The Bourbon Kings of France (19 page)

By 1740 Mme de Vintimille had supplanted her sister—the King even offered her Fleury’s flat. Félicité was a big, bold woman with a rough tongue which somehow amused Louis. But even he was irritated by her outbursts of bad temper; on one occasion he told her, ‘I know just how to cure you of your ill nature, Mme la Comtesse—to cut off your head; it wouldn’t altogether be a bad idea as you have such a long neck.’ In the autumn of 1740 she gave birth to a son (the Comte du Luc—who grew up so like the King that he was called the
Demi-Louis
all his life). But La Vintimille developed puerperal fever and died of it. Louis was so miserable that he took to his bed, had a death mask made of her face, and then retired to Rambouillet almost by himself. When he returned to the court, it was to the forgiving arms of Mme de Mailly.

Unfortunately she was so unwise as to introduce him to her fat and even uglier sister, Adelaide, who took her turn as mistress, although she did not last very long. It is even possible that he slept with a fourth sister, Hortense. By this time lewd songs were being sung in Paris about the King’s weakness for the family.

Mme de Mailly never learnt. In 1742 she presented her youngest sister, Marie-Anne de la Tournelle, who was beautiful, intelligent and thoroughly nasty. At her insistence Mme de Mailly was banished four leagues from court, ‘with a harshness inexplicable in a Most Christian King’, as d’Argenson comments. ‘You bore me,’ Louis told the poor woman. He created Marie-Anne Duchesse de Châteauroux, gave her the official title of
maîtresse en titre
, a flat at Versailles over his own, a house in Paris and a country estate; he also agreed to legitimize any children born to her. Success went to Marie-Anne’s head and she was viciously rude to the poor Queen.

More responsible courtiers were alarmed by the King’s immaturity and irresponsibility. D’Argenson observes that the monarch, ‘rises at eleven and leads a useless life. He allows only one hour for work amid all his frivolous amusements; his Councils can scarcely be called work, as he lets his ministers do everything, merely listening or repeating what they say parrot fashion. He is still a child.’ The new Duchesse de Châteauroux tried to make Louis devote more time to affairs of state and advised him to join his army, but he only moaned, ‘Madame, you will kill me.’

France had been at war since 1741. It was a war which Louis had wanted to leave to other countries, but Marshal de Belle-Isle convinced him that he would be unworthy of his war-like forebears if he did not seize this chance of overawing Europe. He had allied with Prussia to deprive Maria Theresa of her succession to the Habsburg domains, but Frederick the Great had quickly made peace after conquering Silesia. Fleury’s foreign policy was in ruins; not only was France at war, but England emerged from the diplomatic isolation which the Cardinal had so carefully encouraged over the last decade, and joined in on the side of the Austrians. A French army had to surrender in Bohemia. Yet old Fleury—he had been born in 1653—clung to office though he was quite past it; news of reverses in Italy ‘made him dizzy’.

In 1740 d’Argenson had seen the Cardinal coming out of the King’s room; ‘More like a ghost than a man, the merest shadow of a dried up old monkey. He grows thinner before your very eyes, his legs and feet drag, he is only half alive and fast failing … indeed at this afternoon’s session the King’s Council needed Extreme Unction rather than refreshments.’ During the same year a bad harvest and rising prices had caused hunger riots all over the country, even in Paris; old hags seized the bridle of Fleury’s coach and screamed through the windows, ‘We’re dying of hunger!’

None the less, totally deaf and growing blind, the Cardinal toiled on, working at his papers from six in the morning until six at night. He rouged his cheeks and joked that old age was a disability which he did not want to cure just yet. When at last he died, at the end of January 1743, his pupil wrote to his uncle, Philip V of Spain, ‘I owe everything to him and always felt that he took the place of my parents.’

Louis presided over the first Council after the Cardinal’s death.
‘Messieurs, me voilà Premier Ministre!’
There is something faintly frivolous about the announcement; within two months d’Argenson was commenting bitterly that the King was simply not interested in how the realm was governed. It was now however that Mme de Châteauroux persuaded her royal lover to join his troops.

France’s military situation had seriously deteriorated. Marshal de Noailles had received a bloody repulse at Dettingen in 1743, the French army falling back down the Rhine. The troops’ morale had to be restored; it was felt that the appearance of the King at their head would have the desired effect. Louis marched into the Low Countries in April 1744 with a large force which included Mme de Châteauroux and one of her sisters (not Mme de Mailly). He was present when Ypres and several other towns were taken. Then news came that an Austrian army was advancing on Alsace and, together with Noailles and 50,000 men, Louis went to meet it.

On the way he fell ill at Metz. It was a fever which failed to respond to the normal purges and bleedings. Within a few days everyone, including the King himself, believed he was dying. The news alarmed the entire country. Michelet quotes a contemporary account: ‘The people leapt from their beds, rushed out in a tumult without knowing whither. The churches were thrown open in the middle of the night. Men assembled in the cross-roads, accosted, and asked questions without knowing each other. In several churches the priest who announced the prayer for the recovery of the King interrupted the chanting with his sobs, and the people responded by their cries and tears.’

The Bishop of Soissons, the Royal Almoner, refused to give Louis the last sacraments unless Mme de Châteauroux was sent away. Terrified, the King dismissed his mistress, made a tearful confession and summoned the Queen. Marie came at once—he embraced her and begged forgiveness. ‘Only God has been offended,’ replied his pious consort. The Bishop also made him make a full public confession, to be read in every parish church; the citizens of Metz were privileged to hear Louis read the confession in person. (M de Soissons would never again receive preferment.) Prayers were said throughout the kingdom, even in the humblest village church.

Then a Dr du Moulin prescribed a powerful emetic. Suddenly the King began to recover. He was quickly on his feet again and the cure was termed a miracle. What was truly miraculous, however, was the extraordinary outburst of popular rejoicing; all over France the people danced and sang and lit bonfires in the streets; Voltaire wrote some sycophantic verses which compared Louis to the ever-glorious Henri IV, and which were enthusiastically applauded. It was now that the King received the name
‘Le Bien-Aimé’
. He rejoined the army, then went home to Versailles. Mme de Châteauroux, who had been hooted in the streets and was ill, waited for her recall; the longed-for message came and she rose from her bed, to be suddenly stricken down with peritonitis; she was dead in two days, only twenty-seven years old. Louis, from being euphoric after a triumphant welcome into his capital, was prostrate; very unfairly he expressed his grief by ignoring the Queen.

However, he preserved sufficient decorum to attend the festivities which celebrated the marriage of the Dauphin to yet another Spanish Infanta, in February 1745. The culmination was a masked ball in the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles—the famous Hall of the Clipped Yews—which was open to anyone who could afford a ticket. Here, disguised as a yew tree, he danced in the crowd with a delicious brunette who was dressed as Diana; when she removed her mask he recognized Mme Le Normant d’Etioles, whom he had noticed driving in a pink phaeton in the forest of Sénart where he sometimes hunted. A few days later there was another masked ball, at the Hôtel de Ville. Louis looked in briefly at yet another ball at the Opéra and then took a public cabriolet to the Hôtel de Ville where he had supper with Mme d’Etioles; they left discreetly, taking a cab to her house where they spent the night together. The court was quickly aware that there was a new
maîtresse en titre
. Soon Mme d’Etioles moved into Mme de Mailly’s old flat at Versailles. She was a most beautiful young lady, tall, chestnut-haired, with exquisite eyes and teeth, a perfect complexion, and a lively, vivacious manner—she had a particularly delightful laugh.

As Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, she had been born in 1721. Her father, who began life as a ship’s steward, had made money as an army contractor but was then charged with embezzlement and fled abroad, whereupon her mother went to live with her rich friend, the tax farmer M Le Normant. The girl received the best education that money could buy, no less a person than Boucher being her art master. (Sainte-Beuve says ‘she had been instructed in everything save morals which might have embarrassed her.’) At nineteen she married the nephew of her mother’s protector. Young Mme d’Etioles (the name of an estate purchased by her husband’s family) belonged unmistakably to the new
arriviste
nobility, but though she could hardly expect to be invited to the best houses, she was generally recognized as one of the prettiest girls in Paris and considered to have surprisingly good manners. She had all the boundless social ambition of her class, reinforced by a fortune-teller’s prophecy (when she was only nine) that she would grow up ‘a dish for a King’, since when her mother had called her ‘Reinette’—little Queen. Like most people, Reinette was the oddest mixture of good and bad qualities; she never saw her heartbroken husband again, yet she showed herself a loyal and loving daughter to her disreputable old father. Intelligent, tactful, sensitive to his slightest change of mood, she would love Louis very genuinely and give him that soothing feminine companionship which held him far more closely than any physical ties.

Meanwhile the war dragged on, France being forced to continue fighting merely to obtain a reasonable peace settlement. Louis was persuaded to take the field again and to accompany Marshal Saxe. The King enjoyed the campaign thoroughly, sleeping in barns on straw, telling dirty stories (received with acclaim), and singing marching songs in a high, cracked voice. Tournai had been besieged by the French, and an Anglo-Hanoverian and Austrian army of some 46,000 men, commanded by the twenty-two-year-old Duke of Cumberland, marched to relieve it. Saxe intercepted them at Fontenoy with 52,000 troops. He took up a strong defensive position; a triangle based on the village of Fontenoy where his centre was, his right at another village, and his left protected by a wood, the entire position being criss-crossed with redoubts; his troops included Parisian skirmishers imaginatively equipped with crossbows (who later routed General Lord Ingoldsby). The Marshal was incapacitated by dropsy and had to be driven round the field in a light wickerwork carriage.

Cumberland’s cavalry attacked the French from 6.00 am onwards, but was driven back again and again. Finally, the Duke changed his tactics, massed his infantry into a single column, and then battered his way straight up hill into the French centre. Louis, wearing a gold-laced coat and the Cordon Bleu, watched through a telescope. It was now that, after declining the Comte d’Auteroches’s invitation to fire first, the English mowed down 400 men of the
Regiment du Roi
with a single volley. The entire front line of the French centre disintegrated. It was midday. Cumberland’s massive column prepared to bludgeon the second line out of existence. The only four French cannon available blazed away at the English, who stood firm and then beat off charge after charge by the
Maison du Roi
, the King’s household cavalry. Louis put on his cuirass, hoping to charge with them; he and the Dauphin were watching from a hillock. Noailles, who thought the battle lost, now advised the King to leave the field.

Suddenly Saxe drove up. When informed of the advice, he bellowed, ‘What poltroon told you that?’ He felt completely in control of the situation, explaining, ‘Our Irish troops remain.’ Shortly after, at about 2.00 am, the Irish Brigade—Clare’s Dragoons, Dillon’s, Lally’s and all the other Wild Geese-charged up hill into the British, roaring in Gaelic, ‘Remember Saxon treachery!’ The enemy, which included the Grenadier and Coldstream Guards, had already suffered many casualties. Their mighty column faltered, then broke; the total allied losses were over 10,000 men, the Coldstream losing a colour.

Louis embraced Saxe on the field of victory and even wrote to the Queen. Tournai fell the following month and
Te Deums
were sung all over France. The King and his Marshal were the heroes of the nation; everywhere he was acclaimed with shouts of
Vive le Roi
. Yet Louis never went to war again; he had ridden over the battlefield of Fontenoy after it was all over, and had been horrified by the corpses and the bleeding, groaning wounded.

Had Louis XV been killed at Fontenoy he would have gone down to history as one of France’s better Kings, and certainly as one of the most popular. His subjects all but worshipped him. His charm and good looks were the admiration of all (even the humblest peasant was familiar with the Adonis-like profile on the coinage). For nearly twenty years Fleury had given the country unusual prosperity, while a French army had now won a glorious victory.

Yet despite the victory, France’s fight for an honourable peace dragged on for three more weary years. In Scotland, the rising of Prince Charles Edward, at first brilliantly successful, was crushed in 1746. In Italy, the French were defeated in the Milanese and in Piedmont. However, an Austrian invasion of Provence was swiftly repulsed by Marshal Belle-Isle, while in the north Marshal Saxe won two more great victories at Raucaux and Laffeldt, occupied almost the entire Austrian Low Countries and went on to invade Holland. But in 1747 Russia joined the enemies of France, who now stood alone. Across the Atlantic in New France, Louisburg fell to the English and also Cap Breton Island, which commanded the mouth of the St Lawrence, despite the gallant
coureurs des bois
and their Iroquois blood-brothers. France was exceedingly lucky to obtain such a favourable treaty as that signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in April 1748; it was a mutual agreement that each government should restore its territorial gains.