Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (19 page)

The evidence is a story of the King being overheard saying to Monsieur: ‘She does what she can but I myself am not interested.' Possibly he instinctively ducked away from a woman who however beautiful was clearly not submissive. By November 1666 the report from the Duc d'Enghien quoted earlier showed that he had changed his mind. Somewhere between November 1666 and July 1667 Louis XIV seduced the Marquise de Montespan. Or was it the other way round? Either way, the great sexual adventure of his life was about to begin.

One of the maxims of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld which was peculiarly appropriate to Louis XIV in 1667 was his reflection on the human heart where ‘new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.
¹³
But it was not only the passion for Athénaïs which was beginning to consume Louis. There was also the question of his personal glory: something to be established in the suitably glorious sphere of war.
Gloire
was an important word of the time, not only for the King, although he might seem to incarnate the general glory of France. Sometimes it could be equated with ambition, as Madame de Castries, daughter-in-law of Vivonne, was described as
glorieuse
for her husband. Generally it meant personal honour. Young girls at Saint-Cyr would be told to treasure their ‘
bonne gloire',
which meant never doing base things. In a king however, and above all for Louis XIV, glory meant military glory. Years later he would declare that ‘the passion for glory was definitely the leading passion of my soul'; he was talking the language of Corneille's military leader Le Cid, which had been impressed on him in youth.
¹⁴
At the same time there was the glamour of possessing the most blatantly beautiful mistress: this was another kind of glory in the eyes of the world, including foreign ambassadors. The new Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, started in 1662 (following a fire), was centred by the artist Charles Le Brun on the device of the sun, symbolising the reputation of the young King;
¹⁵
in the same way the gorgeous Athénaïs symbolised the richness of his private life. Both contributed to the
gloire
of Louis XIV.

When Louis XIV set out in the direction of Flanders on a military campaign in May 1667, he could fairly be said to be combining two new passions: he was commanding (if not leading) his troops and he was also accompanied by Madame de Montespan. The declaration of war on England the previous year in support of the Dutch had not, to the great relief of Charles II's government, been followed by the use of French troops in this cause. Henriette-Anne, sister of one King, sister-in-law of the other, was coming into her own as a discreet intermediary. Both men saw that under the guise of affectionate familial correspondence, messages could be given and received. Both men trusted her and indeed, in the years which followed as Henriette-Anne developed her role, her loyalties were probably about evenly divided. She adored her brother Charles and at the same time she loved and honoured Louis, her King.

Louis now came clean about his real intentions. With the aid of useful legal advice about the Law of Brabant which favoured Marie-Thérèse's succession to certain properties in the Spanish Netherlands (as the child of the first marriage), he established a war-centre at Compiègne. From here Turenne was to push with the French army against Spanish-ruled Flemish fortresses that were ill-prepared to defend themselves in the so-called War of Devolution. This was realpolitik in the seventeenth-century world: Louis and his ministers equated both branches of the Habsburg family, Spain and Austria, as one, and convinced themselves of the danger of encirclement. Only a really satisfactory defensive border would do. The scenes on the way to Compiègne, and at the court established there, had however something of the pageant about them.

There were tents of silk and damask – Louis had one tent of Chinese silk – hung with rich embroideries. A tent would contain three rooms and a sleeping-room: ‘the most handsome and pretentious suites that anyone could ever see’. And there were the ladies. Of course women always went to war: cooks and prostitutes and on this occasion courtiers. This was not just the whim of Louis XIV. Turenne was generally followed by a great train of ladies, including their vast wardrobes and mules to carry them all. It has been seen that Anne of Austria had taken her son on campaigns when he was quite small. But where the Sun King ruled things tended to be carried out on a larger-than-life scale – including the presence of women. Marie-Thérèse was there, playing an important symbolic role when she was introduced to her future subjects as the Spanish heiress. Athénaïs was there, her pretext the fact that she was lady-in-waiting to Marie-Thérèse. Henriette-Anne was also there. One observer compared the style of it all to ‘the magnificence of Solomon and the grandeur of the King of Persia.
¹⁶

When the King advanced to the front, he returned after a short while to Compiegne, ostensibly to see his wife, actually, as everyone perfectly well knew, to see the woman with whom he was now besotted. It is sometimes suggested that the pair first slept together in Flanders. The logistics of this seem dubious compared with the endless possibilities of the royal palaces beforehand. Life at Compiegne was in essence camping, although magnificent camping.

Two actions now focused universal attention on the rivalry of the ladies in Louis XIV's life. The first of these was the King's step, unprecedented in this reign, of creating Louise a duchess and bestowing upon her land in the Touraine and Anjou. Furthermore he legitimised six-month-old Marie-Anne – ‘our natural daughter' – and designated her Mademoiselle de Blois, a semi-royal title. The letters patent which were duly registered by the Parlement were lavish in their praise for ‘our dear and well beloved and most trusty’ Louise, Duchesse de La Vallière; her ‘infinity of rare perfections’ were stressed, which had long aroused ‘a most singular affection’ in the King's heart and were now to be publicly expressed by a title and an income derived from properties. There was mention of Louise's descent from ‘a noble and ancient house’, conspicuous for its zeal in the service of the state, while emphasis was placed on the modesty which had made her oppose such material endowments. Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Blois as she had become, was declared to be the future heiress of Louise's lands, together with any other descendants ‘whom we have declared legitimate’ (Louise was of course expecting her fourth child at this point).
¹⁷

Legitimisation was a fully acknowledged process at this point: the term used –
légitimer–
indicated that such persons, despite their irregular status at birth, had subsequently been
made
legitimate. Furetière in his
Dictionnaire
devoted five long entries to the subject, of which the main thrust was that legitimisation was to be used for children, born out of wedlock, whose parents subsequently married. This was hardly the case here. The King was a married man, even if Louise was not a married woman, and he had undoubtedly been married to another woman at the time of Marie-Anne's birth. However, Furetière, writing towards the end of Louis's reign, had to recognise the reality of what had taken place over the last thirty years: therefore he pronounced that the King was even able to legitimise adulterine children, and thus ‘efface the turpitude of adultery’, since he was master of the civil state.
¹⁸
Yet no action taken by Louis would arouse more criticism from the devout on one hand, the snobs of the French court on the other. This was because the
legitimés
also became princes and princesses – who might outrank honest courtiers born in holy wedlock.

Louis, in his memoirs written for the Dauphin, justified this advancement of his mistress and her child as being a decision taken on the eve of war: since he had no intention of avoiding danger, ‘I thought it was only just to assure this child of the honour of her birth,’ while giving the mother an establishment which matched ‘the affection I had had for her for six years’. The court, on the other hand, saw the whole thing as a golden farewell: Louise was now expected to accept gracefully that her reign, such as it was, was over. Advantage was taken of her pregnancy to dispatch her to Versailles while the court went to war. In the course of a long reflective letter to a confidante Louise wrote sadly that of all the King's great qualities it was ‘his crown’ which had attracted her the least.
¹⁹
It was the old song, her passion for the man not the monarch. But it no longer resonated as it had once done, in view of ‘the rise of another’, in La Rochefoucauld's phrase.

But Louise was not finished yet. The second even more dramatic action which focused the attention of the court on the current rivalry was taken by herself. Louise's nickname in the witty Sévigné circle might be ‘The Dew' – Athénaïs was ‘The Torrent’ – but The Dew was certainly capable of impetuous gestures, as her precipitate flight to Chaillot had demonstrated three years earlier. Now Queen Marie-Thérèse was spending the night at La Fére, on her way from Compiégne to join the King at Avesnes according to his orders, when a piece of startling news was brought to her. The equipage of the new Duchesse de La Vallière was on its way. There was general consternation. There was also disgust, some of which had a hypocritical ring as the Queen's ladies, including Athénaïs, denounced Louise for reducing Marie-Thérèse to violent bouts of weeping.

The next morning the Duchesse swept a low curtsy to the Queen, according to protocol. Marie-Thérèse did not even acknowledge her presence. Nor was any food provided for her, until the maître d'hôtel took pity on the starving Louise and served her privately. When all the ladies gathered round the Queen resumed their places in the carriage and travelled on to their rendezvous with the King, the conversation never left the subject. What effrontery to present herself to Her Majesty without being sent for! Thus Athénaïs. She was echoed by the others. Athénaïs even went further, with her own brand of effrontery: ‘God save me from being the mistress of the King! But if I was, I should feel thoroughly ashamed in front of the Queen.’

It was the encounter with the King himself which was however the high point of the drama, at once pitiful and embarrassing. Louise flung herself trembling on the ground before him. Only then did his glacial reception – she had defied his explicit orders to stay at Versailles – convince her of her terrible mistake. ‘How much inquietude you might have spared me, had you been as tepid in the first days of our acquaintance as you have seemed for some time past! You gave me evidence of a great passion: I was enchanted and I abandoned myself to loving you to distraction.’ The poignant words were those of a young woman in a convent, seduced and abandoned by a French officer, in the celebrated best-seller of the time,
Letters of a Portuguese Nun.
²⁰
*
They might have been spoken word for word by Louise.

Louis XIV was a philanderer, but he was not a monster. He disliked disobedience but he did not like cruelty and humiliation either.
†
The next day it was he, not the recriminatory and in many cases hypocritical ladies, who invited Louise to join the Queen and her ladies in her carriage. His gesture was so imperious that Marie-Thérèse dared not say a word. That night Louise was invited to take supper at the royal table. None of this stopped Louis's assiduous attentions to Athénaïs, so that the Queen observed out loud that he sometimes only came to bed at four o'clock in the morning. ‘Working on dispatches,’ replied the King smoothly, but the Grande Mademoiselle noted that he had to turn away to hide a smile.
²²

The King returned to his armies, which took the major Flemish fortress of Lille after a nine-day siege; the Spanish troops fell back on Brussels and Mons. The Queen and her strange entourage returned via Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, where Marie-Thérèse wished to pray. Nothing demonstrated the extraordinary interweaving of Queen, paramours – two of them – religion and intrigue more than the fact that Athénaïs and Louise now both went to confession at the same place to the same priest. Presumably they confessed the same sin, of sleeping with the King, though of course it was still true that Athénaïs had committed adultery and Louise had not.

Louise gave birth to her fourth child, a boy, at Saint-Germain on 17 November 1667. He was legitimised in February 1669 and the title of Comte de Vermandois was to be his. Later that year he was created Admiral of France under the conveniently bland name of ‘Louis, Comte de Vermandois’, the King having rejected anything more explicit such as ‘Bastard of France’, ‘Louis, natural son of the King' or even ‘Louis,
Légitimé
of France’.
²³
Honours could not conceal the fact that emotionally the King had moved on. Even poor Marie-Thérèse was found in floods of tears after receiving an anonymous letter informing her of the shift in her husband's affections; perhaps she had entertained a wistful hope that the demotion of Louise would have meant the return of Louis permanently to her side.

By the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle between France and Spain in May 1668, Louis acquired various towns in Flanders which he had recently conquered, including Oudenarde and Lille. But Franche-Comté, lying further south on the borders of Switzerland, which had been overrun by French troops under Condé, was for the time being handed back. The Peace also brought King and court back to Saint-Germain. Louis renewed his frenzied enthusiasm for the elaborate rebuilding of a new Versailles. There in July he staged another vast celebration known as the Grand Royal Entertainment, ostensibly to celebrate the Peace, but in court opinion actually to honour the new favourite. Over three thousand people were present, including the Papal Nuncio and numerous ambassadors. One of these, the Savoyard Comte de Saint-Maurice, described the chaos: even the Queen was forced to wait for half an hour for her entry, while some ambassadors never got in at all. The lucky entrants marvelled happily at the enormous artificial ‘rooms’ made of foliage and hung with tapestries; thirty-two crystal chandeliers illuminated them.
²⁴
Many trees were hung with fruits including oranges from Portugal; a huge palace of marzipan and sugar looked so tasty that the crowd subsequently tore it to bits and ate it.