Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (21 page)

They settled on the twenty-two-year-old impoverished princess of the deposed Polish king Stanislas Leszczyński. The Polish royal family had never intermarried with the French Bourbons, and they could not believe their good fortune. On September 5, 1725, Marie Leszczyńska wed the fifteen-year-old Louis. The marriage proved extremely fruitful. Between August 14, 1727, and July 15, 1737, the queen gave birth to ten children, although there were a few stillbirths and a number of offspring who died young. Unfortunately, only one son survived to adulthood, which left the succession on shaky ground, as France was under Salic law, where only a male heir could accede to the throne.

Still, the young king was perceived to have it all, or so thought the Baron von Pollnitz. In 1732 the visiting German nobleman described the twenty-two-year-old monarch as “one of the handsomest princes in Europe. One can say of Louis XV that he was born without vices, and free of that pride which is usually felt by monarchs. He is friendly with his court, reserved with people he doesn’t know, and most particularly with ambassadors; he is more circumspect and secretive than other people his age. His habits, his behavior and his feelings are those of a virtuous man….”

Although Louis was now considered an adult, he did not seem interested in ruling or confident enough to rule alone. His former tutor Cardinal de Fleury played a key role in governing the kingdom, effectively running the shop for seventeen years until his death in 1743 at the age of eighty-nine. On Louis’ behalf, Fleury balanced the budget and stabilized the French currency. He freed all political prisoners and relaxed censorship. Also, by the mid-eighteenth century, France had the world’s most extensive, state-of-the-art system of roadways, and the growth of the kingdom’s merchant marine was encouraged, at the expense of the navy.

By the time Fleury expired, the king was thirty-three years old. He chose not to replace his mentor, opting instead to rule without a prime minister.

At first Louis was happy with his queen, but her devotion to him (and her devotion in general, as she was an exceptionally pious woman) began to grate on him. Like his predecessor, he was evidently incapable of marital fidelity. On the other hand, his queen
spent a good deal of time enceinte, and court physicians traditionally forbade sexual intercourse as soon as a consort’s pregnancy showed, fearing it was bad for the fetus. This restriction left any king invariably frustrated and with a lot of time on his hands.

The queen was all too aware of her husband’s philandering, even complaining to her father about Louis’ repeated infidelities. As he worked his way through his first four mistresses, a quartet of siblings (the Mailly-Nesle sisters), she salved her wounded heart in philanthropy and piety. On the other hand, she claimed to endure her husband’s lovemaking because it was her duty to submit, so how much fun could the woman have been as a bedfellow? If Marie was looking for ways to chase him from her boudoir, she surely found them, by waking several times a night to complain of the cold, or to look for her lapdog, or to fret about the ghosts that might be haunting the room, which necessitated the presence of a trusted maidservant to sit by the bed and reassuringly hold her hand. Louis was also a libidinous man living in the most licentious of eras. A Catholic, to be sure, but a man of strong passions, who for the sake of his kingdom, like most royals, hadn’t the freedom to choose his wife, nor wed for love.

In 1744, eleven years after he took his first lover, Louis decided to personally take command of his army, leaving Versailles to fight the War of the Austrian Succession. His mistress of the moment, the youngest Mailly-Nesle sister, the formidable redheaded duchesse de Châteauroux, insisted on meeting up with him at Metz. But Louis became gravely ill, and it was touch-and-go as to whether he would survive. For safety’s sake, so his soul would not go to hell, he had to confess and be shriven. This meant he would have to dismiss his mistress with whom he had been living in adultery. The duchesse would be exiled from court, never to return, although by then it was assumed the king was about to die anyway.

Unfortunately for those who were so eager to get the favorite out of the way, Louis recovered. He deeply regretted the sacrifice of his beloved and didn’t forgive those who had compelled him to dismiss her. The incident at Metz changed the king; henceforth he chose temporal solace over the spiritual. He would not make his confession again until thirty years later, when he was clearly at death’s door, and even then he delayed the event until the last possible moment.

When he decided to recall the duchesse de Châteauroux to the royal bosom, it was too late. She had only a day or two to gloat before she caught a cold and died. Louis was bereft.

For surviving the illness at Metz, Louis earned the epithet
le Bien-Aimé
(the Well Loved). From 1745 to 1748, his armies made tremendous strides on the continent, triumphantly conquering the land known as the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), and further cementing his renown.

Yet Louis shocked his subjects in 1748 by deciding in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to restore his Austrian territorial gains to the Hapsburgs, declaring that he was perfectly content to maintain and cultivate his square field (as he defined France) rather than expand it, averring that he made peace “as a king and not as a merchant.” His bold statement even impressed some of his detractors and won him a reputation as the “arbiter of Europe.”

Diplomatically, Louis might have been taking the deathbed advice of Louis XIV to heart, but his personal life was a mess. The Well Loved loved too well, and often unwisely, which hastened the demise of his popularity. His personal debauchery, as well as the licentiousness of his court and its extravagance, were harshly criticized in an era of increasing hard times for the poor and the bourgeoisie. His reputation was further and more irreparably tarnished by the costly and unpopular conflict known as the Seven Years’ War that was sparked in 1755, when Great Britain violated international law by seizing three hundred French merchant ships. It ended up being fought on two continents from 1756 to 1763.

France lost a good deal of territory in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. By the Treaty of Paris, concluded in 1763, France handed over to Britain all lands in North America east of the Mississippi, as well as all French territories in India. Spain received France’s lands west of the Mississippi.

Public discontent with Louis grew. He was neither an inept nor an incompetent monarch, but he was a vacillator who avoided dealing with anything unpleasant. The excesses of his court were no greater than those of Louis XIV or of his rival monarchs Catherine the Great of Russia or Prussia’s Frederick the Great. But the scurrilous propaganda that spread about his powerful mistress Madame de
Pompadour, beginning in the mid-1740s, gave the public a skewed and distorted image of his reign.

Perpetual criticism from the Parlements only inflamed matters. On March 28, 1757, a mentally deranged man named Robert-François Damiens, who had once worked as a menial at the Paris Parlement, attempted to assassinate the king as he walked across the Marble Courtyard of Versailles. Luckily for Louis, it was an exceptionally chilly evening and he was wearing several layers of clothing, so the blade of Damiens’ knife did not severely injure him. The king asked that his attacker be imprisoned and not executed, but the Parlement enforced the traditional punishment: an exceptionally medieval torture followed by a gruesome public execution.

Louis was roundly criticized for being too passive, for permitting his ministers, and even his mistresses (or so it was publicly perceived), to push him around. He hated to make decisions for fear of seeming unpopular. And he did nothing to dispel his negative publicity, never fighting back. Three of his mistresses, the duchesse de Châteauroux, and Mesdames de Pompadour and du Barry, imbued him with self-confidence in his capabilities and instincts, and in his own sense of judgment. In the plus column of his reign, Louis recognized that France’s real threat on the European continent was not her age-old enemy Austria, but Prussia. To that end, his chief minister, the duc de Choiseul, brokered a historical alliance with the Hapsburgs that paved the way for one of the most famous unions of all times: the marriage of Louis’ grandson and heir, Louis Auguste, with the youngest daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, Archduchess Maria Antonia, who would come to be known as Marie Antoinette. It was a diplomatic coup: A Franco-Austrian alliance would make Prussia think twice about aggressively engaging France.

Toward the end of his reign, Louis finally took control of his own government and disbanded the corrupt and antiprogressive Parlements, whose perpetual refusal to register his taxation orders further mired the treasury in debt. He engaged a workaholic chancellor and a finance minister who didn’t care about becoming unpopular and insisted that the nobles and the clergy finally pay their fair share of taxes.

Unfortunately, these reforms all took place in the final months of
Louis XV’s life. His successor, the nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, dismissed his competent ministers and recalled the former corrupt Parlement. As a result, all of the fiscal reforms that Louis XV had begun to effect were immediately reversed, causing lasting, irreparable damage to the financial health of France.

The king contracted smallpox in the final week of April 1774. He died on May 10, and his infection-riddled corpse was rushed with little fanfare to Saint-Denis.

His fifty-nine-year reign is the second-longest in French history, surpassed only by his predecessor, Louis XIV. Louis XV had gone from the
Bien-Aimé
to the reviled—no longer loved, but so scorned that his subjects jeered his coffin as it passed.

L
OUIS
XV
AND
J
EANNE
-A
NTOINETTE
P
OISSON
,
MARQUISE
DE
P
OMPADOUR
(1721–1764)

At five years old, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, with her bouncing brown curls and perfect oval face, was answering to the nickname “Reinette” (little queen). Four years later the family jest was pegged as her destiny when her mother brought her to visit the celebrated Parisienne seer Madame Lebon.

As an adult, Jeanne-Antoinette would later confide to her good friend François-Marie Arouet (better known as Voltaire) that Madame Lebon’s prediction had struck her like a thunderbolt. And at the end of her life, the marquise would remember the fortune-teller in her will, leaving “[s]ix hundred livres to Madame Lebon for having told her at the age of nine that she would one day be the mistress of Louis XV.”

Nevertheless, at the time it was made, such a prediction would have seemed like an impossibility. Kings’ mistresses came from the nobility, not the bourgeoisie, or middle class, the social strata into which Jeanne-Antoinette had been born. François Poisson (though rumors abounded even then that he was not her biological father, despite his acceptance of her paternity) worked for the Pâris brothers,
the quartet of financiers who kept France afloat and provisioned her army with food and munitions.

But in 1726, Poisson was compelled to flee the country, the scapegoat in a scheme to speculate on wheat. His wife received a formal separation from him the following year. While he remained in exile for nearly a decade, Madame Poisson and Jeanne-Antoinette’s godfather, the wealthy
fermier général
(tax collector) Charles Le Normant de Tournehem (who was likely one of Madeleine Poisson’s lovers), schooled the young bourgeoise for the lofty role Madame Lebon had foretold. They exposed the teenage Jeanne-Antoinette to sophisticated Parisian society and the conversation of the most exclusive salons, and provided her with an expensive education. Private tutors at the top of their professions in the arts taught her music, acting, singing, declamation, and the traditional womanly pursuits. By the time she turned eighteen she had become quite a beauty, slender, taller than average, with an enviably flawless complexion, excellent teeth (another rarity), and eyes of a changeable green-gray-blue color that were already being complimented for their intelligence and depth. She was elegant, poised, cultivated, charming and amusing, and a witty conversationalist.

On March 9, 1741, at the age of nineteen, Jeanne-Antoinette wed her godfather’s twenty-four-year-old nephew, Charles-Guillaume Le Normant. Monsieur de Tournehem set the young couple up very nicely, giving them a townhome in Paris and the country estate of Etioles at the edge of the forest of Sénart, not far from the Château de Choisy, which Louis XV had just purchased as a hunting lodge. Consequently, many noblemen began to spend time in the area, and the lovely chatelaine of Etioles, known for her vibrant house parties, did not go unnoticed.

Jeanne-Antoinette’s marriage provided her with an entrée to Paris’s social elite: libertine clergy, artists, financiers, men of letters, and magistrates of the Parlement.

Madame d’Etioles’ first child, a son, was born in December, but died in 1742. On August 10, 1744, she gave birth to a daughter, Alexandrine, who would eventually be placed in a posh convent to derive the benefits of a fine education. By the time Alexandrine was
born, Jeanne-Antoinette had become the perfect package for a royal mistress, except for the matter of her low birth.

Fortunately, she had relations in high places. Monsieur de Tournehem played fairy godfather, placing Jeanne-Antoinette in the king’s path as often as possible and arranging for his nephew to receive a plum job as a
fermier général
far, far away, his assignments keeping him on the road in Grenoble and Provence. One of Louis’ valets, Binet, was a distant relative of Madame d’Etioles; he coached her on where to stand so she might catch the thirty-five-year-old king’s eye as he strode through the palace of Versailles. Louis’ other valet, Monsieur Lebel, who was one of His Majesty’s chief procurers of nubile young girls, had once been a lover of Madame Poisson’s. These were not the classiest references, but they stood Jeanne-Antoinette in better stead than most other hopeful aspirants to the king’s bedchamber. And a pretty, poised, and sophisticated young lady who was anything but a jaded aristocrat was the perfect tonic for a man who craved diversion.