Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (22 page)

All too soon Henriette-Anne had used up her extended leave and had to return to the French court – and Monsieur. As she departed, her brother Charles was in visible anguish, rushing back three times to embrace her, seemingly unable to let her go. The French Ambassador commented that he had not realised until he witnessed this scene that the cynical English King was capable of feeling so much for anyone.

Eight days after returning to France, Henriette-Anne went with Monsieur to their château at Saint-Cloud, a short distance from Paris. The next day she complained of pains in her side as well as the stomach ache ‘to which she was subject' in the words of the Comtesse de La Fayette.
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But she was oppressed by the summer heat (it had rained in England) and determined to bathe in spite of her doctors' advice. On Friday 27 June Henriette-Anne did bathe; on the Saturday however she felt so much worse that she had to stop. The Comtesse arrived in Saint-Cloud later that Saturday night to find Madame looking ghastly and admitting that she felt even worse than she looked. (This was from someone famous for her patience in the face of suffering.) Nevertheless, her nervous energy had not altogether departed: Henriette-Anne walked in the moonlit gardens until midnight.

On Sunday morning she went to Monsieur's apartments and had a long talk: he was planning to return to Paris. She visited her daughter Marie-Louise, whose portrait was being painted. Dinner took place. Afterwards Henriette-Anne, feeling terrible, lay down as she often did, and put her head in the lap of the Comtesse de La Fayette. The Comtesse was wont to think her mistress beautiful in all her attitudes, but now Madame's face seemed to have changed and she looked quite plain.

About five o'clock that afternoon her true ordeal began, a horrifying process of torment which would not terminate for over nine hours. First Henriette-Anne asked for some chicory water, which was prepared for her by one of her most trusty waiting-women and administered by a similarly devoted lady-in-waiting. Immediately she started to cry out: ‘Ah, what a pain in my side! What agony! I can't bear it!' As the hours passed, her pains only grew worse until the doctors who had begun by assuring everyone that there was no danger were forced to change their tune totally, and admit that Madame was actually near to death. Her limbs were icy, her expression glazed, although she never lost consciousness. The bleedings from the foot which were the recommended panacea of the time added to her sufferings.

It was distressing both then and afterwards that in her agonies Henriette-Anne cried out that she had been poisoned by the chicory water and must be given antidotes. Monsieur showed no signs of guilty dismay (the Comtesse de La Fayette admitted with shame that she watched his expression). There was a suggestion that a dog might be given the chicory water until a lady-in-waiting came forward and said she had drunk some without ill effect. The antidotes such as powder of vipers were however administered – without doing more than, once again, increasing the pain.

In spite of her torments, Henriette-Anne managed to retain that graceful quality which had marked her all her life. Now the court rushed to their adored Madame's side, Louise and Athénaïs among others. To Monsieur she said sadly: ‘Alas, you have long ago stopped loving me, but I have never failed you.' The scene with the King was more affecting. He embraced her and embraced her again as the tears fell. She told him: ‘You are losing the truest servant you ever had.'

Given the seriousness of a deathbed at the time, already mentioned with regard to Anne of Austria, the Grande Mademoiselle worried that the sacraments were not being brought.
¹²
The stern Father Feuillet, a local priest of Jansenist sympathies, was introduced. He provided little solace: when Madame was convulsed with suffering, he suggested that this was a suitable punishment for her sins. Then the greater-souled Bossuet, now a bishop, arrived. It was Bossuet who gave her the Sacrament and Extreme Unction and promised her forgiveness. Later the English Ambassador, Ralph Montagu, arrived. It was typical of Madame's good manners that she tried to tell him in English about an emerald she wanted to bequeath to Bossuet lest the Bishop be embarrassed. Finally she kissed the crucifix Bossuet held out. Henriette-Anne, Princess of England and France, died at two o'clock in the morning on 30 June. She was just past her twenty-sixth birthday.

It was inevitable, in view of the state of the Orléans marriage, and Madame's unfortunate involuntary cry after drinking the chicory water, that accusations of poison should be flung at the widower. Although the Machiavellian Chevalier de Lorraine was absent, there were many who thought that he was indirectly if not directly responsible. But it has always been regarded as proof of the Chevalier's innocence that Louis allowed him back to court despite his behaving in ‘so insolent a manner towards the Princess, whilst she was living', in the words of the English Ambassador. In fact these accusations were endemic at this time, as we shall see.

The truth was simpler and sadder. Henriette-Anne's health had been wrecked by childbearing and exacerbated by her own misery. The prospect of taking permanent refuge in England was not one a princess of her time would have contemplated, given that it involved abandonment not only of her children but also of her honoured place at the French King's side – he for whom she had just acted the ambassadress so triumphantly. Modern opinion inclines to the view that she died of acute peritonitis following the perforation of a peptic ulcer. It was a tortured end but it was not the result of a criminal deed.

Monsieur's mourning took the form of extreme attention to etiquette (he was rapidly becoming the private arbiter on such matters, if the King remained the supreme public source). Marie-Louise, aged nine, was draped in purple velvet, the mourning of a princess, and received the condolences of the court in a long procession. That was suitable enough. She was joined by the five-year-old English Princess Anne, similarly attired; with the death of her aunt, she would shortly sail back to England to join her parents, armed with two splendid pearl and diamond bracelets given her by the French King. Even the baby Anne-Marie, less than a year old, was similarly bundled up in purple velvet and had to receive compliments, which she can hardly have registered.
¹³

In order to assuage the horrified grief of Charles II, Louis ordered a state funeral as for a Queen of France, while one of Henriette-Anne's rings was delivered back to her brother. In an even greater departure from tradition, Louis sent Queen Marie-Thérèse to the ceremony incognito. (The King himself by custom never attended such rituals.) It was Bossuet's oration at these obsequies in Saint-Denis on 21 August which crowned the life of Henriette-Anne with the nobility it deserved.
¹⁴
*
He stressed the shortness of her life: ‘Madame passed at once from morning to evening like the flowers of the field.' He harked back to her early years in France: how ‘the misfortunes of her House could not crush her in her youth and already at that time we saw in her a greatness which owed nothing to fortune', she who had a head and heart even above her royal birth. But now: ‘O disastrous night! O frightful night! When there arrived all at once this astonishing news: “Madame is dying! Madame is dead!”' And the Bishop told Louis XIV that Madame had been ‘gentle towards death as she was to all the world.
¹⁵

Just as La Fontaine had saluted Henriette-Anne for the recovery of ‘our court's laughing face', so Madame de Sévigné wrote to her cousin Bussy-Rabutin that ‘all happiness, charm and pleasure' had departed from the court with her death. The Comtesse de La Fayette put it quite simply: it was ‘one of those losses for which one is never consoled.
¹⁶

A few days after Henriette-Anne's death a scene took place which might seem bizarre by any standards except those of the French court created by Louis XIV. The King was devastated by the death of his brother's wife: his thoughts dwelled on her perennial youthfulness as he remembered it (never mind what had happened to her in recent years), her devotion to him seen in her embassy to England. Above all Henriette-Anne was the first beloved contemporary to die, an epochal moment in the life of any human being, including a king.

Finding himself with the Grande Mademoiselle, Louis indicated to her that there was now what in modern terms would be called a job opportunity: the position of Madame was vacant and she might wish to fill it.
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Anne-Marie-Louise was forty-three years old and her childbearing capacity, which had been doubted in her thirties, had certainly now vanished. The King was therefore thinking along two lines. On the one hand he was, as ever with the unfortunate heiress, eyeing those rich properties coveted by so many over the years, and wondering about their fate after the Grande Mademoiselle's death. On the other hand he sincerely believed in the necessity of a new Madame to replace the old one. As a future incumbent would say later, ‘being Madame' was a
métier,
a profession. Effectively the second lady at court – Louis's surviving legitimate daughter, known as ‘the Petite Madame', was only three – Madame had a role to play in the royal order of things.

As it happened, both the spinster-bride and the widower-bridegroom had other priorities. Monsieur definitely wanted a son and heir whereas the Grande Mademoiselle had for some time harboured the extraordinary, even exotic design of marrying a courtier named Lauzun, who was by no conceivable means a proper match for her. Anne-Marie-Louise therefore told the King that she
had
thought of marrying without specifying whom she had in mind.

Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Comte de Lauzun, was now in his late thirties, a man of good family connections and much favoured by Louis himself. Unalluring to the eye of posterity, he clearly possessed considerable sex appeal, despite being described as ‘very diminutive' by the Duke of Berwick, who was baffled by his attraction. Perhaps it was the charm of outrageous, even
louche
behaviour which benefited him in such regimented society. Not all his reported remarks to his would-be fiancée were chivalrous: for example he criticised Anne-Marie-Louise for going to the ballet and parties at her age when she should be praying and doing good works. He also disapproved of an over-youthful red ribbon in her hair. The Grande Mademoiselle took a different line. ‘People of my rank are always young’, she once said.
¹⁸
At any rate he caught her eye and somehow (the potential rewards to him were enormous) suggested in her emotionally virginal mind the dazzling prospect of marriage. That is to say, it was dazzling to this long-term spinster in romantic terms, otherwise horrifyingly daring and even foolhardy.

Astonishing most of his court, Louis did give permission for the marriage, essential for public acknowledgement of the union (a secret marriage with the Church's blessing was another matter). Queen Marie-Thérèse and Monsieur, both sticklers for the formalities, were vociferously opposed to the match. Yet it was significant that the shock, horror at the news of this fearful
mésalliance
was felt most keenly by the Grande Mademoiselle's own servants. Three days later, on 18 December, with a heavy heart but conscious of the duty of the sovereign, Louis rescinded his permission, to the devastation of Anne-Marie-Louise. His excuse – given in a memorandum on the subject – was that Anne-Marie-Louise had pretended falsely that he, the King, had promoted the marriage: ‘my reputation was involved’.
¹⁹
But court disapproval was the major reason. Whether Louis had been weak in the first place in giving in to her desire so strongly expressed, or was acting weakly now in cancelling his decision, was a matter of opinion. Most people at the time thought the former.

Louis, having broken the poor woman's heart in the cause of the royal order in which he believed so passionately, now showed himself at his most supportive. When Anne-Marie-Louise broke down at a ball, it was the King himself who went to her aid, thus preempting the unpleasant ridicule of the courtiers. ‘Cousin, you are not well,' he said and personally escorted her away. So the Grande Mademoiselle remained with her fortune – who would now inherit it? The subject did not go away as she grew older – and her high position at the court. Louis also retained Lauzun in his favour, even using him on a confidential mission, until the rakish count, in a highly melodramatic manner, brought about his own disgrace.

It was a question of the reputation of Athénaïs. Lauzun asked the favourite to intervene on his behalf with the King on the subject of the marriage and then hid himself under her bed when Louis was
in situ
to make sure she had carried out her mission. Athénaïs, believing herself in private, did no such thing. She then lied about it to Lauzun. He was a man of whose violence people at court tended to be frightened, and for good reason. Furious at what he saw as a gross betrayal (never mind his own gross invasion of the lovers' privacy), Lauzun now shouted at the King that he himself had slept with Athénaïs. Louis, with the greatest difficulty mastering his seething outrage, broke his own cane in half and threw it out of the window ‘lest he strike a gentleman'. (His self-control would later incur the ultimate approval of that courtly purist Saint-Simon.)
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Lauzun ended up in prison in the south, in the company of the disgraced minister Fouquet, where he languished for ten years.

All this left the problem of Monsieur's second marriage unresolved. It was the eventual solution, in November 1671, which brought to the court of Louis XIV not only its most original female member but also its most entertaining observer, rivalled only by Saint-Simon (but the new Duchesse d'Orléans had over twenty years' start on the great memorialist).
*
The person in question, known to history by her family name of Liselotte, was Elisabeth-Charlotte, daughter of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine.