep, going to bed late and waking her people at dawn, in contrast to the somnolent Marie-Thérèse.
Where her tastes were concerned, Henriette-Anne had a passionate love of gardening, something she shared with the King: appropriately graceful swans floated in the ornamental water of her gardens at the Palais-Royal. She had a fine picture collection, including a Van Dyck of her English family and a Correggio of the penitent Magdalen. Henriette-Anne also loved to act as a muse to writers. The young Racine (born the year after Louis XIV) dedicated his play Andromaque to her, complimenting her not only on her intelligence but on her benign influence where the arts were concerned. ‘The court regards you', he wrote, ‘as the arbiter of all that is delightful.’9
But Madame de Motteville pinpointed the real secret of the attraction which everyone (including, briefly, her homosexual husband) felt for Henriette-Anne: it was her charm, that ‘something about her which made one love her', a ‘certain languishing air' she adopted in conversation, in the words of Bussy-Rabutin, which convinced people she was asking for their love ‘whatever trivial thing she said'. In short, she had not been able to become a queen – as she and her mother had devoutly wished – but ‘to remedy this defect it was her wish to reign in the hearts of honest men; and to find her glory in the world by the charm and beauty of her spirit’.10 Protocol dictated that this self-styled Queen of Hearts should, in the absence of the real Queen, head every entertainment, indoors and outdoors, with her brother-in-law, the real King.
‘Our court / Rediscovers its laughing face / For while Mars flourished / Love languished …', wrote La Fontaine in his ‘Ode to Madame’.11 But before that rediscovery could be complete, the new mode of the governing of France had to be established in the spring of 1661. The health of Cardinal Mazarin had grown progressively worse and it was clear that he must be dying long before his actual death took place on 9 March 1661. (He was fifty-eight.) This meant that the King was granted an extended season in which to decide who would replace the great minister, he who had in effect controlled France ever since Louis could remember. Queen Anne, after weeping inconsolably, commissioned an enormous marble tomb for her loyal friend.* To the astonishment of Louis's advisers, he announced that there was to be no replacement for Cardinal Mazarin. In future he himself would preside over his own government.
It was a decision based, one imagines, on a long-held desire to be his own master, which only the prospect of Mazarin's decease fully revealed to him. Some people secretly believed this decision to be the King's latest caprice, to be rescinded shortly: a reading of his character which would prove to be totally wrong. Of course, Louis was assisted by his Council. Some of its members were according to convention senior aristocrats, or warriors, or a combination of the two. But Louis was also aided by highly intelligent ministers such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Here was a man in his early forties at the death of Mazarin, whose father had been a failed merchant but who had, by diligence and efficiency, worked his way up the French bureaucratic system. As the Cardinal's confidential man of affairs Colbert had already shown himself capable of trust in intimate matters such as the business of Marie Mancini (and he had a trustworthy wife too). Colbert's orderly mind meshed perfectly with that of the King. His dual ambition was to advance himself and sort out the finances of France, bedevilled like those of any country involved in prolonged warfare. Then there was the Intendant of Finance, a man who had perhaps expected to replace Mazarin: the intelligent, powerful – and powerfully corrupt – Nicolas Fouquet. It remained to be seen what surprise the King, who had already surprised everyone with one decision, had in store for him.
The power of the King of France at this date was in theory absolute but in practice it was not absolutely unlimited. The Estates-General, composed of the three classes of society, noble, religious and commoners, had not met since 1614 (and would not meet, incidentally, until the summer of 1789). But the various parlements in the provinces led by the Parlement de Paris in the capital were certainly not without the power of protest over matters such as taxation, as the latter's behaviour at the time of the Fronde had demonstrated. The lessons of the Fronde and its suppression, the dangers of a turbulent aristocracy, could not fail to be fresh in everyone's minds including that of the King, whose boyhood had been branded by it. Sensibly or insensibly, the Sun King set out to make it clear that outside the hedonistic warmth of the rays he spread at court lay coldness, impoverishment – and personal failure.
Yet the kind of kingship he now proceeded to display was as much marked by his industry as by his hedonism. Where the industry was concerned, ‘all admired the extraordinary change' according to the Chevalier de Gramont and there was general surprise at ‘the brilliant emergence of talents' which the King had kept hidden. Certainly, it would be very far from the truth to see in Louis XIV the type of amused indolence which characterised his first cousin Charles II, now safely established across the Channel. Charles yawned and wrote notes in council meetings and wondered when it would be time for him to go hunting. Louis did not yawn and write notes, and as to hunting, in a fanatically well-organised day, that too had its place, but never to the detriment of his long hours of work. Not only was Louis hard-working as such, but he showed an obsessive interest and command of detail. This extended not only to military orders and decisions but to matters of architecture and decoration, down to the smallest points. For example, he criticised the figures on the royal fans and had them altered – this baton should be held higher, too many dwarves on one (a dig at Marie-Thérèse?), too many dogs on another (Louis adored dogs, so this was purely a design flaw).12 In his relentless industry, a lifelong pursuit, Louis XIV resembled his work-obsessed ancestor Philip II of Spain.
On the other hand the austere Spanish King surely never enjoyed a season like that first brilliant summer of the King's personal rule. They had all known hard times, even Marie-Thérèse with her sad childhood. Now they were free. And everyone was so young. Louis and the pregnant Marie-Thérèse were both twenty-two; Monsieur was twenty; Henriette-Anne's seventeenth birthday was in June. The ladies-in-waiting to Madame such as Louise de La Vallière, who had managed to join her service, were very young too, a fact reflected in the nickname given to these female attendants: ‘the flower garden'. There were picnics. There were moonlight expeditions. Ballet as ever was the centre of graceful amusement. On one particular occasion at Fontainebleau, there was a Court Ballet in which the chief dancers were the King, Henriette-Anne and ‘the handsomest man at court', the Comte de Guiche (although much fancied by Monsieur, the Comte had declared himself in theatrical fashion in love with Madame: not welcome news to one of Monsieur's jealous temperament). A mechanical way was found to move the stage slowly from one sylvan alley to another so that ‘an infinity of persons' approached imperceptibly in an endless dance, as it were, to the music of time.13
There is one unforgettable image which emerges from that celestial season that comprised – time would show – the happiest hours Henriette-Anne would ever know. Madame had gone swimming with her ladies, as she did every day in midsummer, travelling by coach on account of the heat. But she returned on horseback, followed by her ladies ‘in gallant attire, a thousand feathers nodding on their heads', accompanied by the King ‘and all the youth of the court'. Then there was a supper and to the sound of violins, they drove in carriages round the canals for the greater part of the night.14 The only prominent person in all this who was not young was the now-dowager Queen Anne. Increasingly she was alienated from the joyous revelry, and it was at this point that the advanced age at which she had borne her sons began to tell: for she would be sixty in October.
If Henriette-Anne really was the Queen of Hearts, her ambition, it seemed to royal-watchers at court – and who was not permanently gazing at the King? – that one heart she had captured was that of her brother-in-law. There can be no question that at some point in that summer Louis and Henriette-Anne fell gently, happily in love, perhaps not even understanding what had happened to them for a while. Each incarnated the other's ideal. As Marie-Thérèse would have made a good Queen of Spain, Henriette-Anne, gracious and cultivated, would certainly have made a wonderful Queen of France. The private life of Louis XIV might indeed have read very differently if, by some diplomatic twist and chance, the Infanta had not actually been available. Anne of Austria would have promoted her other niece instead, and given the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, might well have succeeded. This is not to postulate improbable lifelong fidelity on the part of Louis XIV. Nevertheless the respect he subsequently felt for his intelligent sister-in-law, and the true, deep affection he always bore her – a letter from him years later attests to it* – reveals the best of his attitudes to the female sex. And she was a princess. Somewhere an opportunity was missed.
At the time the romance flourished by day and by night – or at any rate much of the night. Much of it took place at Fontainebleau: this had been the favourite residence of François I, who had transformed it into a Renaissance palace in the sixteenth century. Now, with its extensive park and magic forest close by – a Desert, noble and beautiful', Loret called it – Fontainebleau seemed made for private pleasure. The court stayed there from April to December 1661 (it would prove the longest sojourn of the entire reign).16
Louis, for all his marital complacency, had by no means lost that romantic streak which had been so fatally aroused by Marie Mancini. Henriette-Anne's marriage to Monsieur, following those halcyon few weeks when she had enjoyed his passion, had settled into a series of little jealous games on the subject of their mutual admirers. Monsieur, anxious to provide himself with a son and heir for the new house of Orléans, was at least assiduous in his marital duties. So that was not the issue. The problem was: who – even his wife – could concentrate on Monsieur when there was an opportunity of enjoying the chivalrous admiration of his elder brother …?
The romance was however short-lived. And it remains open to question whether that short period encompassed a full-blown love affair. One recent writer on the subject has asked: what on earth would have stopped them?17 That might be true of two modern celebrities, but the answer for a seventeenth-century monarch and his brother's wife was: a great deal. Significantly, the phrase ‘sister-in-law' did not exist: such relationships were considered straightforwardly incestuous. In the eyes of the Church, and thus in theeyes of both Louis and Henriette-Anne by innate training, they were now brother and sister. One may suppose therefore that there were kisses and perhaps a little more, but not the full consummation which would have put both of them in an alarming state of mortal sin. Since a favoured method of birth control at this time was coitus interruptus, drawing back from the ultimate act was something which was understood.
The Comtesse de La Fayette who wrote down her memories of Henriette-Anne, and whose great novel The Princess of Cleves concerned a romantic, illegitimate (but unconsummated) love, analysed the relationship as follows. It had all been too easy for them, she wrote, two people born with gallant, that is to say flirtatious, temperaments, thrown together every day in the midst of pleasures and entertainments. Louis and his sister-in-law were ‘on the point of falling in love if not further'. Yet there was an innocence about it all, certainly on her behalf. Henriette-Anne believed that she only wanted to please Louis as a sister-in-law, but ‘I think she was also attracted to him in another way. Similarly she thought he only appealed to her as a brother-in-law although he actually attracted her as something rather more.’18
The end of the affair came with a twist which would have recommended itself to Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, that ‘excellent comic poet' and playwright known as Molière. He enjoyed his first great success with Les Précieuses ridicules in November 1659 when he was in his late thirties (in 1663 he would receive a pension of a thousand louis from the King). It was of course the appalled reaction of Anne of Austria which precipitated the drama: how could she not be shocked by conduct which struck at the very heart of her religion – and her family?
Using Madame de Motteville as her intermediary, Queen Anne began by warning her niece-cum-daughter-in-law of the dangers of her misplaced conduct, those night-time expeditions ‘against propriety and health' and so forth. Henriette-Anne promised to improve, but in true comedic fashion actually wove a plot with Louis by which they could continue their flirtation in secret. ‘Her natural sentiments were against prudence,' commented the lady-in-waiting sadly. The stratagem was for the King to feign admiration for one of the young ladies in Henriette-Anne's ‘flower garden' and under this pretence come calling as often as he pleased. It can hardly be a surprise that in the true manner of such cheerful conspiracies, Louis actually fell for the girl who was supposed to be the cover.19
This was Louise de La Vallière. She was not the first candidate: that was Mademoiselle de Pons, who was recalled to Paris to look after her uncle Maréchal d'Albret, after which Louis turned his attentions to Mademoiselle de Chémérault before finally fixing on Louise. In the event she was considered particularly suitable because she had such an evident, touching crush on the King. What Saint-Simon was to denounce angrily a generation later as ‘the eager homage, the near-worship' felt ‘against all reason' for royalty was already experienced in the heart of this young girl.20 Perhaps it was the portrait of the King in her home in the Touraine which had ignited it, perhaps it was that visit the handsome young man paid to the château of Blois on his way to his marriage.
Observers were apt to scrutinise the texts of the Court Ballets as well as the Ballets themselves for pointers to the future. At the Ballet of the Seasons of 23 July 1661 Henriette-Anne danced the goddess Diana surrounded by nymphs. One of these was Louise. Her appropriate role was that of Spring; in the lines of the poet Benserade: ‘This beauty only just born … It is Spring with her flowers / Who promises a good year.’21 The Ballet was such a success that it was repeated five times in one month. Unknown for the next few weeks was the fact that Henriette-Anne had conceived her first child by Monsieur on or around the same date (Marie-Louise d'Orléans was born on 27 March 1662). Monsieur's jealousy and indignation at the behaviour of his wife and brother took the form – as his jealousy continued to do where Henriette-Anne was concerned – of relentless marital attention. Besides, he needed a son, or failing that a daughter, who in true Bourbon fashion would make an excellent royal marriage.
Louise-Françoise de La Baume Le Blanc de La Vallière was born on 6 August 1644: she was thus a few weeks younger than her mistress Madame and nearly six years younger than Louis. She came from a stoutly royalist family, minor nobility from the Touraine. Her father was a soldier who had been notably brave at the battle of Rocroi, fought a few days after Louis XIV's accession. Louise, with one brother two years older, enjoyed a happy if austere childhood at the little manor of La Vallière at Reugny, north-east of Vouvray, until her father's death when she was seven. Her mother then married again, the Marquis de Saint-Rémy. Perhaps the chant of the Carmelites next door to her childhood home made a permanent impression upon the sensibilities of Louise. She certainly showed all her life an ardently religious temperament and a seriousness on the subject which put to shame many of her contemporaries at the French court.
It may therefore seem surprising that she did not opt for a convent in youth (a decision which would have spared her on the one hand great personal torment and on the other hand the delights of the most glamorous lover in her known world). But this is to misunderstand the financial circumstances in which a girl entered a particular convent. She needed a dowry. It is true that the dowry for a nun – the bride of Christ – was by custom much less than that needed for a bride of a more humdrum human being; which is why in large families with many daughters, the eldest might be lucky enough to get a husband, the youngest lucky enough to enter an agreeable not-too-harshly-restricted convent. Looks were important: convents could be regarded as useful dustbins, remembering how Marie Mancini's mother had thought her plainness designated her for the convent, not marriage, although she was the middle sister. Personal preference did not as a whole come into it: the Duc and Duchesse de Noailles, who had nine daughters, were praised for being ‘so Christian and so tender' for allowing them the choice of the veil or not. The continual denunciations of the preachers against parents who shut unwilling children up in convents shows how common the practice was.22
But nunneries were not the only option. A seventeenth-century young woman of no fortune above the working class (whose females simply found work wherever they could) could also look for a richer household where she would serve in a genteel way. There she would be maintained; there, having formed the vital social connections, she might eventually find a husband.
In the case of Louise, her first entry, as has been noted, was into the household of the three younger Orléans princesses (Gaston's daughters) at Blois, who were roughly her own age. Sharing their lives, she was educated, and even more to the point, she was instructed in royal ways, learning for example that vital court art of dancing.23 And of course all the little princesses planned in a dreamy way, led by the eldest Marguerite-Louise, to marry their august cousin Louis XIV when they grew up.
Louise had a sweet, submissive character. She was eager to please, eager to obey, all this coupled with a natural modesty which was very much to the contemporary taste in a young woman entering society: the description ‘a violet hidden in the grass' was applied to her by Madame de Sévigné with approval.24 However, this hidden violet had from her country upbringing a tomboy side: she was a notably good rider, able to control a Barbary horse bareback with only a silken cord to guide it. A riding accident in youth had resulted in the fracture of her ankle and she walked with a slight limp, but this did not, it seems, affect her dancing or her riding. As we have seen with Marie Mancini, the ability to ride with skill and daring was an important aspect of the early loves of Louis XIV because it ensured a certain privacy (Henriette-Anne was another excellent equestrienne).
As for looks, nobody ever called Louise beautiful but everybody called her appealing: ‘the grace more beautiful than beauty', as the Abbé de Choisy wrote in his memoirs, quoting La Fontarne.25 Her evident vulnerability – here if ever was the innocent virginity which the preachers constantly emphasised as the ideal state of every young girl – was also part of the package. A local admirer, Jacques de Bragelongue, had been dismissed by Louise's mother as being too poor but there was no question of anything damaging in the relationship.* This innocence was something that attracted the Church and the seducer in equal measure, if for precisely the opposite reasons.
If Louise had a fault physically by contemporary standards, it was her lack of the properly lavish bosom. To conceal her flatchestedness she was wont to wear neckties with floppy bows acting as a kind of padding.* A childishly thin throat gave an air of defencelessness. On the other side of the coin she had very pale, almost silvery fair hair, huge blue eyes with what was generally held to be a melting regard, and a soft voice.
The King's assault on Louise's virtue was estimated to have lasted six weeks before she granted him what The Loves of Mademoiselle de La Vallière, an anonymous pamphlet, described euphemistically as ‘that ravishing grace for which the greatest men make vows and prayers’.26 At this point the King was not free from that perennial problem of illicit love-making: where to do it. Louise, as a mere maid-of-honour, lived with her colleagues under the watchful eye of a duenna, and the King's apartments were a kind of public concourse where people flocked, anxious to establish their rank by their presence close to the sovereign. The answer was the apartment of Louis's good friend the Comte de Saint-Aignan: like all the courtiers in favour, Saint-Aignan was granted an in-house room, in this case conveniently on the first floor (many of the courtiers slummed it in tiny attic rooms in order to preserve that precious proximity to the royal scene). Here Louise pleaded, according to the same pamphlet: ‘Have pity on my weakness!' And here the King, after an appropriate duration of siege, showed no pity.
Louise's initial resistance was not a charade. Her piety was genuine and in order to sacrifice her virginity she had somehow to convince herself – or be convinced – that sleeping with the King was a kind of holy duty. But of course this maidenly reluctance by no means discouraged her suitor, especially as he was well aware that his prey was madly in love with him ‘for himself’. A story comes down from the eighteenth century of a pastoral incident, where the appropriate author might be Marivaux rather than Molière. Louise sat in the shade of an arbour with some other ladies and confided to them on the subject of the King: ‘The crown adds nothing to the charm of his person; it even diminishes the danger [of falling for him]. He would be altogether too much for an impressionable heart to resist if he was not King.' Surprise! Louis himself was actually concealed behind the arbour with an equerry and heard everything.
But if the provenance of the story is uncertain, since Versailles figures in it (not yet reconstructed), it strikes exactly the right note for Louis's initial pursuit of the girl, her sense of danger coupled with her bashful admission that this particular king needed no crown to make him attractive to women. It was not a question of the aphrodisiac of power, but the aphrodisiac of his person: that was the message Louis had found so beguiling in Marie Mancini and once again in Louise. Bussy-Rabutin, impressed by Louise's passionate devotion, wrote that she would have loved the King just as much if their positions had been reversed, with her the Queen and he but an ordinary gentleman.27 True or not, Louis believed it to be true. And of course throughout the days, weeks of this pursuit (temporarily complicated as an amazed and indignant Henriette-Anne finally understood what was going on) Louise wept. Her tears of anxiety, tears of agonised indecision and finally tears of submission were also a satisfying part of this classic seduction.
One of the original aspects of Louise's character was her lack of materialism, or what many would have thought at the time was actually a lack of proper care for her own interests and those of her family and circle. But she had no circle and did not try to make one. In this she stood apart from virtually every other woman in Louis's life. This singularity, which sprang perhaps from her need to feel her motives for loving the King were pure and even in some way holy, was not at first appreciated by those around her. Fouquet, the Intendant of Finance, was already under threat as Colbert determinedly presented the King with copious evidence of his money-making at the state's expense. Fouquet, unaware of the trouble brewing, thought he had identified a subtle method of keeping in with the King by bribing Louise.
Louise was outraged and the King likewise, the latter believing wrongly that Fouquet had actually tried to make love to the girl whereas his aim had merely been to establish a useful line of communication to his master. None of this helped the future of the minister who chose to give a splendiferous feast on 17 August at his vast palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built for him by the architect Le Vau in the late 1650s.*
King and royal family attended. It was all aimed at honouring Fouquet's young master, with a sideshow of demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of a great man. But was it so wise to demonstrate wealth and magnificence in excess of that of the sovereign? In the era before the construction and official habitation of the palace of Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte was evidently more splendid than any of Louis's own residences. The week before the feast, Fouquet was told that Queen Anne had made the following comment on his lifestyle to which the Intendant of Finance should perhaps have paid more attention: ‘The King would like to be rich and does not appreciate those who are richer than he is, because they can set about undertakings which he cannot afford; in any case he is quite certain that the great wealth of such men has been stolen from him.’28
With ruthlessness – a new quality in the King's behaviour – and the secrecy taught to him by his boyhood, Louis attended the great feast with every sign of pleasure. Then in September Fouquet was arrested, charged with corruption and imprisoned (under harsh conditions) for life. It was true that this was only the public face of Fouquet's fall. There were private reasons to do with Mazarin's vast fortune and the dubious methods by which it had been acquired that Louis (who had inherited it) and Colbert (previously in Fouquet's employ) were anxious to mask. Yet it was symbolic that the King also confiscated, as it were, Fouquet's artistic imagination. The architect Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the incomparable garden-designer Le Nôtre, the team that had brought Vaux-le-Vicomte to Fouquet, were shortly to create Versailles for Louis XIV.
On 1 November, the propitious Catholic feast of All Saints, Queen Marie-Thérèse ‘by a happy deliverance' gave birth to a son, Louis de France, a Dauphin to whom his father gave the new title of ‘Monseigneur'. During the twelve-hour labour, Spanish actors and musicians danced a ballet beneath the royal windows, with harps but also guitars and castanets to remind Marie-Thérèse of her native land. It is to be hoped that these Spanish sounds diverted the poor Queen, who kept crying out in her native language: ‘I don't want to give birth, I want to die.’29 However, within a few months she had fallen pregnant again.
Five days after the birth of the Dauphin, Marie-Thérèse's stepmother also gave birth; the twinship of these two babies might have echoed the twin births of Louis and Marie-Thérèse if they had been of opposite sexes, and marriage would have been immediately envisaged as Queen Anne had foretold at Fuenterrabia. Instead Carlos became the new heir to the Spanish throne (his elder brother Philip Prosper had died), demoting both his half-sister Marie-Thérèse and his full sister Margarita Teresa in the line of succession. But for how long? From babyhood, it seemed evident to the doctors that the Infante Carlos was not destined for a long life. Although this turned out to be a singularly inaccurate prediction, the doctors' analysis of his frail condition, both mentally and physically, was on surer ground;* in particular his lack of proper development would raise questions about Carlos's ability to beget children. So the question of the future Spanish succession was already lurking. The Dauphin, a large and remarkably healthy baby, described by the enthusiastic versifier Loret as a living masterpiece’,30 was the nearest male heir, after the sickly Carlos – except of course that his mother had renounced her rights of succession.
Meanwhile Louis's undercover love affair with Louise de La Vallière flourished. In theory it had to be conducted in secret because of the sensibilities of the two Queens, the mother and the wife, although very little was ever secret at the French court. But a far more experienced and wily opponent to Louis's illicit amours was now about to engage him in battle, a contest that would last for the next twenty odd years with neither side conceding defeat or receiving total victory, although both had their triumphs. This was the Catholic Church.
The power of the Church in seventeenth-century France over the conscience of its followers, who were the vast majority of the population, was enormous and should not be underestimated even where an ‘absolute' King was concerned. The betrayed Marie-Thérèse, with the sensitivity of a woman in love, probably became aware of what was happening sooner than most people thought, despite difficulties of language and her grand isolation. In the autumn of 1662, on the eve of the birth of her second child, she made some public remarks in Spanish about ‘that girl, the woman the King loves' which indicated that for some time she had not been fooled. Ignorant of the art of intrigue, however, there was nothing much Marie-Thérèse could do about the situation, beyond bemoaning it to Queen Anne, particularly as the King's promised conjugal ardour did not diminish.
Queen Anne, an altogether more doughty operator, as witness her dismissal of Marie Mancini, had a different perspective. In a sense she had brought the La Vallière affair about by her horrified reaction to the over-close friendship with the King's ‘sister' Henriette-Anne. No one knew better than this majestic survivor that great men tended to have mistresses, even if her own husband's loves had been platonic. The Spanish kings, including her brother Philip IV, had had numerous entanglements, and as for the French! It was significant that the most popular king in French history was Louis's grandfather Henri IV, the role model of manliness and swagger, who had been a philanderer on a serious scale. But Queen Anne was not a cynic and she was sincerely pious. What worried her was the thought of Louis's immortal soul, the state of sin into which he had plunged himself. There was no resignation here, only a helpless sadness.
The Catholic Church however was not helpless. And Louis's religion, in which he had been so carefully trained by his mother, might be simple, as commentators sometimes pointed out, but it was sincere: and because it was simple it was not for that reason shallow. He understood, since it had been constantly reiterated to him, that kings had been put in charge of their peoples by God, but that kings were for this reason answerable to God. These feelings, incidentally, were in quite a different category from his attitude to the Church in France as an organisation, and its connection to the overall government of the Pope in Rome. His relationship with Louise was adulterous (that is to say, as a married man he was committing adultery while she of course was not).
It was the matter of an adulterer receiving Holy Communion that became the symbolic battlefield of this epic struggle, since the King publicly attended the Mass daily – in his entire life, he only missed attending daily Mass two or three times – and any falling away in receiving Communion drew public attention.31 The reason was not really very difficult for outsiders to perceive. Already Fouquet, in his unwise approaches to Louise, had noticed the royal ‘backslidings' where taking Communion was concerned and drawn the correct conclusion. This was a mini-scandal for those who cared to note it. But ahead of King Louis, as the year 1662 dawned, loomed an annual occasion which became central to the drama of his illicit affairs: the occasion when he made his Easter duties (faire ses Päques). By the rules of the Catholic Church, a professing Catholic had to make his or her confession at Easter or thereabouts, followed by Communion.* This was an extremely public event for a monarch, a testing time. What was more, notable prelates were invited to preach the Lenten sermons, not always as compliant to weakness as the private confessor.
Every king had his personal confessor, and the Jesuits, traditionally confessors to the kings of France, had a more relaxed approach to the subject of human frailty than some of the mighty monastic orders who did not. A quick confession and a firm promise of amendment, totally sincere at the time, could be followed by Absolution and Communion; the confessor would hope that a soft approach would bring the (moderately) penitent monarch to virtue by slow degrees.
The Jesuit Father François Annat, over seventy at the time of this first crisis of the King's marital life, had been Louis's confessor since he was sixteen, and as was his duty had nursed him through his various adolescent troubles. He practised discretion and detachment: the confessional was after all secret, and as Louis approvingly remarked later, he did not get mixed up in any intrigues. Father Annat was a great enemy of extremism in the Catholic Church, so-called ‘Jansenism’.33* He had written a work attacking the type of austere Catholic who thought that ‘those not chosen were predestined to damnation' – a doctrine of grace close to Calvinism – some twenty years earlier, Quibbles of the Jansenists. Saint-Simon later denounced Father Annat as a ‘supple Jesuit' responsible for tolerating much wrongdoing. It is difficult however to see how a less ‘supple' confessor would have survived so long at the King's side, with the aim all along of one day drawing in the long rein and bringing him back to the path of virtue.
The views of the great prelates were, on the other hand, a great deal less supple. What went on in private in the confessional, promises made and broken, did not concern them. What went on in public, to the edification or scandal of the entire nation, did. The celebrated series of Lenten sermons which led up each year to the great public feast of Easter with the absolute necessity of a public Communion from the monarch (if in a state of grace, that is) were very different from the private counsels of Father Annat. It was a crucial factor in the first phase of the affair of Louis and Louise that the Lenten sermons of 1662 were to be given by the rising orator and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet.
Aged thirty-five in 1662, Bossuet was a follower of St Vincent de Paul, whose attitude to the poor he much admired and promulgated in a series of sermons: ‘No, no, oh rich men of our time!' he once declaimed in the face of a large body of them. ‘It is not for you alone that God causes his sun to rise.' Queen Anne (herself an admirer of St Vincent de Paul) heard Bossuet preach with approval in 1657 and he was then made preacher-extraordinary to the King. In 1659 he delivered a sermon in Paris on ‘The outstanding dignity of the poor in the Church'. At his first court sermon he announced to the great ones before him that ‘honours' would not follow them into the next life. It will be obvious that in an age when flattery was the daily bread of court life, this man was not a flatterer. At the same time his lessons were delivered in such magnificent style that everyone flocked to hear them. Sainte-Beuve, in a happy image, would describe his style of oratory as ‘like the stops of a huge organ in a vast cathedral nave'. His solemn, handsome countenance only enhanced the impression Bossuet made.34
All this time, while the King made love and both Queens lamented, there was one person whose attitude to her religion was quite as literal as that of the two pious royal women. This was Louise de La Vallière herself. After a few months, she could hardly bear her sense of her own sinfulness, so painfully coupled with her abject devotion to the King. On top of it all, Louise, who was no court politician, had become unwittingly involved in an intrigue between Henriette-Anne and the dashing Comte de Guiche when details of it were confided to her by a fellow maid-of-honour, Françoise de Montalais.35 Louise incurred the temporary displeasure of Louis, who could not believe that his sweet little mistress had kept anything from him. All this acted further on a palpitatingly guilty conscience.
On 2 February Bossuet began preaching his series of Lenten sermons at the Louvre. On the one hand he commended Queen Anne, comparing her to Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. On the other hand he was soon ripping into the King's immoral behaviour, under the scarcely disguised figure of the biblical David who had in his early life been swayed by unlawful passion for another man's wife. (There was no perceived connection here with the ‘other' David, a soulful figure praising the Lord with his harp, of whom a portrait bought from the Mazarin estate hung in the King's own room.) Biblical imagery was and remained a convenient ruse for denouncing the all-powerful sovereign of the country: not only David but Solomon and Ahasuerus were royal wrongdoers who could be usetully cited.36
It was all too much for Louise. On 24 February she bolted from the court to the Convent of the Visitation at Chaillot.
* The Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin by Louis XIV, begun in 1661, went through several versions; although the King received considerable assistance, he always had an essential role in the publication, thus the sentiments are his.5
* It can still be seen today at the palace of the Institut de France, a magnificent monument, spared the depredations of the French Revolution because it was used as a grain store.
* The King wrote from Dijon in 1668: ‘If I didn't love you so much I wouldn't write because I have nothing to say to you after the news which I've already given to my brother.'15
* Alexandre Dumas, in the third novel of The Three Musketeers series published in the mid-nineteenth century, The Vicomte de Bragelonne (sic), builds on this story, before passing on to her subsequent fate in Louise de La Vallière.
* A laVallière is still noted in Larousse as a necktie with a large bow.
* Vaux-le-Vicomte remains to this day a magnificent monument to the high style of the so-called grand siècle – and to the perils of Icarus trying to fly higher than the Sun King.
* Modern scientific and genetic knowledge enables us to see that the desperate intermarrying of the Habsburgs, for reasons of state, was not calculated to produce healthy offspring (Carlos was the son of an uncle and niece). Marie-Thérèse and Louis, first cousins on both sides, got lucky with the healthy Dauphin, although their luck did not last. At the time frequent infant deaths in the children of great persons were attributed more sternly to the wrath of God with the parents concerned.
* Easter Communion had been obligatory in the Catholic Church since the fourth century and is still today a precept that must be fulfilled at least once a year ‘during paschal time' unless there is good reason to the contrary. Even the seventeenth-century state prisoner known as ‘the Man in the Iron Mask' was allowed to doff his mask to receive communion at Easter.32
* The name was applied by the hostile Jesuits to the beliefs of the followers of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen. Jansenism was not therefore a body of doctrine.