The Bourbon Kings of France (14 page)

To his subjects no King could have seemed less remote. Every day thousands of Parisians rode out in special public conveyances to see him eating or walking at his new palace. (It was rather as though Queen Elizabeth II lunched daily in public at Hampton Court.) Anyone dressed like a gentleman and wearing a sword was admitted to the gardens—swords could be hired at the gates for a small fee—while the royal apartments were frequently open to the public. Louis greeted everyone politely. This gift of living gracefully in public was largely responsible for the extraordinary popularity which he enjoyed during the greater part of his reign.

He was awakened at about eight in the morning. Having greeted the few courtiers privileged to have the
grande entrée
, he said the Office of the Holy Spirit. He then dressed, each garment being handed to him with ceremony after which he wiped his face and hands on a napkin soaked in spirits of wine; on alternate mornings he was shaved. (He seldom took baths but changed his clothes, including his linen, three times a day.) His breakfast consisted of white bread, and hot wine and water or sage tea. He then said more prayers and completed his dressing. The
Lever
was now over. After giving orders for the day, he heard Mass. There followed a meeting of the Council or audiences. The King dined at one o’clock, alone and in public at a square table. He ate a comparatively light meal with plenty of fruit and vegetables, which he washed down with the still, grey champagne of Bouzy. (The fizzy variety was not yet known at court, though Dom Perignon had just invented it.) In the afternoon Louis either slept with his current mistress or took some other exercise. Often he hunted or went shooting on foot, being an excellent shot. After breaking his arm in 1683, he took to following hounds in a fast wagonette which he drove himself, or spent more time walking in his beloved gardens. When he returned, he recommenced work in his study. Supper was often served as late as eleven-thirty pm. It was Louis’s main meal, and he ate enormously; in the old-fashioned way he never used a fork, eating with his fingers. Finally there was an entertainment—music, dancing, cards or billiards or some other gambling game. He usually went to bed at about one in the morning, with no less ceremony than at his rising.

Versailles was the instrument by which Louis tamed the upper nobility. He drew them to court with an unending series of entertainments and also by the lure of titles and pensions; these were of vital importance to an aristocracy which was to a large extent impoverished. Versailles was the only road to preferment and promotion; there were posts to be had in the royal household and in the Dauphin’s household, commissions in the army, bishoprics, abbeys, canonries. Once at court, noblemen grew still poorer, from gambling or from having to buy splendid clothes. If they would not come, Louis ordered the
Intendant
in their province to make life difficult for them. Within a few years the dangerous war-lords, who only recently had terrorized France, were transformed into foppish courtiers, grateful for gifts to relieve their debt-ridden lives. There was only one plot against his government during the entire reign.

Louis has frequently been accused of destroying the French ruling class, but it will have been seen in the preceding chapters that he had good reason for doing so. Nor did he only make fops of his nobles: the courtiers of Versailles were moulded into an officer corps—each one could be called to the colours at a moment’s notice. In addition they frequently acted as commission agents, who for a given fee would procure an audience of the King to interest him in some commercial or scientific project, rather like modern public relations men.

If Louis was often responsible for financially ruining his nobles, he could show great kindness in individual cases. Mme de Sévigné tells us that when Marshal de Bellefonds came to the King in 1672 to resign his post at court, Louis took him aside and asked, ‘
Monsieur le Maréchal
, why do you want to leave me? Has it to do with religion? Or do you simply want to retire? Is it your heavy debts? If it is the latter, I will settle them and must know more about your affairs.’ The Marshal replied, ‘Sire, it is my debts. I am ruined. I cannot let my friends, who have helped me, suffer because I’m unable to pay them.’ ‘In that case,’ said the King, ‘their debts must be made good. I’m going to give you 100,000 francs for your house at Versailles and a guarantee of 400,000 francs which will serve as a surety should you die. You can pay off what you owe with the 100,000 francs—and then you can stay in my service.’

To read the memoirs of Saint-Simon—who hated him—is to experience something of Louis XIV’s strange fascination. ‘Never did a man use his words, his smiles, even his mere glances, with more grace,’ wrote the Duke grudgingly; ‘no man was ever more polite by instinct or more correct, or knew better how to honour age, merit or rank … his smallest gesture, his walk, his bearing, were all most fitting and becoming, being noble, grand and majestic, and yet perfectly natural.’ Louis knew not only how to overawe, but also how to charm. When an old courtier asked him for permission to leave Versailles, the King answered, ‘We have known each other for too long to say good-bye at our age, when we cannot hope to find new friends—don’t desert me!’ The compliment he paid to the aged Condé, who was having difficulty in climbing the stairs at Versailles, is legendary: ‘One who carries such a weight of laurels can only move slowly.’ These compliments were paid in a voice which was at once dignified and charming. He was elegant even in his rages; having been grossly insulted by a certain nobleman, the King threw his cane out of the window, saying, ‘I should be sorry to strike a man of quality.’ Above all, says Saint-Simon, ‘he had no equal with women’. He had an ineffable way of half-raising himself at supper for each lady who arrived at table. He never passed the humblest petticoat without raising his hat, not even chambermaids. (The
honnête homme
, or French gentleman, of the period could be surprisingly polite to servants—the Duc de Beauvilliers apologized to his coachman if he kept him waiting.)

Louis’s chief fault was his ferocious
amour propre
. The ambassador of the Elector of Brandenburg, Ezekiel Spannheim, noted in 1690 that the King was ‘jealous to the smallest detail of his authority, excessively touchy about everything which concerns it or could harm it’. All the same, says Herr Spannheim, ‘he is easily influenced by advisers and adopts their policies.’ Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim (which he never made)
‘l’état, c’est moi’
. The ‘state’ of Louis XIV was the bureaucracy which he created—his Council of a few all-powerful ministers, and the
Intendants
, each of whom was supreme in his province, overriding the Governor, the Parlement and the municipalities. These chosen servants often acted without their master realizing fully what they were about. As the years went by, however, Louis paid more and more attention to business, working as much as ten hours a day.

By the 1680s Louis was middle-aged and running to fat. His face was lined and sagging; because of the removal of several teeth from his upper jaw—the doctors broke it, smashing his palate—his mouth was shrunken, with pursed lips. He had shaved off his moustache and in place of his own long hair wore a full-bottomed periwig. Sometimes his eyes looked tired, even in official portraits. In 1686 his health was cruelly tested by a terrible operation for an anal fistula; on two occasions, fully conscious, he bore being cut many times, without a sound. Also he probably weakened himself by excessive purges (usually camomile or rhubarb). Yet he kept his huge appetite for food and women, and his love of exercise. At this period he dressed plainly, in a neat brown coat, with a waistcoat of red, green or blue, and the
Cordon Bleu
of the Saint-Esprit. Maturity made him more imposing than ever.

He was not only adored by his subjects, but was the most admired man in Christendom; as Voltaire says, ‘Louis was looked on as the
only
King in Europe.’ Every European sovereign built his own Versailles, copied its etiquette and furniture and learnt to speak French. Schönbrunn in Austria, Het Loo in Holland, the garden façade of Hampton Court, still bear witness to their admiration. Foreigners flocked in crowds to see King Louis.

There were now new personalities at court. ‘Monseigneur’, as the Dauphin was known, was very tall, fat and yellow-haired. Dull, lazy, but unusually good-natured, he bore little resemblance to his father, who overawed him. Having been beaten and crammed by his tutors, Monseigneur detested books, although he collected pictures and furniture in his exquisite flat at Versailles and enjoyed good music. He lacked any aptitude for soldiering, but loved wolf-hunting above all else, exterminating wolves in the Ile de France. A shy man, he preferred to live quietly at Meudon with his ugly Bavarian wife, to whom he was devoted, until she succumbed to melancholia. They had three sons—the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou and Berry. When his wife died in 1690, he married a certain Mlle de Choin, whose greatest charm, in the Dauphin’s eyes, was her enormous bosom. If he had little influence, Monseigneur was none the less often to be seen at court, for his father was fond of him.

Louis liked all his children, including his bastards whom he legitimized, though they did not rank as Princes of the Blood. Of these the most important was his eldest son by Athénais—Louis-Auguste, whom the King made Duc du Maine. Sickly, limping and ineffectual, he failed miserably in his ambition to be a great soldier; he turned out both cowardly and boastful. (Even so, Saint-Simon’s portrait of him is a spiteful caricature.) Louis married him to one of Condé’s granddaughters. His brother, the Comte de Toulouse, was also a dull creature, but proved reasonably successful as a naval officer. He too was found a wealthy wife, one of the Noailles.

There was a nasty little scandal in 1682, when a homosexual clique was discovered at Versailles. It included Louis’s son by La Vallière, the fifteen-year-old Duc de Vermandois, who had been corrupted by the Chevalier de Lorraine. Vermandois was treated with such contempt by the King that he left court of his own accord and joined the army. A sickly boy, he died the following year.

The most colourful arrival at court was Monsieur’s second wife (Madame had died in 1670), Liselotte von der Pfalz—the Princess-Palatine. This ugly German blonde with the figure of a Swiss Guard, was a convert from Protestantism, fat and red-faced, fond of dogs, beer and sausages, and much disliked by the court—a dislike which she heartily reciprocated. If unintel-lectual, Liselotte was brutally shrewd and observant, and her letters give a vivid picture of life at Versailles. Neither she nor Monsieur, now grown pot-bellied and stilted, but still festooned with diamonds and obsessed with his complexion, were exactly in love but they did their duty; after many failures Philippe managed to beget a son by—so he believed, according to his wife—rubbing his manhood with a holy medal.

The most formidable member of the King’s new circle was his own second wife. Queen Maria Theresa died in 1683, her health undermined by pregnancies, killed by the excessive bleeding ordered by the doctors. (Colbert died the same year, sad and disillusioned.) Louis, to the court’s astonishment, wept bitterly. He had been faithful to her for the last two years, even after being badly shaken by the death of a young mistress, Marie Angélique de Fontanges, in 1681. Among the friends of Mme de Montespan was a dark, statuesque widow in her forties, Mme Françoise Scarron. She was the granddaughter of Agrippa d’Aubigné, Henri IV’s old henchman. Her father was a ne’er-do-well who had murdered his first wife, and Françoise had been born in prison, her mother being the governor’s daughter. Since then her life had been as unusual as it was poverty-stricken. As a young girl, having been abandoned by her parents after a sojourn in Martinique where her father died, she was converted to Catholicism. At sixteen she married a crippled and disreputable poet, Paul Scarron, partly from pity, partly from poverty. Although the marriage could not be consummated, she was happy enough, gathering a little salon around her in their house in the Marais. However, Scarron died when she was twenty-four, leaving her almost penniless. Luckily, the Queen Mother, who had been one of Scarron’s patrons, took pity on the pretty young widow and gave her a pension. Pious, yet none the less fond of the
beau monde
, Mme Scarron took up residence in a fashionable convent where she filled her time with good works and embroidery. She knew many people at court and was recommended to Athénais as a suitable person to bring up her children. One of nature’s governesses, she did this so efficiently and showed such discretion that the King rewarded her with a marquisate and the little estate of Maintenon.

Louis first began to know her well during their mutual concern over the health of the little Duc de Maine. He had started by disliking her, but eventually he came to admire her strong mysterious character and Junoesque figure. With her fine eyes and sober, enigmatic charm, dressed in elegant black with a becoming widow’s cap, she was far from unattractive. Eventually he fell in love with her, but to his amazement the former widow Scarron refused to sleep with him; it was she who persuaded him to return to the Queen’s bed. When Maria Theresa died, the King married Mme de Maintenon in secret—the date has never been discovered, but it was probably some time in 1684. He needed her: ‘When a man leaves his youth behind him, he nearly always requires the companionship of a woman of even temper’, is Voltaire’s comment. Françoise did not find her exalted position one of unalloyed enjoyment—Louis, still voracious, must have been an exhausting husband for a middle-aged woman who was probably still a virgin. It is the measure of her remarkable personality that this new, morganatic wife was accepted without demur by the royal family and by the court.

For over thirty years the King showed an unwavering taste for domesticity. Although Mme de Maintenon complained of his unflagging virility, he was never once unfaithful. She rarely ventured out of her apartments, so her bedroom became his office; their two chairs were on each side of the fireplace, separated by Louis’s table where he worked at his state papers. She set up a little theatre next door to her flat; here courtiers performed carefully chosen plays. Under her sober influence Louis grew pious. Operas were forbidden during Lent, and everyone had to communicate at Easter—people were rebuked for talking during Mass. Saint-Simon says that the court, in its efforts to please, ‘sweated hypocrisy’. There was something a little sanctimonious about Mme de Maintenon. She favoured people one moment, only to cast them off the next. None the less she kept her place by her piety and won her ‘battle for the King’s soul’.