The Sun King (3 page)

The King's existence as a grown-up, independent man only began in 1666 after the death of Anne of Austria. She was old enough to have been his grandmother, having been married for twenty-three years when he was born, and was a highly civilized, polite person whom he greatly admired. She held a court better than any queen in Europe and had always been too lazy, or too clever, to have anything to do with politics. During the long minority of Louis XIV, who came to the throne when he was five, she had left the conduct of affairs entirely in the hands of Cardinal Mazarin who was perhaps her lover, possibly her husband. It was a measure of Louis XIV's own exquisite politeness that he waited to become the ruler of France until the Cardinal had died in 1661 — unlike his ancestor, the Emperor Charles V, in similar circumstances. He was careful, too, never to shock his mother or hurt her feelings — his mistress and bastards were carefully kept out of her way. He knew that she feared petticoat influence for him.

Anne of Austria's death was distressing; she was eaten with cancer. At the end, when the King and Queen knelt, weeping, by her bed she murmured: ‘Such children—.' But really they were both twenty-eight, not children at all. Queen Marie-Thérèse had good reason to cry, her best friend was leaving her. She was Anne's brother's daughter and the King's first cousin twice over since her mother was the sister of Louis XIII; Anne was fond of her, perhaps the only person in France who was, and always took her part. The King, with whom, unfortunately for her, she was in love all her life, was not bred to be a faithful husband, either on the Spanish or on the French side. The family tree of the Aragons is an amazing succession of illegitimacies while in France it had long been the custom for the King to have a wife and a declared mistress who was almost a second queen. Henri IV's bastards, powerful dukes, were a living proof of this as they swaggered about the Court; the last of his sons only died in 1682.

As soon as his mother's sufferings were over, the King stopped crying. (In the whole of his long life he was only to be affected by one death, that of the Duchesse de Bourgogne.) He immediately recognized Mlle de La Vallière as his titular mistress, made her a duchess and legitimized their baby daughter, Marie-Anne. Their first child had just died at the age of three; he had been called Louis de Bourbon, with no title. Modest Louise, who blushed to be a mistress, a mother, a duchess, was now brought into the glare of public life; it did not suit her. She was a woman to be kept hidden away, visited by moonlight at her house in the rue de la Pompe, at Versailles or encountered as by chance in some forest glade while the hunt went crashing by — a simple country girl, an excellent rider, puzzled and perplexed in the Byzantine atmosphere of the Court, though by no means averse from the financial benefits to be picked up there. She is supposed to have been responsible for more
placets
(petitions to the King usually concerned with obtaining some
lucrative sinecure, which were a feature of Court life), on all of which she took a comfortable percentage, than any of the other mistresses. In the early days of love, when she ought to have been happy, since the King, whom she worshipped, was at her feet, her large blue eyes used to fill with tears for no particular reason. Then her tears had melted his heart; now they bored him. Inadequate in the rôle of declared mistress, she was not the mate for a Sun King.

The King seems to have put off his major schemes for Versailles until after his mother's death. This occurred during the Guerre de Dévolution with which he sought to implement his wife's claim to the succession of the Spanish Netherlands. Having conquered Flanders and signed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) he set to work in earnest on his house. He gave a
Divertissement
to say good-bye to the old establishment, during which Molière produced his
George Dandin
for the first time. Three hundred of the women present were invited to a sit-down supper. Louise de La Vallière, pregnant, melancholy and dull, was next the King; his look was not upon her but on another table which the Marquise de Montespan and Mme Scarron, her great friend, were keeping in a buzz of laughter. They were the two liveliest women in society at that time. Years later, people remembering the
Divertissement
said it had contained the past, the present and the future.

The pattern of the King's three principal love affairs was the same, the new mistress was provided unwittingly by the existing one. When his flirtation with his sister-in-law Madame (Henrietta of England) began to cause gossip she told him to pretend that he was courting one of her ladies, Louise de La Vallière for instance. The pretence became reality. He had not cared for Mme de Montespan at first but Louise could not be without her. He saw her every day and she was determined to conquer him; she stirred up Satan himself and triumphed. As she was the most beautiful and most brilliant woman at the Court she ought to have been able to succeed without the help of such a compromising ally, but it is a curious fact that she was making no headway until she brought him into the affair. Then Mme Scarron, the future Mme de Maintenon, was thrust upon the King by Mme de Montespan. He could not endure her but she stirred up God and triumphed in her turn, though she took longer. Louise de Le Vallière was the youngest of the three, three years younger than Mme de Montespan who was six years younger than Mme Scarron. None of these women really shared the King's aesthetic tastes. Mme de Montespan patronized artists in a desultory way; the others took no interest in the arts — indeed Mme de Maintenon grudged the money which was spent on beautifying the King's houses; Louis XIV never had a Mme de Pompadour.

A few days after the
Divertissement
, Versailles was given over to workmen and what was called the
enveloppe
put in hand. The King had decided, with the collaboration of Le Vau, to envelop his father's house, like a precious jewel, in his own. Le Vau left the east front of
brick and stone as it was, flanking it with wings and leading up to it with pavilions which were to house the ministers. For the west, or garden side, he designed a new stone front in a more majestic manner, to consist of two wings joined by a terrace on the first floor. The King also turned his attention to the town. It was laid out by Le Nôtre and land was given to people who undertook to build houses to an approved specification. Three wide avenues starring out from the Place d'Armes were planted.

During the years which followed the
Divertissement
of 1668, the King gave himself over to his favourite occupations, war and building. Having bought the alliance of his English cousin Charles II, he set about conquering Holland. In those days it was hardly realized that if two rich countries lived side by side in peace, greater prosperity for both could result. A state of war was the natural condition of nations; during the whole of the seventeenth century there were only seven years of peace in Europe. As soon as trade began to expand, it was choked off by cut-throat quarrels.

Co-operation with the Dutch did occur to Louis. He offered his baby daughter Marie-Anne to be the wife of William of Orange and received a humiliating rebuff. William said that in his family one married the legitimate daughters of kings, not their bastards. (He was the son of one Mary Stuart and about to be the husband of another.) So Marie-Anne stayed at home, married the Prince de Conti and became an ornament of her father's court. Louis XIV, always touchy on the subject of his illegitimate family, never forgave William the insult. He had three further reasons for disliking the Dutch: the republicanism which seemed ingrained in their character, their Protestantism and their pamphlets. His own press was strictly censored, but disagreeable observations on himself, his policy and his family never stopped coming off the printing presses of The Hague and Amsterdam. Furthermore he was always obsessed by the Rhine. His foreign policy never altered in its main objective which was to secure, as France's frontiers, the Rhine, the mountains and the sea. Leibniz was forever saying that Louis XIV had no need to fight for France to become mistress of the world and rich beyond dreams, he only had to stay quietly within his existing frontiers; but that if he must go to war, to occupy the young men, why not do so in other parts of the globe? Egypt, Asia and America were all waiting to be conquered, far more interesting prizes than a few German villages. But Louis cared not a fig for these exotic places and who, nowadays, can blame him for that? It was the frontiers that interested him, the mountains and above all the Rhine. Each time his eye slid down this river on the map he was annoyed to be reminded of little Holland. He put on his feathered hat and went off with his great generals Condé and Turenne to bring her down. When he thought he had succeeded and was within sight of Amsterdam, the brave Dutch opened the dykes and the King found himself at the edge of an inland sea. Holland was saved, though
at a dreadful cost. Various countries now came to her assistance and the tide turned very slightly against the French. Under the leadership of William of Orange the Dutch were never conquered, though there were at least two occasions on which Louis seemed to have them in his power. Each time he turned away at the crucial moment: as usual with him there was no explanation. The year 1675 saw the death of Turenne, killed in battle to the despair of his soldiers who loved him so much that the whole French army was sobbing and crying that night. This loss was followed by the retirement of Condé. The Peace of Nimeguen, 1679, gave Louis XIV Franche-Comté and most of the Spanish Netherlands; it marked the apogee of his military glory.

Meanwhile Versailles had become an enormous workshop. The house was covered with scaffolding and buried in dust: the gardens were like a quarry, full of mud, stones, drain-pipes, men and horses. Thousands of good-sized forest trees were being planted; those which died, about half, were immediately replaced. Marble and bronze statues lay about waiting for the King to say where he wanted them. He was in such a hurry to see the results that the building still suffers from hasty, ill-completed work. He dragged the Court there from time to time; the courtiers slept where they could and he himself was not comfortable. By the grandeur of the new schemes it was beginning to be clear that Versailles was intended to be one of the main royal residences.

At this time France, in the words of Lord Macaulay, had ‘over the surrounding countries at once the ascendancy which Rome had over Greece and the ascendancy which Greece had over Rome'. Louis XIV's great house was to be the outward and visible sign of that ascendancy.

There were four men without whose collaboration the King could never have built Versailles: Colbert, Le Vau, Le Nôtre and Le Brun. They were all much older than he, must indeed have seemed to him like old men; remarkable as they were, he dominated them and was the spirit of the whole tremendous enterprise. He knew exactly what he wanted; his eye had been trained by Mazarin who had surrounded him in childhood with beautiful objects, and he had a personal taste which developed and improved year by year, stamping itself on everything he undertook.

When Mazarin died he left his fortune to the King, saying that the pictures, the books, the houses, the eighteen enormous diamonds known as
les Mazarins
and the money (even, he might have added, the nieces) were nothing — the precious legacy was Colbert; and so it proved. He was the most remarkable minister in the history of France. If the French are divided into Franks and Gauls — Franks, serious and rather cold, the builders, and Gauls, adorably frivolous, the destroyers of this nation — Colbert was the very type of the Frank. He was born in 1619, the son of a wool merchant of Rheims. His emblem was the humble grass snake — the antithesis of Fouquet's squirrel which can be seen climbing higher and higher, all over Vaux-le-Vicomte. Unlike Fouquet who was a jolly man of the world and a great lover of women, Colbert concealed his brilliance beneath a dour reserved manner — he frowned more often than he smiled, and never tried to charm. But people knew where they were with him; and those who, hoping to get off paying some tax, went behind his back to the King, to be received with infinite grace and told, with a delightful laugh, ‘Sir, you will have to pay!', would say they rather preferred Colbert's frown. Early in life he saw that economics are a sure if unspectacular road to power; he began his career by putting order into the private affairs of Mazarin which he found in an incredible muddle; then, still under the Cardinal, he turned his attention to the national finances and established them on a solid foundation. When the King was a boy he taught him to keep accounts; he was the first king of France who had ever done such a thing. Colbert made him write down how much money he had got at the beginning of each year and then subtract expenses from it. When it ran out too soon, as it always did, he would borrow for him, from Mazarin! He realized
that a new world was dawning in which a country must export or die; and he instituted a Council of Commerce, presided over by the King, which met every fortnight. He hated Versailles, but he alone was capable of producing the enormous sums of money which it swallowed and as soon as he saw that the King was determined to live there he bowed to the inevitable and began to think of ways in which the house could be made to further French commerce.

The prestige of Louis XIV and the fame of Versailles mounted year by year; other European princes and magnates wanted a Versailles of their own, down to the smallest details of its furnishings; Colbert exploited this fashion to help his exports. He erected a rigid customs barrier, nothing was allowed to be imported that could be made in France. Factories were set up to supply the linen, lace, silk, glass, carpets, jewellery, inlaid furniture and other articles of luxury that used to come from foreign lands, mostly from Italy; all these were soon of a superior quality to any that had been seen, since French craftsmen, then as now, were the best in the world. The finest examples of their work went to Versailles and were shown to the foreign visitors who flocked there; the château became a shop window, a permanent exhibition of French goods. It made an enormous contribution to French supremacy in the arts, as nowadays some great aeroplane, not in itself a paying proposition, can advance the technical progress of aeronautics. But soon there were not enough workmen so Colbert took measures to increase the working population. Families of over ten children were exempt from tax. He thought too many young people were taking religious vows and raised the age at which they might do so. Workmen were forbidden to emigrate and foreigners, especially Protestants who were persecuted in their own countries, were encouraged to come to France. He always said that the men should not be too strictly directed but allowed to do what they thought best. He had difficulties with the Gauls however. The great nobles refused to invest in his companies for trading overseas; the workmen were not easy, they refused to give up their sixty public holidays a year (apart from Sundays), and there were strikes. He himself worked fifteen hours a day seven days a week and his holographs would fill a hundred volumes. Though his only real interest was commerce, he ran every government department except that of war. His work bore fruit; in the ten years between 1661 and 1671 the national revenue was doubled. In 1683 it was four times that of England and nearly ten times that of the Venetian republic. But the richest of all European countries was Holland. The prosperity of this tiny state, troubled by England beyond the sea, by the sea itself and by its European neighbours (the Spanish menace hardly over when the French menace began) was a perpetual source of wonder. Colbert, like his master, but for different reasons, was obsessed by Holland. The Dutch had two citizens to one peasant, and that one produced heavier crops to the acre, fatter pigs and higher yielding cows than were to be found anywhere else. Like bees,
the Dutch seemed to gather honey from all around them: Norway was their forest, the banks of the Rhine and the Dordogne their vineyard; Spain and Ireland grazed their sheep; India and Arabia were their gardens and the sea their highway. Their enormous riches and enviable way of life were achieved by commerce, banking (the Bank of Amsterdam dates from 1609), insurance, printing and the fact that they were a seafaring nation situated between the new world and the old. Also there were no Gauls in Holland. Colbert would have loved to rule such a land! His greatest handicap was the war that raged on the frontiers during the whole of Louis XIV's reign. A hundred and fifty thousand men were kept under arms even in peace time — men whom Colbert could have employed over and over again on different schemes for enriching the country. He hated war, and not out of humanity, for he had none in his make-up. He did little or nothing to help the French peasants through a period of agricultural depression; indeed low farm prices suited his policy of cheap exports. The gap between the peasantry and the rest of the population first became serious under Colbert; it was not bridged, as in England, by country gentlemen. He encouraged the slave trade and though he did insist on certain humanitarian measures, this was only to keep down the death rate of such valuable cattle. Worst of all, perhaps, he increased the number of galleys in the French navy from six to forty, each containing two hundred unhappy souls. Since black people were useless for manning them (they had no stamina and died at once) he employed French criminals and Turks caught in the Barbary wars. When the Turks were worn out they were sold in America for what they would fetch. Young, solid Frenchmen accused of capital offences were often sent to the galleys for life instead of being executed. Minor criminals, if they were able-bodied, were never released at the end of their sentences — they could only be freed if their relations could afford to buy a Turk to replace them. Colbert thought that too many of his galley slaves died — the Intendant of the Galleys swore that they were well fed but said they died of grief and boredom. We can imagine these two rich, comfortable courtiers conversing together on the subject in some golden drawing-room.