The Bourbon Kings of France (21 page)

An outsize member of his little circle was that illiterate
condottiere
, Maurice de Saxe. One of the 365 children of Augustus II—‘The Strong’—of Saxony-Poland (Stanislas Leszczynski’s supplanter), Marshal Saxe had been a soldier since the age of twelve, entering the French service in 1720. Louis rewarded his many victories by creating him Marshal General of France and giving him the château of Chambord. Saxe had strange and colourful ambitions; after losing his delightful little Grand Duchy of Courland on the Baltic, he dreamt of making himself King of Madagascar. A huge, corpulent man, dropsical and stone-deaf, the Marshal was a glutton and a womanizer but his eccentricities were gladly suffered. He had an embarrassingly coarse wit; once, seeing Louis and Mme de Pompadour out walking together, he bellowed, ‘There go the King’s sword and the King’s scabbard.’ Saxe died in 1750, of over-exerting himself with a lady of pleasure.

The one member of the circle who dared to be openly hostile to Mme de Pompadour was the infamous Richelieu. Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu and a great-nephew of the Cardinal, had been born in 1696 and was First Gentleman of the Bedchamber (and therefore in charge of all court entertainments) for more than half a century. A brave and skilful soldier—he captured Minorca from the English in 1757—he was also almost unbelievably venal and unscrupulous; once he offered to sell the frontier town of Bayonne to the Spaniards, while during the Seven Years War his soldiers nicknamed him
Papa la Maraude
(Daddy Plunder). A creature of exquisite elegance and breathtaking extravagance who gave wonderful parties, the Duke also had intellectual pretensions; he was elected to the Academie Française, was the friend and patron of Voltaire, and was a notorious free-thinker. However, Richelieu’s chief claim to fame was as a Don Juan; he was a sexual athlete whose uncanny gift of attracting women was attributed to supernatural powers; when he died at ninety-four, letters were found in his pocket from four ladies, who each begged for an hour in his bed. Countless scandals enveloped this insatiable debauchee and intriguer—he had been in the Bastille three times. Richelieu was really rather a horrible man, but the King, like most people, never tired of his disreputable, amusing company. Mme de Pompadour had the good taste to dislike him.

It is curious, even taking into account that war was the only occupation fit for a nobleman, that almost all Louis’s closest friends were distinguished generals. Ironically, in view of his distaste for bloodshed, the King was surrounded by soldiers. The guardsmen of the
Maison du Roi
numbered no less than 10,000, including such specialized troops as the 150 Horse Grenadiers (reputedly the finest-looking men in France). Even when he went to Mass he arrived to martial music from a fife and drum band.

The portraits of Louis XV by Nattier, van Loo and Quentin La Tour give some idea of his good looks. Those who knew the King were even more struck by his charm and beautiful manners; by now a unique and fascinating compound of majesty and simplicity, he could be delightfully gay and talkative, though only in private. Manners had relaxed generally, the
honnête homme
giving place to the
bon compagnon
as the pattern for gentlemanly behaviour, and sometimes Louis was the best of companions. The Prince de Croy tells us of little dinner parties (so informal that sometimes the gentlemen dined in their shirtsleeves); there were no servants in the small room under the eaves, everyone helping himself and the King making the coffee. The Prince says, ‘Often I felt more at ease with him than with almost anyone else—his kindness is engraved on my heart.’ In public he was a very different person, shy and stiff. ‘One could see that he wanted desperately to say something but the words died in his mouth’, observes a courtier. The King could be rude too, sulky and scowling, especially when his dreadful melancholy was upon him, though according to Croy ‘he never grumbled or shouted’. Savage things are said of Louis XV by other contemporaries who also knew him well, but these were invariably frustrated men whom he had dismissed from their posts.

His was a strange temperament. In his melancholy moods the King often showed a morbid obsession with death, which may have been due to his parents’ untimely fate; like the Prince of Denmark he sought for his noble father in the dust; on occasion he was very like Hamlet in the churchyard—once, passing a cemetery, he sent a groom to find out if there were any newly-dug graves. At court he frequently inquired about dangerous operations and serious illnesses, asking people where they would like to be buried and even foretelling their demise. For although Louis literally lived for pleasure, he knew little happiness. His entire character and intellect were vitiated by pessimism. Even if the hostile d’Argenson could admit that the King ‘gave orders like a master and discussed business like a minister’, at Council meetings his suggestions were too easily over-ruled by his ministers, while he would agree to policies which his innate shrewdness told him were misguided. His hopeless lack of purpose is illustrated by the immortal remark (made famous by Carlyle), ‘If
I
were Lieutenant of Police, I would prohibit those Paris cabriolets.’

Yet with all his frivolity and dissipation, Louis—like all Bourbons—was a deeply religious man. He never missed Mass, walked tirelessly in processions, had an expert knowledge of the liturgy, and prayed with real devotion; he once said naively, ‘I do not regret my rheumatism—it is in expiation of my sins.’ He was also like all his family in being in no way an intellectual. He found the ideas of the
Philosophes—ces gens là
as he scornfully termed them—quite incomprehensible; their excessive rationality did not appeal to a doubting mind which knew very well that men are fools by nature. The King was old-fashioned too in his complete conviction that he had received absolute authority from God—he believed it no less firmly than had Louis XIV. For all his Rococo tastes, Louis XV was more a man of the seventeenth than of the eighteenth century.

Unlike Louis XIV, the King did not enjoy the company of men of letters. None the less his reign was the silver age of French classical literature. It saw the publication of
Candide, Manon Lescaut, Gil Blas, Emile
and the
Nouvelle Héloïse
, of Buffon’s natural history and Vauvenargues’s maxims, to name only masterpieces.

Unfortunately for Louis XV, his prime coincided with the age of the ‘Enlightenment’. This was a climate of ideas, almost amounting to a new religious and political philosophy, which was largely derived from the thoughts of Newton and Spinoza, partly from the example of English freedom, and partly from the dissatisfaction of under-privileged bourgeois intellectuals. It was disseminated by Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and a host of others, broadcast everywhere in France by means of a new encyclopaedia of knowledge which claimed to deal with every aspect of human activity. Later the Enlightenment was reinforced by Rousseau, though his pernicious ideas about equality and a return to nature were hardly compatible with reason. By the end of the reign, most literate Frenchmen had consulted the
Encyclopédie
, which could be obtained through the new Masonic lodges or at the public reading rooms despite every attempt at censorship. However, the
Philosophes
really wanted reform, not revolution. Their aim was to eradicate Diderot’s ‘artificial man’, the man of tradition, which meant putting an end to religious and intellectual intolerance (of which the Jesuits were a symbol, ‘fanaticism’s grenadiers’ as d’Alembert called them); humanizing the country’s barbarous mediaeval code; and setting the state on a sound economic basis. They were quite content with the
Ancien Régime
, so long as it could be brought up to date and made to function efficiently. They did not wish to destroy privilege, but merely to rationalize it, as—so they thought—had been done in England.

Louis disliked most new ideas, but eventually allowed the
Encyclopédie
to be published when
‘sincère et tendre Pompadour’
(Voltaire’s name for her) intervened in its favour. She tried to turn him into a ‘Benevolent Despot’ of the sort to be seen at Vienna or Berlin, but—predictably—was unsuccessful. None the less, he was not averse to his ministers holding fashionable views and actually made Voltaire his Historiographer Royal and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

Poor Queen Marie, prematurely aged, had become duller and dowdier than ever. Her dreadful red velvet bonnets were a constant cause for merriment. She painted execrable little pictures, performed dismally on the guitar, harpsichord and hurdy-gurdy, and worked day in, day out at her tapestry; her sole indulgences were gluttony and some mild gambling on a peculiarly dreary card game. Her religious duties were scrupulously observed—she frequently overspent her allowance on charities. The Queen was a frump, but a most dignified one—her stateliness put some in mind of the old court of Louis XIV—and everyone, including the King, respected her deeply. She had a cosy little circle of dull friends, most of whom joined with her in abominating all
Philosophes
and free-thinkers, in abhorring Jansenists and in cherishing Jesuits.

The Dauphin Louis, small-eyed and black-haired, resembled the King hardly at all. He was another Duc de Bourgogne, of whom some contemporaries had excessive hopes. Like his sainted grandfather, he had been an evil-tempered child who frequently struck his servants, but whose personality had completely changed when he was about fourteen; like his grandfather he became lethargic and taciturn, perhaps as a consequence of having grown unnaturally fat; he may well have suffered from a glandular affliction. Henceforward he was disturbingly pious; his intimate friends were fanatic priests and, to the alarm of all Enlightened courtiers, he would throw himself flat on his face at the Elevation of the Host. His preferred occupation was ‘vegetating’—his own name for it. His habitual rudeness, even boorishness, did not arouse affection. D’Argenson writes, ‘If there really
is
some spark in him, it is a dying one, extinguished by fat and bigotry.’ None the less, at sixteen he showed at Fontenoy that for all his lethargy he had plenty of courage, begging to lead a charge.

In 1745 the Dauphin married yet another Spanish Infanta, the red-haired Marie Theresa (sister of his father’s former betrothed) with whom he quickly fell in love, but the poor girl soon died. The young husband was prostrate. In 1748 he was forced to take a second bride, the fifteen-year-old Marie Joséphine, straw-haired and sapphire-eyed, who was shy and plain (although the sour d’Argenson thought her ‘a pretty child’). Despite bad teeth and a flat nose, she grew up high-spirited and surprisingly attractive, and the Dauphin fell in love again, becoming an uxurious husband; the pair shared a mutual love of religion and music, withdrawing into a secret world of their own. Five sons were born to them; the short-lived Ducs d’Aquitaine and de Bourgogne, and the Duc de Berry and the Comtes de Provence and d’Artois—the last three becoming Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. There were also two daughters, Mesdames Clothilde and Elisabeth.

Louis had mixed feelings about the Dauphin. ‘My son is lazy, quick-tempered and moody. He is not interested in hunting, women or pleasure. But he really does love goodness, he is genuinely virtuous, and he is not without intelligence’; this seems to have been the King’s considered verdict. He cannot have been too pleased with the Dauphin’s calculated rudeness to poor Mme de Pompadour, to whom he could not even bring himself to speak; he referred to her father as ‘that gallows Bird’. Nor was Louis above sneering at him, especially at his plumpness—he once asked, ‘Do I not have a well-fed son?’ None the less, when the Dauphin was dangerously ill with smallpox in 1752, the King spent whole days and nights in his room.

Portraits of the Dauphin Louis show a not ill-looking face, a curious compound of sharpness and femininity. He undoubtedly had a stronger character than his father, and during a brief regency when the King was ill in 1757, showed himself both firm and able. It was not easy to overrule him—later he defended the Jesuits to the bitter end—and he had no illusions about the growing weakness of the monarchy; he wrote that the realm’s financial disorders must be attended to before anything else, that ‘the monarch is nothing but the steward of the state revenues’. In his personal life he was civilized enough, collecting books and pictures, and playing the organ, the harpsichord and the violin; surprisingly, he was an admirer of Rousseau’s
Contrat Social
. However, the Dauphin was no lover of the
Philosophes
, who—probably with reason—dreaded his accession and feared that the reign of ‘Louis the Fat’ would be a reign of bigotry and intellectual intolerance.

Another source of opposition to the Enlightenment were the King’s daughters. He had six who grew to womanhood, and although they were not particularly beautiful he adored them all (to the extent of holding their hands when their teeth were drawn). The two he loved best predeceased him; these were the twins, Mme Henriette who died very young; and Mme Elisabeth, Infanta of Spain and later Duchess of Parma, who despite her marriage had frequently returned to Versailles. Croy says that Mme Henriette’s death literally paralysed Louis, who was ‘in a frightful state’. The twins’ place in his affections was taken by the boyish, hot-tempered Mme Adelaide, who as a very pretty little girl had refused to leave him and be educated in a convent; she and the rather colourless Mmes Victoire—amiable and pretty—and Sophie—ugly and sly—never married, Adelaide and Victoire surviving the Revolution and dying only in 1800. The most unusual of the six was the youngest, the tiny, hump-backed Mme Louise. Brought up by the nuns of Fontevrault, from her girlhood Louise wished to take the veil. When she was over thirty her wish was granted and she entered the enclosed convent of the Carmelites at Saint-Denis, where she was blissfully happy praying for her sinful father. Until his death the King came to see her at least once a month, when she would bitterly attack the debauchery of the court and new ideas (later she was a critic of poor, giddy Marie Antoinette). ‘Soeur Sainte-Thérèse de Saint-Augustin’ was lucky enough to die just before the Revolution, in 1787. All Louis’s daughters were loyal supporters of the Jesuits.