Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (8 page)

But Evelyn, in all the lushness of his description, also put his finger on an aspect of Louis's character, the Louis who lived through the complicated vicissitudes of the Fronde. His ‘countenance' was sweet, but at the same time it was ‘grave'. The impenetrable public composure which was to be such a marked characteristic of the mature Louis XIV was already in place.

The troubles of the Fronde were finally put to rest when the brilliant French soldier the Vicomte de Turenne, originally under the command of Condé, helped to defeat his former master on behalf of the court. In February 1653 Condé retreated to the service of Spain, and Cardinal Mazarin returned. A halcyon period lay ahead, in which the young Apollo was displayed by his mother in a series of godlike appearances, symbolic of peace not war. They also, of course, symbolised the power of the crown.

Dancing was the key element in all this. The importance of the dance at this time, as vital to young men as fencing, was considered to be so great that even the Jesuits saw it as necessary to instruct their pupils in the art. Among the various genres, that of the Court Ballet, developed in Italy and brought to France by Catherine de Médicis, needed a ceremonial dignity, at which Louis XIV had a natural talent: already by the age of eight he was described as dancing ‘perfectly'. As a young man he excelled at the grave so-called Slow Courante and could perform the necessary turn-out of legs and feet with supreme elegance.
*

In the
Ballet of the Night
at the carnival of 1653, Louis wore for the first time the costume of the rising sun, while one of the lines spoke of the ‘coming marvels' to be expected of this glittering vision. Alongside him danced a young musician of twenty, born in Italy, now French, who had recently been in the service of the Grande Mademoiselle, Jean-Baptiste Lully. Professional dancers posed as beggars with bandaged wounds so that they could be ‘cured' in the Court of Miracles. A few months later, in a ballet called
The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis,
Louis played Apollo himself, surrounded by the first ladies of the kingdom dancing the nine muses. Henriette-Anne, at the time of the Fronde reduced to shivering in her bed for lack of heat and food, was now thought suited to the role of Erato, muse of erotic poetry; she was not yet ten years old but her position as the first princess in France after her aunt and mother entitled her to the role. In case anyone missed the significance of these government exercises in propaganda, Louis, playing a sorcerer in the
Ballet of the Feasts of Bacchus,
was hailed with these lines: ‘He is indeed the Master of the Future: / You only need to look upon his eyes and his countenance.’
¹⁹

For once in royal annals, there was actually no need of exaggeration to hail the fourteen-year-old King in this manner. All contemporary accounts agree that he was astonishingly handsome at this stage. The beautiful, long, curling hair, sentimentally praised by the Grande Mademoiselle, was only one of his physical assets, but it was much prized at the time. (Queen Anne struck many a graceful attitude combing thick locks which her son had inherited.) Louis's figure was described as ‘tall, free, ample and robust' while his bearing was characteristic of ‘those whom we speak of as having the blood of gods.’
²⁰
*
This particular eulogy went on: above all this nonpareil had to be seen dancing the ballet; then he appeared as ‘Heaven's masterpiece, the gift of God to France'. It did not need the indulgent eyes of his mother and the court, relaxing at last after the divisive horrors of the Fronde, to see in the juvenile grace of Louis a triumphant presage – once again as at his birth – of a golden age.

On 7 June 1654 Louis XIV was consecrated King of France, according to the custom of his ancestors, in the cathedral at Rheims, north-east of Paris. Those princes present did not include his uncle Gaston, in exile at Blois, nor the Grand Condé, now serving his erstwhile enemy in Spain. But the array was magnificent, the ceremony prolonged, beginning at six in the morning, and the whole ritual ostentatiously holy and historic.
†
Seated in a specially constructed box, Queen Anne was radiant with her son's public triumph; only the presence of the widowed Henrietta Maria beside her provided a kind of
memento mori.

But Louis XIV did not only look a romantic ideal at this point: he himself felt full of romance towards women. He loved to play the guitar, the plucked stringed instrument introduced from Spain (where it had been brought by the Arabs).
²³
He was originally influenced by his mother and the memories of the Spanish court of her faraway, idealised youth. But it was Cardinal Mazarin who saw to it that Louis had the best available teacher, a fellow Italian, Francisco Corbetta, who by the mid-century had published two guitar books for the rulers of the cities of Bologna and Milan, and probably another for the King of Spain.

Playing the guitar was a notably less ceremonious occupation than dancing in the formal Court Ballet: at the same time, what was the Spanish guitar if not a weapon of courtship in the hands of a gallant? It was significant in this context that the return of Mazarin meant the institution once again of a kind of home life, as had been enjoyed before the Fronde, but it was now a home life which included a host of Mazarin's female relations, a lively collection of Italian girls. For the Cardinal had a desire, laudable by most family standards (if not those of the jealous French), to surround himself with his own blood, and arrange ambitious marriages for them.
²⁴

These Mazarinettes, as they were known, were seven strong, plus three brothers, and had started arriving in court in 1647. They included the Martinozzis, children of Mazarin's eldest sister; Laura, a few years older than Louis, would marry the heir to the Duke of Modena. Anna Maria married the Prince de Conti who was the younger brother of the Grand Condé.

The Martinozzis were blonde and pliant. The same could not be said of the Mancini girls, five of them altogether, whose ages in 1654 ranged from nineteen to five. These were the children of Mazarin's second sister Hieronyma, who had married up into a higher degree of the Italian nobility. With their zest for life, their combative high spirits, their intelligence and their dark ‘Roman' looks, the Mancinis were very far from being the contemporary ideal, at least in theory. It was not so much that they were dark – although it was female fairness which was constantly praised as representing perfection. It was more the Mancinis' general disdain for conventions. Every preacher, every philosopher preached the need for feminine passivity and submission. As Hortense Mancini, the acknowledged beauty of the family, wrote in her memoirs: ‘I know that the glory of a woman consists in never talking of herself.’ Or as a certain governess would sum it up later, a woman born Françoise d'Aubigné: ‘modesty should be the lot of women … your sex obliges you to obedience. Suffer much before you complain about it.’
²⁵
The Mancinis on the other hand were active and early on entered the courtly business of fascination.

The eldest was the sweet-natured Victoire – ‘the only wise one' – who married the Duc de Mercoeur. Olympe, Louis's exact contemporary, was a famous charmer, quite as determined as her uncle to make the best of her chances. The beautiful Hortense, born in 1646 following two boys, looked ‘like an angel'; she was easygoing but wayward; the novelist the Comtesse de La Fayette noted acidly that Hortense, unlike her sisters, had no wit but to some people at court ‘that was yet another mark in her favour’.
²⁶
Marianne, the youngest, who would marry the Duc de Bouillon, loved poetry and later saw herself as the protectress of poets, including La Fontaine.

There was however a Cinderella in the family, to quote the ancient folk fairy story which would be published in its French version towards the end of this century in Perrault's
Tales of Mother Goose.
This particular Cinderella was the middle child, a year younger than the sparkling Olympe. And the role of the vindictive Ugly Sister was played in her life not by Olympe or Hortense – the Mancini girls were always strongly supportive of each other – but by her own mother.

Marie Mancini was the darkest of all the girls and very slender. With her long thin arms and her wide mouth (at least she showed the contemporary rarity of perfect white teeth when she smiled), Marie appalled her mother with her lack of classical looks. The lethargic and anxious Hieronyma Mancini, inspired by a horoscope which predicted that Marie would cause trouble in the future, demanded on her deathbed that the Cardinal should shut Marie up in a convent and keep her there.

Surrounded by these young women in a pleasant domestic atmosphere, it was inevitable that Louis would fall in love with one of them. Or more than one. It was not a question of sexual initiation. There was a tradition among sophisticated European royals that this was the task – or privilege – of an accommodating older court lady. When Louis was hardly in his teens, the enchanting Duchesse de Châtillon, known as Bablon, was alleged to have set her cap at him. A dismissive rhyme was written on the subject by the sharp-penned Bussy-Rabutin: ‘If you are ready / The King is not … / Your beauty deserves more / Than a minority.' Now fifteen, Louis was ready. Just as Charles II, while still Prince of Wales, had been seduced by the opulent Mrs Christabella Wyndham, Louis is always supposed to have been initiated by one of his mother's most trusted ladies-in-waiting (she had taken part in the flight from the Palais-Royal on that fateful night). ‘One-eyed Kate', as the Baronne de Beauvais was nicknamed, was about twenty-four years older than Louis, much closer to his mother's age than his own. The incident was said to have taken place as Louis was on the way back from the baths – ‘she ravished him or at least surprised him' – and to have been enjoyable enough to be repeated on several more occasions.
²⁷

The evidence for this is, it is true, based on later gossip. Primi Visconti and the Duc de Saint-Simon both mention the story with confidence, although the former first arrived in France in 1673 and the latter was only born in 1675. Nevertheless there seems enough support to give the story plausibility. Madame de Beauvais was rewarded with a house and pension – conceivably for services to the mother rather than the son, or possibly both. More cogently, the young Saint-Simon remembered her, wrinkled and by this time almost entirely blind, being treated with great respect at Versailles by Louis XIV and accorded that ultimate mark of favour, a talk with the King ‘privately’.
²⁸

Where romantic flirtation as opposed to sex was concerned, Louis was originally captivated by Olympe Mancini, with her delicious
fossettes
or dimples and her ‘eyes full of fire'. Olympe had a dubious reputation: she was described as having a nature ‘little touched with Christian maxims', and there were rumours that Louis slept with her. It was certainly possible. It is true that this was an age when in the marriage-market all girls had to enter, virginity was highly prized and virgins closely watched: the Cardinal's men were after all everywhere. Yet Olympe's subsequent career would show her to be a bold and even amoral woman, not afraid to barter her physical charms for her own advantage – or for her own pleasure. There were always those who took the risk of breaking the rules, and Olympe was certainly among them. In the course of time she was rewarded with a semi-royal match to a Savoyard prince who became the Comte de Soissons. Olympe's condition was that she should remain at the French court. Here her Italian zest and voluptuous looks continued to be generally admired – not least by the King.

Olympe Mancini knew the rules – the rules of the court as laid down by Queen and Cardinal. Yet already Louis was beginning to challenge his mother's authority, especially where his own pleasures were concerned. In 1655, at a so-called Petit Bal held by Queen Anne in her apartments to honour her niece Henriette-Anne, the Queen instructed her son to open the proceedings by dancing with his cousin. Instead of agreeing, as protocol demanded, Louis made it quite clear that he preferred to dance with Victoire Mancini Duchesse de Mercoeur and took her hand, muttering something about not wishing to dance with little girls (Henriette-Anne was nearly eleven but small for her age). Her appearance, in Louis's graceless expression, reminded him of the bones of the Holy Innocents.
²⁹

It was a calculated affront not only to the English royal family but also to Queen Anne's own authority. Furious, she yanked Victoire de Mercoeur from her son's grasp. In vain poor Queen Henrietta Maria ran after Queen Anne with the polite fiction that her daughter had a bad foot and thus no wish to dance. Queen Anne insisted. Louis sulked but in the end the mother's will prevailed. The question must however have been in her mind as in that of other observers of the sullen seventeen-year-old boy: for how long?

* Not only did sexual relations outside marriage constitute a mortal sin by the rules of the Catholic Church (putting the sinner in danger of hell if she/he died without repenting), but taking communion in such a state was a further grave offence. Anne however was noted for being a frequent communicant in an age when not many people were.

* In France there was a contemporary obsession with the idea of homosexuality being ‘Italian’; Primi Visconti, born in Piedmont, was once told, to his great indignation, that ‘in Spain the monks, in France the nobility, in Italy everyone’ was homosexual. Primi Visconti's racy memoirs of the French court where he arrived in 1673 are a useful source, given that he was frequently in the company of Louis XIV.
³