The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (17 page)

The King himself addressed the subject of his adultery in the
Memoirs,
which he compiled in annual instalments for his son when the latter was still a young child. He conceded that, ideally, ‘Princes should always be a perfect model of virtue’, particularly since their moral lapses could never be long concealed. However, ‘if we should fall in spite of ourselves’, the unfortunate consequences could be limited by taking two precautions. The first was to ensure that ‘the time we devote to our love never be taken away from our affairs.’ The second, and ‘most difficult to put into practice’, was to take care that ‘we remain masters of our mind, that we keep the affections of a lover separate from the decisions of a sovereign and that the beauty who gives us pleasure never has the liberty to speak of our affairs or our servants.’ He cautioned his son, ‘Once you give a woman the liberty to speak to you of important things they are bound to make us fail.’ Not only was ‘no secret … safe with them’, but their judgement was disastrously flawed, with ‘the weakness of their nature often making them prefer trifling interests to more solid considerations.’
¹⁰⁰

Reading this passage, one could argue that the King believed his sins of the flesh were not truly pernicious and that, provided he observed the conditions he imposed on himself, indulging his desires was an excusable weakness. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Louis’s sexual transgressions left him untroubled by guilt, for in his own way he was a devout Catholic. It is true that the King’s German sister-in-law derided him for being ‘incredibly simple with regard to religious matters’. She claimed that he was ignorant of scripture and certainly he was not interested in theological debate, saying knowledge of such matters was not necessary for salvation. He arguably attached excessive importance to outward observance, attending mass every day and being punctilious about fasts, but devoting less time to private prayer and self-scrutiny. It was this which led one Bishop to complain in an anonymous letter of criticism (which the King almost certainly never saw) that Louis’s religion consisted ‘merely of superstitions’ and ‘little superficial practices’. Nevertheless, if the faith which his mother had inculcated in Louis as a child was based on instinct rather than reason, and if his devotion was, as Ezechiel Spanheim put it, ‘blind … or at least scarcely enlightened’, it was also central to his existence.
¹⁰¹

In this he differed from many people at court who made a show of piety but were not true believers. Primi Visconti noted, ‘Everyone here professes devotion, particularly the women, but all it consists of is observing the sins of others … People only become religious for worldly ends, the men for their advancement or following a disgrace, the women to show their discretion. From church one sees them returning very quickly to balls or places of ill repute.’
¹⁰²

It was indeed arguable that life at court could not be reconciled with true spirituality. When the Maréchal de Bellefonds withdrew from court in disgrace in 1674, the Abbot of La Trappe wrote to him, ‘I should not be speaking to you sincerely if I said the news grieves me, being convinced as I am that God is neither known nor served in the world you are leaving.’ The Abbot believed ‘that to be occupied and employed in it offers as many obstacles and impediments to your salvation as a life of retreat offers means and facilities for achieving it’ and he added that removing oneself from court was comparable to ‘escaping from the midst of a shipwreck’.
¹⁰³

Some individuals were not worried that a court existence conflicted with the principles of true religion, preferring to believe that the Almighty himself subscribed to the values which prevailed there. When the famously dissolute Chevalier de Savoie died suddenly without receiving extreme unction, Mme de Meilleraye refused to accept that this inevitably meant that his soul was forfeit. Instead, she insisted, ‘It is my considered opinion that where a man of that birth is concerned, God would think twice about damning him.’
¹⁰⁴

This was an error into which the King could never have fallen. His faith may have been unsubtle, but it was robust and he regarded himself as subject to God. Since he did not believe he was exempt from divine retribution, he was uncomfortably aware that indulging his lust carried a risk of eternal damnation.

In his twenties the prospect seemed so remote that for most of the time the King had little difficulty shrugging off this unpalatable thought. At Whitsun 1664, when the King’s love for Louise de La Vallière was at its height, he was not only prepared to forgo the consolations of religion rather than renounce his mistress, but he scoffed at his brother, who apparently saw no contradiction in interspersing his bouts of sodomy with receiving the sacrament. Scornfully he told Monsieur that ‘he would not play the hypocrite like him, who went to confession because the Queen Mother wished it.’
¹⁰⁵

However, he could not always sustain this brazen façade, for shortly after this he broke down when his mother upbraided him for his adultery. While he remained clear that, as yet, he lacked the strength to forsake the pleasures of the flesh, his answer showed that he was not untroubled by remorse. Tearfully he acknowledged ‘that he knew his wrongdoing, that he felt at times the pain and the shame of it; that he had done what he could to restrain himself from offending God and from giving way to his passions; but that he was compelled to own to her they had now become stronger than his reason; that he could no longer resist their violence, nor did he even feel the desire to do so.’
¹⁰⁶
In the years to come the King’s recognition that he was a slave to sensuality when in all other respects he exercised an absolute mastery over himself could not but be a source of regret to him.

*   *   *

Although few people at court dared reproach the King for incontinence there was at least one brave churchman who did his best to awaken his conscience. In early 1662, a few months after Louis had started his affair with Louise de La Vallière, the great orator Bossuet preached a sermon before the King on the theme of David and Bathsheba. Later that Lent he told Louis in another sermon that it was essential that a sovereign should embrace both the royal and the Christian virtues. ‘We cannot accept that he lacks a single one, no, not a single one,’ he pointedly declaimed.
¹⁰⁷

At other times Bossuet inveighed in his sermons against false repentance. He reminded his audience that absolution of sin after confession was dependent on firm purpose of amendment and that, if this was lacking, it was sacrilegious to take communion. This would have touched a raw nerve in the King for, by the late 1660s, he was communicating regularly, despite his frequent adultery. In 1669 the King dealt with the problem by ceasing to attend Bossuet’s sermons, but the following year he demonstrated his esteem for the Bishop by appointing him preceptor to the Dauphin.

Clearly, the King had not found it easy to forget Bossuet’s admonitions and at Easter 1675 he experienced a major crisis of conscience. Despite the fact that he was still in love with Mme de Montespan he attempted to break with her although, in the end, he proved incapable of doing so. However, during the next four years their interludes of passion were disrupted by regular estrangements. Sometimes difficulties were caused by the King’s attentions to other women, but at Easter different problems arose, for the knowledge that it was incumbent on him to confess and communicate meant that, around this time of year, the King became particularly conscious that his addiction to sensual pleasure was endangering his soul.

It is not clear how often during these years the King was able to persuade himself that he was in a sufficient state of grace to take the sacraments. His own confessor, Père de La Chaise, is reputed to have been fairly accommodating about this, although there is a story that in 1678 he feigned illness at Easter so that he would not have to hear the King’s confession. When Père Duchamp took his place he told the King that he could not absolve him of his sins. According to another account, however, Louis voluntarily refrained from taking communion throughout this period, preferring to be censured for this rather than to risk profaning the holy mysteries. Whatever the truth of the matter, Holy Week was invariably ‘a terrible week for Mme de Montespan’, for, as the Comte de Bussy put it, ‘With a lover whose conscience is so delicate as the King’s, a mistress must always tremble at Easter.’
¹⁰⁸

When the King was troubled by pangs of remorse he could not fail to be aware that he was not only jeopardising his own soul but also setting a bad example to the court, and thus fostering immorality on a wider scale. The great preacher Père Bourdaloue once reminded the King in a sermon of the profound effect his behaviour had on the court and how beneficial it would be if he lived a better life. ‘How many conversions, Sire, would your example bring in its wake!’ he pleaded. ‘What an incentive it would be to certain disheartened and despairing sinners when they said to themselves, “There is the man we have seen doing the same debauches as us; see him now converted and obedient to God”.’
¹⁰⁹

As it was, if the King attempted to enforce higher standards of behaviour at court he risked being rebuffed on the grounds that he was in no position to preach. He had found this out in January 1670 when he had told his brother that it would be contrary to his conscience to confer the revenues of two abbeys on that notorious sodomite, the Chevalier de Lorraine. It subsequently reached the King’s ears that Monsieur and the Chevalier had ridiculed his high-minded response, pointing out that his conscience was elastic enough where women were concerned.
¹¹⁰

All this meant that when eminent people at court were implicated in the Affair of the Poisons the King had to contemplate the possibility that, indirectly at least, he was in some way responsible. His own carnality and sinfulness had contributed to the court’s corruption and moral decay, undermining its spiritual welfare to a point where evil flourished.

THREE

SEX AND THE SUN KING

During the Affair of the Poisons it would be alleged that in the past twenty years several court ladies had conspired to poison or bewitch the King’s earliest acknowledged mistress, Louise de La Vallière. A little later the Marquise de Montespan, who had succeeded Louise as royal mistress, was also named as a poisoner. She was said first to have established her hold over the King by using drugs and black magic. When these methods had failed her and the King had taken a young woman named Mlle de Fontanges as his lover, it was claimed that Mme de Montespan had taken steps to poison her rival. In addition, she had supposedly decided to punish the King for his infidelity by murdering him.

In many ways, therefore, the Affair of the Poisons revolved around the royal mistresses. In order to understand that episode, and to judge whether the allegations made in the course of it were true, it is helpful to know something about these women and to examine the course of the King’s extramarital relationships.

*   *   *

It was during the summer of 1661, when his wife was pregnant for the first time, that Louis XIV started his affair with Louise de La Vallière. Louise, who celebrated her seventeenth birthday on 6 August, was a maid of honour to Henriette-Anne (known as Madame), the first wife of Louis’s brother, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. The King’s love for Louise came about almost by accident: he only started flirting with her to distract attention from the fact that a mutual attraction had developed between him and his sister-in-law, but, against his expectations, this sham romance grew into a genuine attachment.

Some people were surprised that the ‘very pretty, very sweet and very naive’ Louise should have exerted so powerful an appeal. She was tall and blonde with beautiful blue eyes ‘whose sweetness ravished one when she looked at you’. She appeared surprisingly modest and retiring for a royal mistress, although some people maintained it was her ‘tender and reflective air’ that formed an essential part of her ‘indescribable charm’. Like the Queen’s, her appearance was marred by poor teeth and she also had a slight limp, but ‘that was not unbecoming to her’, for it did not detract from her grace or prevent her from dancing well. Besides this, she was exceptionally thin, in an age when it was not fashionable to be underweight, and her bust was extremely small. When the distinguished judge Olivier d’Ormesson saw her for the first time, he was highly critical of her emaciated appearance, while in 1664 an Italian visitor to France declared that in his opinion the Queen was much prettier than Louise and the King’s infatuation with her merely proved that ‘sensuality blinds one’. Louise looked her best on a horse: not only was she an excellent rider who kept up effortlessly with the King on hunting expeditions, but riding habits were very becoming to her as the lace cravats worn with them enhanced her tiny bust.
¹

Louise did not strike people as being particularly intelligent or witty, although it is possible that she was more entertaining when she was alone with the King. Certainly, she later deplored the fact that through ‘vivacity of mind’ she had never scrupled to cause amusement by making malicious remarks at other people’s expense. No one else, however, identified this as a failing of hers, and at least one person praised her for ‘never doing harm to anyone and always doing all the good she can’. People were more inclined to criticise her for failing to exploit her position to the maximum. Mme de Lafayette complained, ‘La Vallière’s slight intelligence prevented this royal mistress from making use of her advantages and credit whereas anyone else would have profited from the opportunities afforded by such a grand passion on the King’s part.’
²