Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (40 page)

The influence of the Abbé Godet des Marais was important, because he urged Françoise strongly to side with the orthodox and severe Bossuet on the subject of Quietism: something Bossuet Condémned in a sermon at Lent 1696. Along the way Fénelon became a victim too. Now Françoise abandoned the man who had been her friend and sat by, helpless, while Fénelon was forbidden contact with Bourgogne and all the Quietists were purged from the young Duc's household. Françoise's abandonment of her former friends was seen as cowardice – although she would probably have justified it as part of her essentially pragmatic attitude to religion. In any case Louis became subtly cold towards Françoise, suggesting that Fénelon had been ‘a bad shepherd' who had been wrongly appointed to tend his grandchildren. As for poor Bourgogne, he was heartbroken, pleading in vain to be allowed at least to write to Fénelon: there was to be no further contact between Fénelon and his ‘little Louis' till 1701.
²⁵

The whole protracted episode caused a degeneration in Francoise's health which may have been at least in part psychosomatic. It was significant that her reconciliation with the King occurred when he came and stood beside her bedside with the words, which had something of love but also much of impatience about them: ‘Well, Madame, are you going to die of this then?' And so the way was prepared for an apotheosis. At a military review at Compiêgne in September 1698 the King leaned ostentatiously on the open window of Madame de Maintenon's sedan-chair. He took off his hat and left it on top of the chair in order to describe the proceedings to her in full view of troops and courtiers alike. Louis hardly spoke to anyone else, and even Adelaide found it difficult to get him to answer her questions. It was as open a declaration as he ever made on the subject of her status, and left a profound impression on all present, including Saint-Simon.
²⁶

It was however an apotheosis which had only occurred at a certain cost. Although Françoise had busied herself using her influence to secure bishoprics for her friends – Godet des Marais was made Bishop of Chartres and her ally Antoine de Noailles Archbishop of Paris – she now discovered that the price of influence was orthodoxy plus submission to the King's will, should she happen to cross it. As Madame de Maintenon confessed to the Archbishop when she had failed to bring about a particular Church appointment: ‘I see that the King was not as docile as I thought.'
²⁷
She was very far from being the strong-willed manipulator of Liselotte's and Saint-Simon's depiction: more the pliant ‘Thaw’ of the Sévigné nickname. In the upbringing of Adelaide, however, Françoise clearly had her role, which was not that of Queen precisely, so much as grandmother-cum-governess. Adelaide needed Françoise and Louis needed Adelaide: order was restored. So the unacknowledged but painful rift was healed.

Did Maintenon hanker after the full role of Queen in public? Naturally her enemies said she did, but there is no evidence of it beyond their prejudices. Equally there is no evidence that Louis XIV ever seriously contemplated giving it to her: dynasty was sacred to him, royalty too, as had been impressed upon him from his earliest years by Anne of Austria, a mighty Princess. While he had chosen a discreet and virtuous private life with Françoise, it was not within his imaginative range to see her sitting on the throne once occupied by his mother (and by Marie-Thérèse, another mighty Princess). What would have been the point? With the increasing selfishness of the ageing, particularly in a man trained from the start to be self-centred as a form of duty, the King knew that he had what he wanted.

It did not occur to him to question seriously whether Françoise was equally content … He treated her at all times with scrupulous politeness. Although Françoise burned the King's letters after his death, a few little notes do survive about daily arrangements, in which the language is formal and above all considerate, with the reiteration of phrases like ‘if you approve' and ‘I shall conform to your wishes'. There is certainly no hint of command. ‘If you would like to take a promenade with me at three or four o'clock,' wrote the King on one occasion, ‘come to the Basin of Apollo, where I shall be with a chair for you'; but ‘please don't feel obliged to do this'. And probably in most ways Françoise
was
content, reflecting passively on ‘the enigma' of her destiny in the words of her confessor Godet des Marais: God had put ‘the salvation of a great king' in her hands … ‘You are his refuge, remember that your room is the domestic Church where the King retires.'
²⁸

So long as her reputation was secure, Françoise was satisfied (as she had said of herself), and
pace
Liselotte nobody really thought of her in the 1690s as an ‘old whore' – old, yes, since she was in her sixties, but whore seemed very wide of the mark. It is true that the scurrilous pamphlets got going on her as they did on everyone of note. Despite the restrictions of censorship (which could be overcome by printing in Holland), mockery was widespread and lewd: no one was spared.

For example, it is to this period that a satirical pamphlet suggesting that the true father of Louis XIV was actually the Comte de Rantzau belongs. Rantzau, a Maréchal de France originally from Holstein, died in 1650; there was of course no contemporary evidence for this wild surmise.
²⁹
If the King's past was smirched, so was his present. A medal of 1693 showed Louis being tugged away from the front line by four women, with a legend on the subject of unsuccessful invasion that was a rude adaptation of Caesar's famous aphorism:
Venit, vidit sed non vincit
(He came, he saw but he did not conquer). Eight years after its erection, the equestrian statue of 1686 in the Place des Victoires was adapted for a scurrilous engraving showing a new pedestal with the King in chains to four mistresses, Louise, Angélique, Athénaïs and Françoise, in place of his military triumphs. The printer, bookseller and his boy assistant were all hanged for their efforts.
³⁰
But the satires did not cease.

Françoise therefore could hardly expect to be spared. She was said to have been seduced long before she met Scarron, ‘the breach already made' by the Marquis de Montchevreuil, featured inaccurately as the Duc de Montchevreuil. There was a ridiculous rumour that while still very young she had given birth to an illegitimate child called Babbé. Despite the tone of these attacks on ‘the old she-monkey', in which age was a prominent feature, the worst accusation was that which had her doing a deal with the Jesuits: her own secret marriage to the King in exchange for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
³¹
None of this was true.

It was Louis XIV however whose feelings constituted the real enigma to the outside world. There was a celebrated moment when Pierre Mignard was about to paint Madame de Maintenon in the role of St Frances of Rome; the King's permission was sought to drape her in ermine robes, the style of a Queen. (Something that was incidentally done in other portraits of great ladies, other than queens.) ‘Certainly St Frances deserves ermine!' replied the King laughingly, leaving no one much the wiser as to his precise meaning. But he did love the picture: a miniature based on it was something he carried with him in his waistcoat pocket till the day of his death.
*

The Treaty of Ryswick, signed in September 1697, which brought to an end the nine-year War of the League of Augsburg, was hailed by a loyal courtier like the Marquis de Dangeau in glowing terms: ‘The King gave peace to Europe upon conditions which he wished to impose. He was the master ….'
³²
It is true that if he lost Lorraine, ‘the master' retained French Hainault and Lower Alsace including Strasbourg; in the West Indies, Santo Domingo (since the 1790s Haiti) was an important acquisition for the future. Yet there was much he had also acquired – at enormous cost in casualties – which Louis did not retain. The French armies which in the popular imagination had succeeded the Spanish armies of his youth as Europe's invincible warriors were no longer to be seen in quite that light. William III, once merely the modest Prince of Orange, was Europe's foremost martial leader.

By implication, the Treaty also acknowledged William for the first time as King of England. Here Louis XIV did act with some spirit: he refused to banish the former King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, with their children, from France. Furthermore he showed his sensitivity to the ordeal which the Treaty represented for these unhappy exiles by ordering that there should be no triumphant music and celebrations in their presence. Since the finalisation of the Treaty coincided with their traditional autumn visit to Fontainebleau, foreign news was not to be brought to him unless he was alone. And Louis pressed William for the payment of Mary Beatrice's jointure of fifty thousand a year, settled upon her by Parliament.

Part of this support for the exiles was Duc to Louis's genuine reverence for Mary Beatrice, in every way the dominant character of the pair these days, as ex-King James's conversation, never scintillating at the best of times, centred more and more upon his impending death. But neither he nor any other European could be unaware that the question of the eventual English succession remained unsolved. William and Mary (who died in 1694) had no children. Her sister Anne seemed to be unable to raise a healthy child, the only survivor from infancy of her huge brood, the young Duke of Gloucester, a virtual invalid with a hugely swollen head, was to die at the age of nine in July 1700. Under these circumstances, it would need the certainty of hindsight to rule out the chances of ten-year-old James Edward succeeding. Still styled the Prince of Wales, Mary Beatrice's son was a happy, healthy child, and lived under the protection of France.

Not the English but the Spanish succession now threatened this lull of European peace. On 1 November 1700 Carlos II of Spain, that monarch whose demise had been predicted since his birth, did actually die at the age of thirty-nine, and of course he died childless. In a bold gesture of contempt for the various rulers who had been notionally sawing up his empire over the years, Carlos left his entire dominions to his half-sister's grandson on condition that they were kept together: this was none other than the Duc d'Anjou, second son of the Dauphin of France. It was perfectly possible to argue that Anjou was Carlos's nearest heir (Anjou's elder brother Bour-gogne, like the Dauphin himself, was ruled out as being a future King of France). Equally the descendants of Carlos's full sister Margarita Teresa, who had married the Emperor, could mount a claim: her grandson Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, a prince but not a threateningly powerful one, was a suitable choice: unfortunately he died in 1699. The next imperial choice was more openly Habsburg: the Emperor's younger son the Archduke Charles (he who had once been proposed as a bridegroom for Adelaide).

In assessing Louis XIV's decision to accept the throne on behalf of his grandson, once again, as with the fate of James Edward Stuart, one must avoid hindsight. It was not in Louis XIV to reject such a great dynastic prize for
his
dynasty – and of course deprive the Habsburgs of it at the same time. He did not need the urging of Madame de Maintenon (who in any case did no such thing as urge but merely sided politely with the favourably inclined Dauphin).
³³
The man who placed the need for glory at the centre of his youthful ambitions was not going to reject it on behalf of Anjou now, even if common sense must have told him that the crown would not be surrendered by the Austrian party without a struggle. Where Louis failed was in not seeing further into the anxieties of Austria: he should, at the same time as accepting on behalf of Anjou, have made it clear that Anjou would never succeed to the French throne himself. (The Bourgognes at this point had no children, so that this was within the bounds of possibility.)

Who knows? Perhaps secret imperial dreams also excited Louis, and the thought of the two crowns of France and Spain united was not totally inimical to him. As it was, he broke the news of his decision to his grandson as Anjou was playing cards. The boy stood up respectfully, took the news with ‘the gravity and coolness of a king of eighty years' and then sat down at once as though weighed back into his seat by the cares of a heavy crown.
³⁴

‘I hope Your Majesty will sleep well tonight,' said Louis XIV. Anjou, who was not quite seventeen, was a sober, intelligent lad without the tiresome piety of Bourgone or the mischievous nature of fourteen-year-old Berry. Whether Anjou, now transformed into Philip V, did sleep is not related. Liselotte as usual had something livelier to say. Out hunting with the new monarch, she ostentatiously let him pass: ‘After you, great King,' she said. The Duc de Berry ‘almost died laughing’.
³⁵

But the accession of the French candidate to the throne of Spain was to prove no laughing matter. The War of the Spanish Succession which followed would be described by Winston Churchill in his life of Marlborough as ‘the first world war' because it involved other continents as well as Europe. In the course of it, every kind of ruin would encompass France.

* A form of clog with a wooden sole and leather upper from which the modern word ‘galosh' derives.

* Now preserved, appropriately enough, at the château de Maintenon.

PART FOUR

Winter