Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (7 page)

Diane, who was pointedly not invited to her former lover’s funeral, returned the jewels that had been crown property. Then the dowager queen dismissed her from court. Diane retired to the countryside, primarily to the Château d’Anet. After the king’s death she and Catherine never saw each other again. Diane was also compelled to forfeit another treasure to Catherine: her beloved Château de Chenonceau. She had always wanted to wrest Chenonceau from Diane, and the duchesse de Valentinois could hardly refuse to comply. Catherine was a big admirer of her father-in-law’s credo that vengeance was the mark of a feeble king and magnanimity a sign of his strength. She and her son, the new king, François II, could have been a lot crueler to a former royal mistress whose very public romance with the king had humiliated her for every one of the twenty-six years of her marriage.

According to Diane’s biographer Princess Michael of Kent, the inscription on her tomb, which Diane herself ordered, reads, “Died 26 April, 1566, aged 66 years, 3 months and 27 days” (which places her birth date on December 31, 1499, three months later than other sources record it). When Diane’s remains were disinterred in 2009, French scientists discovered high levels of gold in Diane’s hair, evidence perhaps that the drinkable gold she regularly ingested as part of her beauty and fitness regimen may in fact have contributed to her demise. And the sixteenth-century chronicler Pierre de Brantôme referred to the “wash of liquid gold” with which it was rumored Diane bathed each morning.

The duchesse de Valentinois had originally been entombed in a funeral chapel near the Château d’Anet commissioned by her daughter to house her remains. Diane’s sepulcher was desecrated during the French Revolution and her bones were tossed into a mass grave (however, in 2008, excavations beneath Diane’s memorial revealed bones identified as hers, and her ashes were ultimately returned to the château with great fanfare in May 2010); but her memory had been dishonored centuries before the Jacobins discovered her final resting place.

Catherine de Medici rarely referred to Diane de Poitiers in her correspondence, whether official or personal, but nearly twenty years after the noblewoman’s death, the dowager queen of France dispatched
some marital advice to her unhappy daughter Margot, queen of Navarre, through the French secretary of state Bellièvre. Catherine confided to her daughter, “If I made good cheer for Madame de Valentinois, it was the king that I was really entertaining, and besides, I always let him know that I was acting sorely against the grain; for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his harlot; as one cannot call her anything but that, no matter how vulgar the word.”

L
OUIS
XIV

1638–1715

R
ULED
F
RANCE
: 1643–1715

K
nown as
le Roi Soleil
, or the Sun King, Louis XIV ascended the throne as the king of France and Navarre in 1643 at the age of four. His parents were Anne of Austria, who was actually a Spanish Hapsburg princess, and the possibly homosexual Louis XIII. Louis XIV, the ultimate French king, was actually a geographic masala: He was in fact only twenty-five percent French. The rest was twenty-five percent German, twenty percent Spanish, and twelve percent Italian, with a smattering of Slavic and Portuguese blood, and perhaps even some Jewish and Moorish ancestry through his Aragonese antecedents.

Because Louis XIV’s birth came twenty-three years after his parents had been estranged (although there had been four stillborn babies before him), he was nicknamed
le Dieu-donné
—“the God-given”—as it was a miracle that his mother had managed to conceive with a king who so rarely visited her bed.

Louis’ father had intended for the kingdom to be governed by a regency council until his son came of age. But Anne of Austria had her husband’s will annulled and became the sole regent, although the governing power of France was entrusted to the prime minister, her purported lover, Cardinal Mazarin.

During Louis’ minority, a two-pronged civil war known as the Fronde fractured France. The first wave, the
Fronde Parlementaire
(1648–1649), was a rebellion fomented by France’s judicial body, the Parlement. Consisting of aristocrats and ennobled commoners, the members of the Parlement believed themselves the natural defenders of the fundamental laws of the kingdom against what they viewed as
the arbitrariness and oppressiveness of the monarchy. The nobility, long exempt from paying taxes, rebelled against Mazarin’s attempts to tax them. The second wave, the
Fronde des Princes
(1650–1653), was instigated by the nobility and led by the king’s own uncle, the duc d’Orléans. They claimed to be acting in the boy-king’s interests, insisting that the regents were ruining the realm. The rebellion gradually fizzled and died, their cause mooted when Louis came of age and was crowned.

In 1661, Cardinal Mazarin passed away and Louis XIV assumed the reins of his own reign. France had been at war on several fronts, and the king harnessed his subjects’ desire for peace by consolidating power in the hands of the monarch at the expense of the aristocracy.

When Louis took control of his kingdom, the treasury was on the verge of bankruptcy and his first challenge became fiscal reform. When he chose his ministers, he chose well. Over the course of his spectacularly long reign, under his aegis they also instituted military reforms and modernized the army. The
Grand Ordonnance de Procédure Civile
of 1667, also known as the Code Louis, reformed the kingdom’s legal system by unifying the two disparate sets of laws that had been used for centuries depending on whether one lived in the north or the south of the kingdom. The Code Louis became the basis for the Napoleonic Code.

The Sun King brought street lighting and a police force to Paris. He built Les Invalides, then and now a veterans’ hospital. He also renovated the Louvre, which, after he officially moved the court to Versailles in 1682, was given over to the public. In 1686, at the instigation of one of his most influential mistresses, Madame de Maintenon (to whom Louis was by then secretly married), he founded the Institut de Saint-Cyr, an academy for impoverished aristocratic girls. Saint-Cyr was the only school for girls in France that was not a convent.

Louis’ belief in the divine right of kings led him to turn the monarchy into a centralized state, reducing the power and authority of the feudal nobility. To that end, one of his greatest achievements—politically, socially, and aesthetically—was the transformation of Versailles from a modestly sized hunting lodge into the greatest and
most glamorous palace and surrounding landscape in Europe. He developed a rigid system of court etiquette that brought the once feudal (and feuding) aristocrats under his roof and under his thumb, turning them into courtiers, glorified servants who vied for royal preferment and fought over perquisites of rank and the right to perform such menial tasks as handing His Majesty his nightshirt. Having to spend so much time at Versailles prevented the nobles from staying too long at their country estates, where they might conceivably consolidate their feudal power bases and foment rebellion. Manners were ritualistically prescribed, even down to the way one walked, requested admission to a room (you didn’t knock, but scratched with your pinkie nail on the wood), or applied your rouge.

The French court became the envy of Europe for its manners and sophistication, and Versailles was its showplace, representing the power and majesty of the monarchy.

In 1660, Louis had married the Infanta of Spain, Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of King Philip IV. Their marriage was part of the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended a war between France and Spain, and they were first cousins on
both
sides (which may have been one reason that most of their children died young). A loophole in their marriage contract ended up leaving the door open years later for French Bourbon succession in the queen’s homeland so that their grandson ended up on the Spanish throne as Philip V.

Louis and Marie-Thérèse (as the queen was known in France) had six children, but only one survived to adulthood, Louis the Grand Dauphin, known as Monseigneur. However, the king managed to sire several healthy children with his many mistresses, among them Louise de la Vallière and Athénaïs de Montespan. He acknowledged seventeen of his royal bastards (he fathered about as many as his English cousin Charles II), and he married them off to legitimate Bourbons.

Louis XIV’s largely neglected queen died on July 30, 1683; she had never become terribly proficient at French, and the king had never learned Spanish. It is believed that a couple of months later, on October 10, he secretly married his
maîtresse en titre
, or official
mistress, Françoise d’Aubigné, the marquise de Maintenon. Although the marriage was never publicly mentioned, it was an open secret and lasted until Louis’ death.

Though her role is probably exaggerated, Madame de Maintenon’s influence is considered a major factor in Louis’ decision in 1685 to revoke the Edict of Nantes, a law passed by his grandfather Henri IV, which had granted the Huguenots (the French Protestants) religious and political freedom. During the early 1680s the Huguenots suffered institutionalized religious intolerance in France; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the bitter icing on a nasty cake.

For the better part of Louis’ reign, France became involved in one foreign war after another and her cast of allies shifted with alarming regularity. The control of the Spanish Netherlands (what is now Belgium) was under contention. The succession of the Spanish throne was contested. Louis wanted to press into Austrian Hapsburg terrain wherever possible. And he had an on-again/off-again enmity with England.

Among Louis’ primary foreign policy goals was territorial expansion. His explorers ventured beyond Europe’s borders, extending French colonialism to North America, Asia, and Africa. Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette discovered the Mississippi River in 1673. In 1682, de la Salle followed the route of the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and staked a claim to the Mississippi basin in his sovereign’s name—naming it
la Louisiane
. And Louis dispatched Jesuit missionaries to China in an attempt to sunder the Portuguese hegemony there.

Consequently, by the early 1680s, France was the dominant power in the world. The French crown, in the person of Louis XIV, also exerted considerable influence over the Church as well as the aristocracy. He used both ritual and the arts to maintain his control over the kingdom, effectively deifying himself. Representations of the king were ubiquitous, and often allegorical—in painting, sculpture, frescoes, tapestries, and medallions. More than three hundred formal portraits were painted of him, and he commissioned at least twenty statues of himself. The duc de Saint-Simon, a prolific diarist and memoirist in the court of Louis XIV, observed of the king that “There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly,
adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.” And to make sure people revered him, in 1680 the sovereign began to refer to himself as “Louis the Great” on his own coins.

Even Napoleon begrudged Louis XIV his ego trip, calling him “the only king of France worthy of the name.”

Add to that the remark made by historian Antonia Fraser that Louis “was as much marked by his industry as by his hedonism.” After all, this was the man who was considered so obsessed with sex that he had to make love twice a day.

He fell ill with a gangrenous leg in August 1715 and refused to let the surgeons amputate, although he had braved serious and painful operations in the past. He once underwent an anal operation without anesthesia, and lost part of his jawbone when a dentist used red-hot coal to cauterize an abscess in his mouth.

Aware that he would be succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, who would accede to the throne as Louis XV, the old king penned a few words of advice for his little heir. “Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviations of the burdens of your subjects.”

Louis XV, apart from having a general reluctance to go to war, did not play it safe on the home front, however, taking several mistresses, official and otherwise, and squandering the goodwill of his subjects. But Louis XIV’s wars did expand France’s borders, adding ten new provinces, creating an empire overseas, and establishing French prominence in Europe. He encouraged the growth of local industry through his patronage of French businesses. And his consolidation of the nobility under Mansart’s gently sloping roofs at Versailles reduced the feudal threats of past centuries.

As king of France for seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days, Louis XIV reigned longer than any European monarch. To put it in perspective, Louis XIV remained king of France while England saw the reign of Charles I, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration and reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, and well into the reign of George I.

Louis’ sovereignty marked a golden age for literature and architecture.
It was the era of Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine, Mansart, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre. And the king wasn’t just a patron of the arts; he was a participant. As a devotee of the dance, he often performed in court ballets himself during the early years of his reign.

He died on September 1, 1715, just four days before his seventy-seventh birthday, having lived so long that generations of his heirs predeceased him. A postmortem showed a monstrous abdomen; the king was a man of huge epicurean appetites as well as amorous ones. In the tradition of French monarchs, he was interred in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.

Louis’ cult of personality managed to obscure some of the deficits of his reign. While he reduced the fractious nobility to idle courtiers, they weren’t taxed, and the treasury sorely needed their money. He was such a genius at propagandizing that he made the crown appear omnipotent, but all the pomp and pageantry obscured the monarchy’s weak financial underpinnings, leaving it in a fragile state for his successors and their ministers, who were not skilled enough to govern or to control the aristocracy with as firm a hand.