Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (9 page)

* It was a type of breaststroke which was in question, with the face out of the water: proposed by the German professor Nicolas Wynman in his
Colymbetes
of 1538, as a protection against drowning.

* The close family connection of the European royal families at this date is demonstrated by the fact that the young princes and princesses of France, England, Spain and Savoy were all first cousins, descended from the five children of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis: Louis and Monsieur (Louis XIII); Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier and her Orléans half-sisters (Gaston); Charles II, James, Henriette-Anne and Mary wife of William II of Orange (Henrietta Maria); Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain (Elisabeth); Charles Emmanuel and Marguerite-Yolande of Savoy (Christine).

* The Parlement de Paris was not a parliament in the English sense of the word but a High Court with jurisdiction over a third of the kingdom; there were other provincial Parlements.

* In addition, the sudden death of Ladislas IV of Poland precipitating a crisis in the monarchy, the death of Christian IV of Denmark at a critical moment for his country and a revolt in Moscow against the Tsar Alexis meant that her comment of 1648 was fully justified.

* The term ‘the Grande Mademoiselle' will be used in future here to denote Anne-Marie-Louise, although it was in fact a title used later to distinguish her from her senior half-sister, meaning ‘the Elder Mademoiselle', not a reference to her stature, moral or physical.

* The turn-out of Louis XIV's time was 90 degrees, i.e. each leg turned out 45 degrees from the centre-line, rather than the 180 degrees which has become the norm.

* Louis XIV is always mentioned as being tall by those who knew him, like the Grande Mademoiselle: in another account he was mentioned as half a head taller than Cardinal Mazarin, whom no one described as being short. The myth of the small King elevating himself on high heels is based on a misconception about fashion at the time. Charles II for example, who was well over six feet tall, also wore high heels. Historians now think that Louis XIV was probably about 5'9”.
²¹

† The attention paid to the mere fact of consecration in this period may be judged by the earnest dilemma of a young English Royalist, Mary Eure, in 1653. Needing to be touched for the King's Evil, as scrofula was termed, she could not decide between Louis XIV (as yet unconsecrated) and Charles II (a king without a throne).
²²

CHAPTER 3
Peace and the Infanta

‘Good news, Madame! … I bring Your Majesty peace and the Infanta.’

– Cardinal Mazarin to Anne of Austria, 1659

B
y 1657, Louis XIV, approaching nineteen, was evidently of marriageable age. It could be argued that he was the most brilliant match in Europe: and if that was true, the one bride who was equal to him in her superb rank was his first cousin the Infanta Maria Teresa. This was the marriage for which Anne of Austria had prayed so fervently since the two, virtual twins, were in the cradle. Similarly Maria Teresa's French-born mother Elisabeth had impressed on her daughter the incomparable majesty of the role of the Queen of France: otherwise a great Spanish princess could well be happier in a convent. Unfortunately the two countries of France and Spain had been at war so long – and Spain now harboured the Frondeur rebel general the Prince de Condé – that there were considerable obstacles in the way of these wistful dreams.

Meanwhile there were many other royal parents to whom the young King of France appeared as the ideal son-in-law. For example, Louis XIII's sister, Christine Duchess of Savoy, made delicate enquiries about the prospects of her own daughter Marguerite-Yolande.
¹
There was always much to be said for a Franco-Savoyard marriage (which is why so many of them took place down the centuries of the
Ancien Régime
). Savoy's geographical position between Austria north of its capital Turin and the Italian duchies of Modena and Tuscany made it of perpetual strategic significance to France. Another possible Italian bride was from the d'Este family: a daughter of the Duke of Modena whose heir had recently married the Cardinal's niece Laura Martinozzi. To almost any Catholic princess – and perhaps a few Protestant ones prepared as Henri IV had done to find the throne of France worth a Mass – Louis XIV represented a magnificent career opportunity.

One way-out suggestion was made by a French theologian presenting an address to the former Queen Christina of Sweden, who was on a European tour following her abdication.
²
Perhaps this maddening, eccentric, brilliant spinster, in her masculine wig looking ‘more of a man than a woman’, nevertheless with a highly feminine décolletage, might be the bride from heaven … Christina maintained a steely silence at the suggestion, although the idea of such a marriage certainly represents a counterfactual delight.

What then of the French royal princesses? The Grande Mademoiselle, now thirty, had been recently welcomed back to court with elegant words from the King: ‘let us talk no more about the past.' (Louis had learned early on the gentle and useful art of public forgiveness.) Her half-sisters, daughters of Gaston by a second marriage, were of more marriageable, or rather child-bearing, age by the standards of the time. Although the Grande Mademoiselle would have preferred the King's fancy to fall on any candidate other than these ‘inferior' princesses, Marguerite-Louise at twelve was already ‘beautitul as the day’.
³
Then there was the half-French half-English Henriette-Anne, who if scorned as ‘a little girl' by her cousin Louis, still had to be found a bridegroom. Naturally Queen Henrietta Maria dreamed of what would be the greatest match of all, and Queen Anne, with her feeling for dynastic connection – remember all those family portraits – would have accepted the niece who had been her protégée since babyhood if the Infanta remained unavailable.

However, where Mazarin was concerned, neither the money of the Grande Mademoiselle, the beauty of Marguerite-Louise nor the impeccable royal breeding of Henriette-Anne counted in this situation. What was a career opportunity for a princess was a diplomatic opportunity for a King (and his advisers). The marriage of Louis XIV was destined, surely, to be an awesome matter of state. So his duty demanded.

Yet for a moment, a week, a month, perhaps a little longer, it seemed that the steady flame of duty in Louis's heart, so carefully tended by his mother since his birth, flickered dangerously as the far more exciting flame of romantic love flared up beside it. It was a question not so much of his feelings for the Mancini Cinderella, Marie, but his intentions towards her.

Louis was already showing himself susceptible to a pretty face, a languishing glance, and at court especially among his mother's junior ladies-in-waiting there were plenty of attractive girls glad to throw just such a glance in his direction. One of them was Anne-Lucie de La Motte d'Argencourt, who, while not a startling beauty, had a bewitching combination of blue eyes, blonde hair and naturally very dark eyebrows (black eyebrows, unlike black hair, were much admired at the time). Furthermore she shared Louis's ‘violent passion' for dancing. Naturally the Queen frowned upon the flirtation, and although Louis gallantly offered to ignore his mother's criticisms, this proposal seemed to the girl to cast some aspersion on her virtue. In the end Queen Anne persuaded her son that it was all a matter of sin and he abandoned his romance for a while – before returning and sweeping Anne-Lucie away in a court dance. Anne-Lucie said afterwards that Louis trembled all the time he held her.
⁴

The authority of Anne and Mazarin was however still in the ascendant. Brutally, Mazarin told Louis that Anne-Lucie had betrayed all his secrets, whereas the girl had merely tried to win Mazarin's esteem by discussing the King with him. Nevertheless, a combination of their anger and the jealousy of the wife of the lover Anne-Lucie actually preferred, meant that she was relegated to a convent at Chaillot. It is pleasing to report that unlike many girls thus dismissed in this period, Anne-Lucie found life there very much to her taste, received many visits (she was not an enclosed nun), and spent the next thirty-five years in total happiness.

Where Anne and Mazarin were concerned, Marie Mancini presented quite a different challenge. Contemporary observers agreed on three things about the Cardinal's niece (apart from the fact that in general they disliked her). These were their conclusions: first, that she was not remotely pretty; second, that she was intellectual, even bookish in a way most young girls were not; third, that for a season she was ‘absolute mistress' of the young Louis XIV, in the words of the novelist the Comtesse de La Fayette, having ‘compelled' him to love her.
⁵
Queen Anne also believed that Marie Mancini had woven a spell: furiously she compared it to that by which the enchantress Armide had captured Rinaldo in Tasso's
Jerusalem Delivered
and turned him to sensual pleasures.

And yet the pleasures Marie Mancini outlined do not seem to have been particularly sensual, unless taste for high romance in plays and novels be seen as such. What Hieronyma Mancini, the wicked Stepmother – actually mother – of Marie's story had missed was her daughter's originality by the standards of the time. Not only did she appreciate painting and music but she had an ardent love of literature. The heroic plays of Corneille, especially
Le Cid,
were a particular favourite: a taste, of course, that Marie Mancini had in common with Queen Anne. Here was a heady mixture of love, honour, duty and renunciation as Chimène passionately adores Rodrigue the killer of her father, yet feels compelled in terms of her personal
gloire
to demand his death. At the same time the proud Infanta Urraque is inspired with an equally unsuitable passion for Rodrigue, but in her case it is the need for royal to wed royal which inhibits her. ‘Heaven owes you a king,' Urraque is admonished at one point, yet ‘you love a subject’.
⁶
A female who was obsessed by Corneille and his lofty chivalric ideals was in a different class from most girls of her age for whom the prayer-book was enough, with the best-selling novels of Madeleine de Scudéry the far horizon of their reading.

The standard of women's education in France was not only low in the seventeenth century but unabashedly so. Even a clever woman like the Princesse des Ursins would boast of merely knowing her catechism and her rosary ‘as good women do' (although she certainly knew a great deal more). Most women were held to have no need of such leisurely accomplishments as reading and writing. Physical weakness was equated with moral frailty to add to the presumed inferiority of the weaker sex: women were by nature disorderly beings not even responsible for their own actions (with of course no status at law).
⁷
What need of education for them?

Estimates of the number of women who could actually sign their own name in this period vary between 34 and 14 per cent. ‘Oh, that I were but a Man, I should study Night and Day,' wrote the English pamphletist Elinor James. But since they were not men, as a whole the female sex accepted its virtually illiterate destiny. For women of the upper classes, a convent education, provided by inspiring individual nuns, offered growing possibilities as the century progressed. But even here a clever woman like Madame de Sévigné looked down on the quality of the teaching supplied: she rejected the idea of a convent for her daughter's child, telling the daughter, Juliette de Grignan, to whom she wrote so constantly and so richly: ‘you will talk to her [the child]. I think that is worth more than a convent.' Conversation, declared the great letter-writer, was better than reading.
⁸

The fact was that, as Madame de Sévigné's remark indicates, there were clever women in France – in Paris – and it was the art of conversation which was their principle organ of expression. In the salons of the brilliant, witty, cultured, refined women later nicknamed by Molière the
Précieuses,
ideas flowed during conversation. And from ideas came a special kind of excitement, making other more stolid company unendurable. Madeleine de Scudéry, for example, suggested that a woman in conversation should demonstrate a marvellous rapport between her words and her eyes, while she should of course be careful not to sound ‘like a book talking'; she should rather speak ‘worthily of everyday things and simply of grand things’.
⁹
But these women and their male admirers deliberately constituted their own kind of society with their private nicknames and their codes, which had little to do with the court, particularly during the troubled years of the Fronde.
*
In short, the young Louis XIV did not know many sparkling young women. Thus Marie Mancini constituted his introduction both to the arts, which made a lifelong impression, and to a kind of chivalric love.

It helped that Marie was not entirely preoccupied with things of the mind. She was a wonderful rider, and her slender figure – scrawny, some said rudely – meant that she had a marvellous air dressed up in boy's clothes on her horse, where the plumper beauties fashionable at the time might not have made such a pretty picture. In black velvet edged with fur, including a matching hat above the huge dark eyes which were her best feature, she was irresistible. It was certainly not a coincidence that the King's early loves were all superb equestriennes, able to outdistance the court if necessary, since riding in the forests and glades round the various royal châteaux represented some of the few opportunities for privacy that Louis had.

As for the Cinderella element in the story, the King's eye first fell upon the neglected Marie when her disagreeable mother was dying in late 1657 and he paid a series of courtesy visits to his chief minister's sister. According to Marie, the King appreciated the frankness she showed in their talks: ‘the familiar way in which I lived with the King and his brother [due to the intimacy of Cardinal and Queen] was something so easy and pleasant that it gave me the opportunity to speak my thoughts without reserve.’
¹⁰

Louis was able to taste the delights of knightly rescue: the beguiling thought that he had transformed Marie's life with his attention. As she wrote much later in her memoirs,
¹¹
it was a pleasure for Louis to be so generous to her: the King saw them as Pygmalion and Galatea, the sculptor and the marble statue that he brought to life. In other words, from her own point of view (that of an ordinary young woman of little or no fortune) ‘it was the love of a God'. The Court Ballet
Alcidiane and Polexandre
of 14 February 1658, founded on a novel by Marin de Gomberville, contained these lines: ‘Your Empire, Love, is a cruel empire / All the world complains, all the world sighs.’
¹²
But in these early months of their relationship, neither Louis nor Marie found Love's Empire anything but delightful.

What Marie Mancini really offered Louis in the heady days before that inevitable royal marriage – or was it really inevitable? – was something totally new to him in an upbringing which had at times been traumatic but in private terms always carefully cloistered. Of course there was her unconditional love for
him
as opposed to his crown, a tribute which like any young man born to a great position, Louis found immensely seductive. But there was more to her hold over him, the ‘spell' she had cast, than that. Marie, in her ‘witty, bold and wanton' way offered independence from the clearly stated wishes of his mother and the Cardinal.
¹³
Even their disapproval must have been exciting because it was new.

The situation to outsiders was especially baffling since it seems quite unlikely that Marie and Louis ever slept together. Once again contemporary commentators, no friends to Marie, combined to doubt the fact. The abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden spent a week at the court at Compiègne and longer than that – rather longer than expected – in France. She had a low opinion of Marie Mancini's looks: she told the Grande Mademoiselle that it was a shame the King could not be in love with someone more attractive. Nevertheless Christina doubted that ‘he [Louis XIV] has even touched the tip of Marie's finger'. Perhaps it was not
quite
that platonic: the discreet Madame de Motteville probably expressed the truth when she wrote that the relationship was ‘not altogether without its limits’.
¹⁴
Subsequent events would show that Marie's nature was romantic and impetuous, in contrast to her frankly carnal and charmingly calculating sisters Olympe and Hortense. A physical affair – however far it went – with Olympe Mancini or the rash Anne-Lucie de La Motte d'Argencourt was something that could be tolerated as harmless (if sinful, as the Queen never failed to point out) and then quietly ended with all the weapons of society at the disposal of Cardinal and Queen. But the winning card of God's thunderous disapproval could hardly be played against a platonic friendship, however intense.