Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (23 page)

At first sight Liselotte was an obscure German princess, very far from being the greatest match in Europe as Marie-Thérèse had once been. Nor was she a King's sister, and that King an important European player, like the first Madame. But the Palatinate, a principality on the Rhine with its capital at Heidelberg, had considerable geographical importance where the plans of Louis XIV to the east were concerned. The Wittelsbach dynasty had acquired the Palatinate in the thirteenth century, and by the beginning of the seventeenth the Palatinate was the leading Protestant German state. However, it suffered much devastation during the Thirty Years War. Liselotte's marriage contract, if not fulfilled, offered rights over and opportunities in the Palatinate, in a grim parallel (from the point of view of that country) with the rights of Marie-Thérèse in the Spanish Netherlands.

Liselotte was born on 27 May 1652 and was thus nearly twelve years younger than her future husband. Her interesting ancestry included her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I, known as the Winter Queen, who was herself the granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots, the most romantic femme fatale in history.
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Liselotte however was neither beautiful nor romantic. She was stolid, not to say earthy, and even on occasion downright vulgar. In her letters home Liselotte would cover these vulgarities with the airy words: ‘By your leave, by your leave', when she gave vent to such comments as this: ‘With my cold, I shall probably look like a shat-on carrot.' More entertaining was her frequent use of folksy proverbs: ‘The snow falls as easily on a cow-pat [
Kuhfladen
] as on a roseleaf’ was one of them. ‘When the goat gets too frisky, she goes dancing on ice and breaks a leg' was another.

It will be seen that in a world where style and dignity, everything possessed by the first Madame, were so highly esteemed, Liselotte was the exception. The Grande Mademoiselle deplored her ‘lack of a French air' Duc to her German origins. Certainly she must have spoken French with a strong German accent, as her phonetic spelling of some French words indicates. And Liselotte positively hated dancing, the art which distinguished the French court, starting with the exceptional skill of the King himself. This ‘confounded ball' she exclaimed in exasperation on one occasion, probably the only person at court to feel that way (Monsieur like his brother was an excellent dancer). Nor was she a romantic. Bérénice's lament over losing Titus in Racine's eponymous play did not move her: ‘All the howlings she sets up about this make me impatientx2019;.
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In the matter of her appearance, the second Madame was also at the opposite end of the spectrum from her predecessor. Where Henriette-Anne was graceful and slender, getting thinner with the years, without ever sacrificing her charm, Liselotte was big and got bigger. A vivid interest in food and drink helped on the process: she never lost her taste for German food and drink such as sausage, sauerkraut and beer, which had to be sent to her by her favourite aunt Sophia. Liselotte was the first to describe her face in comic terms – it was a ‘badger-cat-monkey' face and her nose a ‘badger's snout'. As for her complexion, the apple-cheeked freshness of her youth quickly gave way to a coarse weatherbeaten appearance, her skin prematurely wrinkled and ‘red as a crayfish' Duc to her mania for hunting all day and every day without the conventional mask to protect her. All this was very far from Henriette-Anne's legendary complexion of‘jasmine and roses’. As her weight increased Liselotte once again pronounced the best verdict on her appearance: ‘I would be good enough to eat if
1
were roasted like sucking-pig.
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Nor did her clothes help: Liselotte boasted of taking no interest in them; no alluring
déshabille
for her, either cumbersome court clothes or serviceable hunting costumes, nothing in between.

The peculiar circumstances of her family background surely explain the excessive attention the adult Liselotte would come to pay to what Saint-Simon called ‘honour, virtue, rank, nobility', with the emphasis on the last two. In time this attention would have something quite hysterical about it, especially about the status of the royal bastards: ‘mouse-droppings in the pepper' was her blunt way of describing them.
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Yet Liselotte had been raised against the background of a highly unusual marriage, or rather two of them. The constant disputes of her parents led in the end to the disappearance of her mother from court. Already Charles Louis had installed his mistress in a room above his own, and she had given birth to several of his children; Charles Louis now bigamously married this mistress in the lifetime of his wife to ‘legitimise’ them.

The happiest times of Liselotte's childhood were the seven years spent with her beloved aunt Sophia, her father's sister, married to the Elector of Hanover.
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Sophia, to whom many of Liselotte's letters were later addressed, took the girl on a prolonged visit to The Hague, where her grandmother Elizabeth the Winter Queen had taken up residence. It was here that Liselotte got to know her cousin William of Orange, two years older and like herself a Protestant. It had been Liselotte's wistful hope to marry him eventually. Now, for reasons of realpolitik, she was not only marrying elsewhere, but marrying a Catholic, in consequence of which she had to change her own religion. Nobody in her family circle seemed to see anything odd about this, including the stoutly Protestant Sophia: the French King's brother was a splendid match for someone like her niece. One simply had to make sacrifices …

Liselotte said later that she had only agreed to conversion in order to honour her father. It certainly cannot be said that Catholicism was ever really imprinted on Liselotte. Once again this was something which set her apart from those at the French court, forever worrying about their own salvation. The torments of a Louise de La Vallière were unknown to her. Louise wrestled with a Catholic conscience; Liselotte did not. It was something she faced in herself: she was not devout and did not have the kind of faith that moved mountains. The most Liselotte could do, she declared, was try to keep the Ten Commandments. As for God Almighty, she conceded that she did admire Him ‘although without understanding Him’.
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Over the years Liselotte became by inference quite anti-Catholic: ‘the boredom of all that Latin whining', she wrote privately of one particular long-drawn-out Easter. Any sermon longer than fifteen minutes sent Liselotte unashamedly to sleep. Perhaps her cynicism had begun with the day of her proxy marriage in the Gothic cathedral of Metz where a plethora of sacraments was rained down on her in a very short space: conversion, communion, confirmation and marriage. (At the time her conversion was said to be Duc to ‘the Holy spirit’.)
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On arrival at the French court Liselotte did have one great asset which for the first few years outweighed her disadvantages of style: she amused the King who had, as it were, commissioned her arrival. Her frank speaking was an agreeable novelty, as people in power always do enjoy frank speaking until it wounds them. Her enthusiasm for the outdoor life, whatever it did to her complexion, was very much to his taste too. Liselotte, who had once wanted to be a boy, was a marvellous rider – not a graceful Diana of the chase as Marie Mancini had been, but an Amazon. The gazette
Mercure Galant
wrote that ‘few men were as vigorous in pursuit of this exercise' and certainly Madame was capable of hunting from five in the morning until nine at night. Liselotte also liked to walk, unlike most people at the French court, who she complained were left ‘puffing and panting’ twenty paces behind her, with the exception of the King. Like Louis himself, Liselotte was also passionate about the theatre.
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Louis therefore showed his new recruit to court great kindness from the beginning, when he introduced her to Marie-Thérèse: ‘Courage, Madame,’ he said gently. ‘She is far more frightened of you than you are of her.' He also liked the fact that Liselotte was virtuous. No gallantries were to be expected from this Madame, and when the sophisticated Princesse de Monaco, a swinger
avant la lettre,
suggested a lesbian affair, Liselotte was outraged. If she was, as some suspected, a little platonically in love with the King, that was only to be expected from one of ‘these other stars' which surrounded the sun ‘like a court' in the words of Louis's memoirs, and hardly displeasing to him.
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Contradictory as it might seem, Louis XIV had a great taste for virtuous women whom he could admire wholeheartedly as he remembered admiring his mother. One of these was Colbert's daughter, Jeanne-Marie, married to the Duc de Chevreuse, Liselotte's contemporary with ‘her admirable virtue which never failed her in any predicament'; she was incidentally one of the few fellow walkers Liselotte discovered, so perhaps virtue and exercise went together. Later Louis would admire Saint-Simon's young wife, daughter of the Duc de Beauvillier, for her mixture of modesty and noble bearing. The supreme example was the beautiful dark-eyed Italian princess, Mary Beatrice d'Este, who passed through France at the age of fourteen in 1673 to marry James Duke of York. On this occasion Louis described himself paternally as her ‘godfather', but he did not forget Mary Beatrice, that vision of Catholic youth and beauty, even if he could scarcely have predicted the circumstances in which they would next meet. Then there was his children's governess, Françoise Scarron, whom Louis was getting to know, in clandestine visits to the Parisian house of her little charges: she was nothing if not virtuous.

Liselotte's take on the whole subject of marriage was expressed like this: ‘Marriages are like death. The time and season are marked, you can't escape. That's how Our Lord wished it and how we must do it’.
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It was a view which her predecessor would have shared, just as Liselotte quickly came to share Henriette-Anne's dislike of the Chevalier de Lorraine, who now proceeded to humiliate the second wife wherever possible just as he had humiliated the first. As for Monsieur himself, the best Liselotte could do, describing him to her aunt Sophia, was to call him ‘not ignoble', with his hair, his eyebrows and lashes all very black, his large nose and his small mouth.

But in one crucial respect, the marriage of Monsieur and the second Madame was a success. Liselotte conceived her first child, a son, less than a year after marriage. ‘Very soon there is going to be a big bang,' she wrote in her merry way in May 1673. Although this boy did not live long, a second and healthy son Philippe, given the title Duc de Chartres, was born in August 1674. His horoscope predicted that he would be pope, ‘but I am very much afraid that he is more likely to be the Antichrist’, added Liselotte.
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A daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, followed two years later, who evidently took after her mother: she was ‘as fat as a Christmas goose and large for her age'. After that, by mutual agreement, Monsieur and Madame ceased marital relations. Monsieur had found them, it seems, even more testing with Liselotte than with Henriette-Anne, when he had after all been a decade younger. From Liselotte's confidences we know that Monsieur needed the inspiration of rosaries and holy medals draped in appropriate places to perform the necessary act.
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Liselotte's satisfactory fertility was in contrast to that of the unfortunate Queen. There was a sad catalogue of royal infant deaths around this time: three in just over a year. The little Duc d'Anjou died at the age of three in July 1671; his brother, born the following year, was dead by the beginning of November; then the Petite Madame, an especially beloved child, died at the age of five in March 1672. The line of royal succession now led from the Dauphin to Monsieur, and so to the new baby Philippe. There were evil tongues which ascribed the deaths of the Queen's children to the scandal of her husband's philanderings, although as has been noted, repeated intermarriage was the more likely explanation.

There was a further, even more marked contrast, to set the tongues wagging again, between the Queen's experiences and those of the Ceres-like goddess of fertility Athénaïs. A second boy, Louis-Cesar, was born to her in 1672 (very shortly after Marie-Thérèse's son who died) and a second daughter Louise-Françoise in June 1673. With Louis-Auguste, born in 1670, and her two children by her husband, Athénaïs had given birth to six children in under ten years, only one of whom, that mysterious baby of 1669, had died in infancy. It was a prodigious record, especially when combined with the sensual duties of a mistress, and as it turned out Athénaïs's ready powder would be lit again in the future.

There was however a question mark over these little pledges of love – or symbols of royal, even national virility as many of less censorious disposition would have seen them. How long would they remain in the comfortable obscurity of the rue Vaugirard, tended by the virtuous Françoise Scarron? This was especially true after Athénaïs gave birth to Louise-Françoise on 1 June 1673 at Tournai, while the whole royal cortége of war was once more in Flanders.

Louis had declared war on the Dutch in 1672 in pursuit of solidifying his north-western dominions. This so-called Dutch War was expected to end in another triumph for Europe's most dazzling military monarch. But for once the victorious French armies had met their match. The heroic resistance of the Dutch took the form of opening the dykes and flooding their own country, making further French advances virtually impossible. All this was done under their newly appointed leader, the young Prince William of Orange (that Protestant nephew of Charles II Liselotte had once hoped to marry).
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The French were obliged to withdraw in early 1673.

In the new season's campaign Louis was engaged in the siege of Maastricht, the court remaining at nearby Tournai. The Queen and Louise de La Vallière occupied the Bishop's house while Athénaïs gave birth in the town's citadel. This distinction of dwelling hardly made for concealment.