Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (5 page)

It is evident that Brother Fiacre's sincerity had made a great impression on Queen Anne when they met. Six years later she called the monk to her presence again with the words: ‘I have not forgotten the signal grace you have obtained for me from the Blessed Virgin who gave me a son. I have had a great picture made where he [Louis] is represented in front of the mother of God to whom he offers his crown and sceptre.’ And the monk duly travelled once more to Cotignac with the picture. Nor was this the end of the connection. Brother Fiacre, even as an old man, was allowed privileged access to Louis, for the role he was believed to have played ‘in the happy birth of Your Majesty'. When the monk died, it was on the orders of the mature King (who paid for the journey) that his heart was taken to Notre-Dame-des-Grâces.
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That was the supernatural reasoning, one that the pious Anne clearly accepted, given the respect paid to Brother Fiacre. A more down-to-earth explanation was provided by a story involving Louis XIII, a hunting expedition near Paris cut short by an unexpected storm, and given that the King's separate apartments at the Louvre were not prepared, the need to take refuge in those of his wife on the night of 5 December 1637 … The result of this unscheduled propinquity was Louis, born exactly nine months later. Unfortunately the
Gazette de France,
the official source of royal movements on any given day, does not confirm joint occupation of the Louvre on that particular night (although it is true that Anne was there).
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The King and Queen were however together at their palace of Saint-Germain from 9 November for six weeks. The couple moved to the Louvre on 1 December, after which the King went hunting at Crône, and by 5 December was at his hunting lodge of Versailles. It was the prolonged period of opportunity in November which led the doctors to project a birth at the end of August.
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Leaving aside the supernatural, and given that the dates of the storm do not fit (unless the King made a speedy and unrecorded stop at the Louvre on his way to Versailles), the truth was surely more prosaic. The conjugal relations of a King and Queen were never subject to the ordinary laws of preference, attraction or even anger and disgust. The need for an heir had hardly diminished, and at some point in the autumn, following the summer crisis, relations were simply resumed with happy results. Yet even if Louis XIII himself irritably if understandably observed: ‘It is scarcely a miracle if a husband who sleeps with his wife gives her a child,’ the circumstances of the conception, followed by the birth of the long-desired son, were widely held to be extraordinary – and above all by the baby's mother. ‘Godgiven': it was a view of himself as someone of special destiny that Anne would impress upon the future Louis XIV.

On 14 January 1638 the royal doctor, Bouvard, informed Cardinal Richelieu of the Queen's condition. Two weeks later the news was broken in the
Gazette de France.
On 10 February – the occasion of Brother Fiacre's visit – Louis XIII invited the whole kingdom to pray for a Dauphin and placing it under the protection of the Blessed Virgin, commanded the country to celebrate the Feast of her Assumption on 15 August.
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The Queen underlined the connection by sending to Puy for a fragment of the Virgin's holy girdle to aid her in childbirth. Other sacred relics, to which Anne was in any case extremely partial, decorated her private oratory.
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The royal midwife, Dame Peronne, hitherto sadly under-employed, was installed some months before the expected date with her potions and her pots of pork fat recommended for rubbing during labour. The royal birthing-bed was readied: this was three feet wide, and consisted of two planks between two mattresses, a double bolster for use under the shoulders and two long wooden pegs on either side for the Queen to clutch during her ordeal. Very different from the elaborate great bed with its hangings and embroideries in which the Queen slept, the birth-bed was nevertheless an object of state, kept in a cupboard when not in use and produced for successive royal ladies.
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The Queen's health was good. There was no threat this time of a ‘wretched miscarriage', in the King's phrase: only the high figure of infant mortality haunted Anne as it haunted all parents at the time – and in this case the whole court. It has been reckoned that roughly one in two children died, and those that survived the birthing process remained statistically at risk until their first birthday and beyond, so that burials of children under five were not recorded in the parish registers. The only irksome moment – one common to all fathers, not only kings – was when the baby failed to arrive according to Louis XIII's precise schedule: he was anxious to leave for Picardy. The King snarled at the Queen, but the dating of childbirth, although calculated then as now from the last
règles
(monthly period), has never been a precise art and it is easily comprehensible that the royal doctors erred on the side of caution.

It was on Saturday 4 September that the Queen finally went into labour at the royal château of Saint-Germain. This wondrous castle, adjacent to the small town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ten miles from Paris, was raised high over the curving banks of the Seine. The air was pure. There were gardens and terraces going down to the river, in which it was fashionable for both ladies and gentlemen of the court to swim. Close by lay the forests so vital to the main royal leisure pursuit of hunting. The old château was of twelfth-century origin but had been completely rebuilt in the sixteenth century by François I; then the adjacent Château-Neuf, a more intimate residence, was begun in 1557 by Philibert de L'Orme and transformed by Louis XIII's father Henri IV. The Queen's labour took place here, in a room overlooking the river.
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The labour took place in public, or at any rate in the presence of the court, as was the royal custom of the time, so as to prevent the possible substitution of a living baby for a dead one – or a son for a daughter. After all, in this case the King and Queen had evidently not made love under the waxing moon, let alone practised the physical constriction of the left testicle from which females were supposed to be generated – two contemporary suggestions for producing males. In view of this attendance, courtiers had to work out a private signal for indicating the vital sex of the child without vulgarly shouting it out. Whatever her use later in the dynastic matrimonial stakes, the birth of a girl was always a source of vivid disappointment at the time; one royal princess of this period, whose husband wanted an heir, volunteered crossly to throw her newborn daughter in the river.
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Thus arms were to be kept folded for a girl, hats to be hurled in the air for a Dauphin.

It was at 11.20 a.m. on Sunday morning 5 September 1638 that the Queen's ordeal came to an end and hats were hurled violently, joyously, into the air. ‘We have a Dauphin!' declared Louis XIII. It was ‘the time when the Virgin was at her greatest strength', wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in
Le: Bonheur de Jour
the next year. This was a reference not so much to the Virgin Mary, under whose protection the baby had been placed in the womb, but to the astrological sign of Virgo, which, stretching between late August and late September could indeed be argued to be at its zenith on 5 September. The sun itself was also said to be exceptionally near to the earth, as though to salute the future King, and it was of course the day of the Sun, a traditionally auspicious day. Racine wrote of the galaxy at that moment that it was ‘a constellation composed of nine stars.’
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The sun and stars did indeed look down upon, and the Virgin blessed, an exceptionally strong and healthy baby.
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The boy now shown to the gratified courtiers was the first legitimate male to be born into the Bourbon royal family proper (excluding the Princes of the Blood) for thirty years – that is, since the birth of Gaston d'Orléans. Gaston's daughter and Louis's first cousin, Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, proud of her own Bourbon inheritance, referred to the ‘natural goodness' which ran in the veins of all the Bourbons.
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She contrasted it with the ‘venom’ which she believed ran in the blood of the Médicis – which Louis and of course Anne-Marie-Louise herself would have derived from their shared grandmother, Marie de Médicis, wife of Henri IV and daughter of the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany.

It is true that physically there was an Italianate darkness in all the grandchildren of Marie de Médicis. It appeared most notably in another of Louis's first cousins, Charles II of England, who bore a remarkable resemblance to his ancestor Lorenzo the Magnificent. But there was an equally strong mixture of Spanish and Austrian Habsburg blood in the baby's veins. Anne of Austria was herself the child of a Spanish father and an Austrian mother who was actually her husband's niece. Other uncle–niece unions had occurred within the succession, to say nothing of the repeated marriage of first cousins to insure against outside dilution. A trace of Jewish blood, for example, had entered the royal family of Aragon in the fifteenth century via the mother of Ferdinand of Aragon: constant intermarriage meant that this trace was preserved rather than dissolved.

And so the child who had been mature enough to be born with two teeth – auspicious in a male, less so for his wet-nurses – embarked on his life with cries of joy ringing in his ears: first of the court, then in the little town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, gradually spreading through all France.

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The infancy of Louis, the Godgiven child, was marked by two features, one common enough, the other anything but common. On the one hand he saw very little of his sickly father. That was not at all unusual by the standards of the time, any more than the increasing prospect of his father's death was outside the norm (Louis XIII had been only nine when his own father was assassinated, and in the previous century the accession of young kings had been the rule rather than the exception). Anecdotes survive of their relationship which designate irritability on the part of the father – but then Louis XIII, often in pain, was an irritable man. One story of the eighteen-month-old boy screaming at the sight of his father, and Anne of Austria's desperate efforts to retrieve the situation by demanding better behaviour from her son in the future, certainly has the ring of truth.

But then men, especially kings in their separate households, did not see much of their young children. Relations between the child's parents continued to flourish in one sense at least, for all Louis XIII's suspicion of his wife, since almost exactly two years after Louis, another boy, Philippe, was born on 22 September 1640; he was subsequently known as ‘Monsieur', the traditional title of the sovereign's second son, and sometimes as ‘Petit Monsieur' in the lifetime of his uncle Gaston.
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(This birth has always constituted the best proof that Louis was not some changeling procured from an alien source; and that marital relations continued at least sporadically between the royal couple.)

What was both uncommon and significant was the amount the young Louis saw of his mother. Contemporaries drew the obvious conclusion: that Anne had found the love with her first-born son that she had never found with her husband. The result was, as the ever-present La Porte observed, that Louis not only saw much more of his mother than children of his class generally did, but also loved her much more. In his own memoirs, written mainly in his twenties, Louis confirmed the pleasure he always took in her company: ‘Nature was responsible for the first knots which tied me to my mother. But attachments formed later by shared qualities of the spirit are far more difficult to break than those formed merely by blood.
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It is true that Anne's own mother, Margaret of Austria, also noted for her piety, had seen more of her daughter (before her premature death) than most queens in the remote atmosphere of the hierarchical Spanish court. But Anne's involvement was quite exceptional. One of the Queen's attendants wrote that her mistress hardly ever left the child: ‘She takes great joy in playing with him and taking him out in her carriage whenever the weather is fine; it is her great pleasure in life.’
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When the Queen woke up – at ten or eleven, except on days of devotion, very late by French standards – she went to her oratory and prayed at some length.
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She then received ladies concerned with her various charities, philanthropy being one of the historic roles of a queen. After that, her sons came to her, enjoying their specially commissioned furniture: a little green velvet chair with fringes and gilded nails for Louis and a type of red velvet walker for Monsieur. At his mother's ceremonial rising, a court affair, Louis frequently handed her the chemise, traditionally the prerogative of a high-born lady, not a child, sealing the deed with a kiss.

Except when they were very small, the children took their meals with their mother. Anne loved her food: not only the proverbial Spanish chocolate but bouillon, sausages, cutlets and
olla
– a rich Spanish stew-pot of vegetables. One result of this happy indulgence was that with the onset of middle age and two late pregnancies, her voluptuous figure swelled. Loyal commentators pretended that it made no difference to her beauty – and besides, the greenish eyes still sparkled, the hair was still abundant, the long white hands were as graceful (and well displayed) as ever. The other result was a positive image of food and eating for the young Louis: in time his appetite would astonish Europe and burden his court.

There are many vignettes of Louis's joy in his mother's company: he would join her in her luxurious marble bath in her Appartement des Bains. This was decorated in azure and gold with the mythological theme of Juno, another great queen, as well as pictures of Anne's Spanish relations by Velázquez. The huge marble bowl had lawn curtains and pillows at the bottom of it, a little wood-burning stove providing hot water. Here the pair would lounge, dressed according to the general custom of the time, whether bathing or swimming, in long grey smocks of coarse linen. La Porte gives a picture of the little boy jumping with joy at the news that his mother was going to her bath and begging to join her.
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No such delight greeted Anne's practice of visiting convents – a Queen of France had the right to visit even closed convents. The adult Louis would recreate the pleasures of the Appartement des Bains in a very different context but he never showed enormous enthusiasm for convents.
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