Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (14 page)

The King's assault on Louise's virtue was estimated to have lasted six weeks before she granted him what
The Loves of Mademoiselle de La Vallière,
an anonymous pamphlet, described euphemistically as ‘that ravishing grace for which the greatest men make vows and prayers’.
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At this point the King was not free from that perennial problem of illicit love-making: where to do it. Louise, as a mere maid-of-honour, lived with her colleagues under the watchful eye of a duenna, and the King's apartments were a kind of public concourse where people flocked, anxious to establish their rank by their presence close to the sovereign. The answer was the apartment of Louis's good friend the Comte de Saint-Aignan: like all the courtiers in favour, Saint-Aignan was granted an in-house room, in this case conveniently on the first floor (many of the courtiers slummed it in tiny attic rooms in order to preserve that precious proximity to the royal scene). Here Louise pleaded, according to the same pamphlet: ‘Have pity on my weakness!' And here the King, after an appropriate duration of siege, showed no pity.

Louise's initial resistance was not a charade. Her piety was genuine and in order to sacrifice her virginity she had somehow to convince herself – or be convinced – that sleeping with the King was a kind of holy duty. But of course this maidenly reluctance by no means discouraged her suitor, especially as he was well aware that his prey was madly in love with him ‘for himself’. A story comes down from the eighteenth century of a pastoral incident, where the appropriate author might be Marivaux rather than Molière. Louise sat in the shade of an arbour with some other ladies and confided to them on the subject of the King: ‘The crown adds nothing to the charm of his person; it even diminishes the danger [of falling for him]. He would be altogether too much for an impressionable heart to resist if he was not King.' Surprise! Louis himself was actually concealed behind the arbour with an equerry and heard everything.

But if the provenance of the story is uncertain, since Versailles figures in it (not yet reconstructed), it strikes exactly the right note for Louis's initial pursuit of the girl, her sense of danger coupled with her bashful admission that this particular king needed no crown to make him attractive to women. It was not a question of the aphrodisiac of power, but the aphrodisiac of his person: that was the message Louis had found so beguiling in Marie Mancini and once again in Louise. Bussy-Rabutin, impressed by Louise's passionate devotion, wrote that she would have loved the King just as much if their positions had been reversed, with her the Queen and he but an ordinary gentleman.
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True or not, Louis believed it to be true. And of course throughout the days, weeks of this pursuit (temporarily complicated as an amazed and indignant Henriette-Anne finally understood what was going on) Louise wept. Her tears of anxiety, tears of agonised indecision and finally tears of submission were also a satisfying part of this classic seduction.

One of the original aspects of Louise's character was her lack of materialism, or what many would have thought at the time was actually a lack of proper care for her own interests and those of her family and circle. But she had no circle and did not try to make one. In this she stood apart from virtually every other woman in Louis's life. This singularity, which sprang perhaps from her need to feel her motives for loving the King were pure and even in some way holy, was not at first appreciated by those around her. Fouquet, the Intendant of Finance, was already under threat as Colbert determinedly presented the King with copious evidence of his money-making at the state's expense. Fouquet, unaware of the trouble brewing, thought he had identified a subtle method of keeping in with the King by bribing Louise.

Louise was outraged and the King likewise, the latter believing wrongly that Fouquet had actually tried to make love to the girl whereas his aim had merely been to establish a useful line of communication to his master. None of this helped the future of the minister who chose to give a splendiferous feast on 17 August at his vast palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built for him by the architect Le Vau in the late 1650s.
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King and royal family attended. It was all aimed at honouring Fouquet's young master, with a sideshow of demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of a great man. But was it so wise to demonstrate wealth and magnificence in excess of that of the sovereign? In the era before the construction and official habitation of the palace of Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte was evidently more splendid than any of Louis's own residences. The week before the feast, Fouquet was told that Queen Anne had made the following comment on his lifestyle to which the Intendant of Finance should perhaps have paid more attention: ‘The King would like to be rich and does not appreciate those who are richer than he is, because they can set about undertakings which he cannot afford; in any case he is quite certain that the great wealth of such men has been stolen from him.’
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With ruthlessness – a new quality in the King's behaviour – and the secrecy taught to him by his boyhood, Louis attended the great feast with every sign of pleasure. Then in September Fouquet was arrested, charged with corruption and imprisoned (under harsh conditions) for life. It was true that this was only the public face of Fouquet's fall. There were private reasons to do with Mazarin's vast fortune and the dubious methods by which it had been acquired that Louis (who had inherited it) and Colbert (previously in Fouquet's employ) were anxious to mask. Yet it was symbolic that the King also confiscated, as it were, Fouquet's artistic imagination. The architect Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the incomparable garden-designer Le Nôtre, the team that had brought Vaux-le-Vicomte to Fouquet, were shortly to create Versailles for Louis XIV.

On 1 November, the propitious Catholic feast of All Saints, Queen Marie-Thérèse ‘by a happy deliverance' gave birth to a son, Louis de France, a Dauphin to whom his father gave the new title of ‘Monseigneur'. During the twelve-hour labour, Spanish actors and musicians danced a ballet beneath the royal windows, with harps but also guitars and castanets to remind Marie-Thérèse of her native land. It is to be hoped that these Spanish sounds diverted the poor Queen, who kept crying out in her native language: ‘I don't want to give birth, I want to die.’
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However, within a few months she had fallen pregnant again.

Five days after the birth of the Dauphin, Marie-Thérèse's stepmother also gave birth; the twinship of these two babies might have echoed the twin births of Louis and Marie-Thérèse if they had been of opposite sexes, and marriage would have been immediately envisaged as Queen Anne had foretold at Fuenterrabia. Instead Carlos became the new heir to the Spanish throne (his elder brother Philip Prosper had died), demoting both his half-sister Marie-Thérèse and his full sister Margarita Teresa in the line of succession. But for how long? From babyhood, it seemed evident to the doctors that the Infante Carlos was not destined for a long life. Although this turned out to be a singularly inaccurate prediction, the doctors' analysis of his frail condition, both mentally and physically, was on surer ground;
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in particular his lack of proper development would raise questions about Carlos's ability to beget children. So the question of the future Spanish succession was already lurking. The Dauphin, a large and remarkably healthy baby, described by the enthusiastic versifier Loret as a living masterpiece’,
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was the nearest male heir, after the sickly Carlos – except of course that his mother had renounced her rights of succession.

Meanwhile Louis's undercover love affair with Louise de La Vallière flourished. In theory it had to be conducted in secret because of the sensibilities of the two Queens, the mother and the wife, although very little was ever secret at the French court. But a far more experienced and wily opponent to Louis's illicit amours was now about to engage him in battle, a contest that would last for the next twenty odd years with neither side conceding defeat or receiving total victory, although both had their triumphs. This was the Catholic Church.

The power of the Church in seventeenth-century France over the conscience of its followers, who were the vast majority of the population, was enormous and should not be underestimated even where an ‘absolute' King was concerned. The betrayed Marie-Thérèse, with the sensitivity of a woman in love, probably became aware of what was happening sooner than most people thought, despite difficulties of language and her grand isolation. In the autumn of 1662, on the eve of the birth of her second child, she made some public remarks in Spanish about ‘that girl, the woman the King loves' which indicated that for some time she had not been fooled. Ignorant of the art of intrigue, however, there was nothing much Marie-Thérèse could do about the situation, beyond bemoaning it to Queen Anne, particularly as the King's promised conjugal ardour did not diminish.

Queen Anne, an altogether more doughty operator, as witness her dismissal of Marie Mancini, had a different perspective. In a sense she had brought the La Vallière affair about by her horrified reaction to the over-close friendship with the King's ‘sister' Henriette-Anne. No one knew better than this majestic survivor that great men tended to have mistresses, even if her own husband's loves had been platonic. The Spanish kings, including her brother Philip IV, had had numerous entanglements, and as for the French! It was significant that the most popular king in French history was Louis's grandfather Henri IV, the role model of manliness and swagger, who had been a philanderer on a serious scale. But Queen Anne was not a cynic and she was sincerely pious. What worried her was the thought of Louis's immortal soul, the state of sin into which he had plunged himself. There was no resignation here, only a helpless sadness.

The Catholic Church however was not helpless. And Louis's religion, in which he had been so carefully trained by his mother, might be simple, as commentators sometimes pointed out, but it was sincere: and because it was simple it was not for that reason shallow. He understood, since it had been constantly reiterated to him, that kings had been put in charge of their peoples by God, but that kings were for this reason answerable to God. These feelings, incidentally, were in quite a different category from his attitude to the Church in France as an organisation, and its connection to the overall government of the Pope in Rome. His relationship with Louise was adulterous (that is to say, as a married man he was committing adultery while she of course was not).

It was the matter of an adulterer receiving Holy Communion that became the symbolic battlefield of this epic struggle, since the King publicly attended the Mass daily – in his entire life, he only missed attending daily Mass two or three times – and any falling away in receiving Communion drew public attention.
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The reason was not really very difficult for outsiders to perceive. Already Fouquet, in his unwise approaches to Louise, had noticed the royal ‘backslidings' where taking Communion was concerned and drawn the correct conclusion. This was a mini-scandal for those who cared to note it. But ahead of King Louis, as the year 1662 dawned, loomed an annual occasion which became central to the drama of his illicit affairs: the occasion when he made his Easter duties
(faire ses Päques).
By the rules of the Catholic Church, a professing Catholic had to make his or her confession at Easter or thereabouts, followed by Communion.
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This was an extremely public event for a monarch, a testing time. What was more, notable prelates were invited to preach the Lenten sermons, not always as compliant to weakness as the private confessor.

Every king had his personal confessor, and the Jesuits, traditionally confessors to the kings of France, had a more relaxed approach to the subject of human frailty than some of the mighty monastic orders who did not. A quick confession and a firm promise of amendment, totally sincere at the time, could be followed by Absolution and Communion; the confessor would hope that a soft approach would bring the (moderately) penitent monarch to virtue by slow degrees.

The Jesuit Father François Annat, over seventy at the time of this first crisis of the King's marital life, had been Louis's confessor since he was sixteen, and as was his duty had nursed him through his various adolescent troubles. He practised discretion and detachment: the confessional was after all secret, and as Louis approvingly remarked later, he did not get mixed up in any intrigues. Father Annat was a great enemy of extremism in the Catholic Church, so-called ‘Jansenism’.
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He had written a work attacking the type of austere Catholic who thought that ‘those not chosen were predestined to damnation' – a doctrine of grace close to Calvinism – some twenty years earlier,
Quibbles of the Jansenists.
Saint-Simon later denounced Father Annat as a ‘supple Jesuit' responsible for tolerating much wrongdoing. It is difficult however to see how a less ‘supple' confessor would have survived so long at the King's side, with the aim all along of one day drawing in the long rein and bringing him back to the path of virtue.

The views of the great prelates were, on the other hand, a great deal less supple. What went on in private in the confessional, promises made and broken, did not concern them. What went on in public, to the edification or scandal of the entire nation, did. The celebrated series of Lenten sermons which led up each year to the great public feast of Easter with the absolute necessity of a public Communion from the monarch (if in a state of grace, that is) were very different from the private counsels of Father Annat. It was a crucial factor in the first phase of the affair of Louis and Louise that the Lenten sermons of 1662 were to be given by the rising orator and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet.