The Sun King (30 page)

Although the King showed a new side to Bourgogne, age had done nothing to soften him towards other people. When he was preparing to go to Fontainebleau in 1711 two members of his family were in no condition to follow him there. The Duchesse de Berri was expecting her first baby, ill all the time. The doctors said she must be kept quiet and that it would be madness for her to go to Fontainebleau. Neither the little girl herself nor her father the Duc d'Orléans dared speak to the King about it. Berri trembling put in a word and had his head bitten off. Madame and Mme de Maintenon had the humanity to speak up, although neither of them liked the Duchess. The King merely became angry — said she must go and that was that. She was sent by boat in order to avoid the vibration of a coach. Unluckily the boat ran into the foundations of a bridge and snapped in two — the Duchess was badly shaken; immediately gave birth to a dead daughter, and never thereafter had a child which lived more than a few months. (Most of her babies were still-born.) The King remarked that as the baby was only a female no great harm was done. Almost worse, he forced the Comte de
Toulouse, in frightful agony from stone, to go to Fontainebleau, also against medical insistence. Both these young people were so ill that the King hardly saw them during the whole visit.

The transformation of character which we have seen in the Duc de Bourgogne and his wife often happens with ardent and very personal young creatures, when they have found their place in the world. He was happy in his work and she with her babies: it now seemed that when the old King disappeared his realm would be in excellent hands. The events of February 1712 are almost too heartrending to relate.

In 1711 the Court had been away from Versailles for several months on account of smallpox there; hardly had the King returned than people began to go down with measles. During a long comfortable chat with two of her ladies, the Dauphine had been saying that many people had died at Versailles since she first came there fourteen years ago. How strange to be old and find oneself with hardly any contemporaries with whom one could talk about the past. Already she was twenty-six and she felt that her youth had gone! Soon after this she caught measles. She had always been delicate, had had three children and six miscarriages, and had never led a reasonable life. The first day or two of her illness she got up, feeling wretched, then she was put to bed; nine doctors came, gave her emetics and bled her. Madame was beside herself when she saw what was going on, and at last she burst out, imploring them to let the Dauphine alone. Mme de Maintenon sharply rebuked her for this impiety in medicine and told her to mind her own business. Presently Marie-Adélaïde was advised to confess. Although she felt very miserable she was surprised to learn that her condition was thought to be so desperate. Her Jesuit confessor came but she hesitated. He was a good, understanding sort of man; he saw at once that she did not want to confess to him — asked her if this was so, and when she said ‘yes' asked whom he should send for. She send she would rather not have a Jesuit and named a priest from the Versailles parish church; he could not be found so another was brought, to whom she made a very long confession. The stupefaction at Court when all this became known may be imagined. There has never been an explanation: some thought it was because the Jesuits were too strict, others because they were not strict enough — in any case Marie-Adélaïde was known not to like them. Her sister, the Queen of Spain, did exactly the same thing when she died two years later.

‘You are going to God, Madame,' said Mme de Maintenon. ‘Yes, aunt,' she said, obediently swallowing two more glasses of emetic.

‘Goodbye, beautiful Duchess,' she said to Mme de Guiche. ‘Today Dauphine and tomorrow nothing.' It was too true.

The grief of the King and his old wife was terrible; she had been the joy of their existence. In their panic and misery they seem not to have noticed that the heartbroken husband was also very ill. The King fled to Marly and the Dauphin was persuaded to follow him there; his
gentlemen dreaded that he might hear sinister noises coming from his wife's room. When the King saw him he was struck by his look and most lovingly urged him to go to bed. He did so and never rose again. ‘I die with joy,' he said — suffered horribly and said he knew now what his poor darling had had to endure.

Their two children caught the illness. Somebody addressed the elder boy, who was five, as ‘M. le Dauphin'. ‘Don't,' said the child, ‘it's too sad!' The doctors then dispatched him into the next world: three Dauphins of France had died in eleven months. As for the younger boy, his governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour, was determined not to let the doctors near him. While they concentrated on his brother, she took him to her own room, pretended that he was quite well, put him back to breast feeding, although he was two, kept him warm and saved his life.

Although five hundred people in Paris and several at Versailles died of measles with the same symptoms as those of the princes, there was much hysterical talk of poisoning. Madame, who never let a death go by without crying poison, found herself hoist with her own petard, because the culprit this time was supposed to be the Duc d'Orléans, and his motive, to put the Duchesse de Berri on the throne. He was thought to be carrying on an incestuous love affair with her: certainly he loved her more than anybody, and the Duchesse d'Orléans and the Duc de Berri were furiously jealous of the relationship, One might believe that the Duchesse de Berri was a poisoner — she was a pathetic, mad little person — but her father was incapable of such a crime. The worst thing old Fagon ever did was to try and arouse the King's suspicions against Orléans — probably in order to excuse his own incompetence. Father, mother and son, all sent to Saint-Denis in the same hearse, was quite a good score even for those days. But the King greatly as he had always disliked his nephew and son-in-law, knew him well enough to be certain of his innocence and as, many years ago, he had defended Monsieur from the same accusation, now he defended Orléans. The bodies were opened with the usual horrifying ceremonial, and the surgeon Mareschal, who was present, asserted that there was not a trace of poison.

Nobody expected the new little Dauphin to live; for years he was a particularly delicate child, although he grew up to be very strong. The next heir, Philip V, was told that he must choose between Spain and France and chose Spain, though with many a mental reservation. France was his love and he never ceased to pine for his native land. So the future Regent and probably the future King seemed to be Berri whom nobody had bothered to educate. He and Louis XIV had nothing whatever in common, and the King could hardly bear the sight of his Duchess. However the two young people pulled themselves together and made a real effort. Berri began to attend Councils; he was not very clever but made up for it by his extreme sweetness — everybody loved him. His wife held a Court and did all she could, quite honestly, to take the place of Marie-Adélaïde. In 1713 she was pregnant. At seven months
the waters broke and three days later, after a shattering confinement, she had a boy, born alive. Mme de Maintenon said that everybody who saw Berri at this time seemed to have been born at seven months, and to have known hundreds of healthy people born several days after their mother's waters had broken. But the baby died.

Louis XIV was now not only sad but also bored. Mme de Maintenon, to try and amuse him, brought two old, long-neglected friends back into his little circle; Madame, twice descended from William the Silent, was, like William himself, a wonderful chatterbox and sometimes succeeded in making the King smile, and the Maréchal de Villeroy, who had lost many a battle but was a jolly soul and had been brought up with the King (the courtiers used to say that Villeroy was irresistible to women but not to the enemy). The three of them gossiped about days long ago and tried to forget the dreadful present. The King gave up his efforts to keep the courtiers amused and busy; the evening parties had stopped; the iron discipline of every hour relaxed. Both Madame and Mme de Maintenon said, in all their letters, this is no longer a Court. Mme de Maintenon: ‘We have no more Court here. Madame is not well and very low: Mme la Duchesse de Berri still has a temperature; Mme la Duchesse d'Orléans is down with every sort of affliction; Mme la Duchesse is always whining for favours; Mme la Princesse de Conti is lazy, hardly ever leaves her room, seems unwell and doesn't bother to be elegant any more; other members of the royal family are never at Versailles; in short I have nothing good to tell you except the King's wonderful health and courage.' Versailles was only inhabited by the old; it had become unfashionable and the smart set escaped to Paris, which hummed with pleasure and vice. The Princesse de Conti, the Comte de Toulouse and the Duc d'Antin all bought themselves houses there; this would have been out of the question formerly and was considered an interesting sign of the times.

The only person who really managed to amuse Louis XIV was the Duc du Maine who now resumed his position of prime favourite from which he had been ousted by Marie-Adélaïde, ever since her arrival in France. He was in and out of his father's room as much as he used to be. The old King, pushed by Mme de Maintenon, made another of those resounding mistakes to which he was so unaccountably prone, and forced the Paris Parlement to declare his bastards eligible for the throne of France if the legitimate branch of his own descendants should die out. This was monstrously unfair to the Duc d'Orléans. No harm was done in the event, since Bourgogne's baby grew up and reigned as Louis XV, but the result might well have been that division of Frenchmen which it had always been the King's policy to prevent.

Louis XIV still had three years in which to put his house in order, and ought to have applied himself to reforming the constitution of France. In half a century he must have noticed how badly it worked but he was tired, would do anything for a quiet life and instead it was the ‘Constitution
Unigenitus
' which now occupied his attention. More and more under the influence of Mme de Maintenon, he used his remaining strength to force the papal Bull
Unigenitus
on the French bishops. The Bull was supposed to bury Jansenism for ever. No other government took it seriously. The Serenissima Republic of Venice locked it up in a cupboard and never mentioned it; in Savoy, Spain and Poland its acceptance or refusal was left to individual bishops. Only the King of France made a national issue of it. The Archbishop of Paris, Noailles, formerly such a great friend of Mme de Maintenon and now her enemy, led the opposition to the Bull with the result that Louis XIV exiled him from Versailles. Jansenism had begun to flourish again, especially in Paris and the King's action was the source of endless difficulties for his successor.

Meanwhile the fortunes of war had been slightly turning in favour of the French ever since the King's courageous decision in 1709 not to capitulate. He had managed to raise some cash (notably in bullion from the New World, which he borrowed from the Spanish bankers) with which to feed and clothe his soldiers. English public opinion was beginning to agree with Lord Peterborough who said ‘We are all great fools to get ourselves killed for two such boobies [the Archduke Charles and Philip V]'. There was a change of government which took England out of the war and she signed preliminaries of peace with France in 1711. The Italian states and the Papacy banded together to resist the Emperor and his tool the Duke of Savoy; the Emperor himself died of smallpox and was succeeded by the Archduke Charles; and Vendôme established Philip V in Spain with several resounding victories.

The French army in the North was now commanded by Maréchal de Villars, one of those picturesque, boastful soldiers who are sometimes, to the annoyance of their colleagues, as good as their own opinion of themselves. He was a man of great courage; his knee was shattered by a bullet at Malplaquet; in agony he continued to direct the battle until he fainted away. He refused to allow the surgeons to cut off his leg and by a miracle he was soon well again, except for a stiff knee. At Versailles he was considered a slightly comic figure, partly because he insisted on taking his young wife, of whom he was inordinately fond, to the front with him. It was a sensible precaution: she was nothing if not flighty. At the death of M. le Duc, Mme la Duchesse, distracted, sent urgently for Toulouse; he was found in bed with Mme de Villars, to the general merriment. Later she was to be an early love of Voltaire's; he stayed with her and her husband at their château, Vaux-le-Vicomte, renamed Vaux-Villars, and collected much information from the Marshal for the
Siècle de Louis XIV
. The courtiers saw this Marshal as a
cocu
, not to be taken seriously, but the King believed in him.

At the end of July 1712 the Court was at Fontainebleau. For some days there had been no dispatches from Villars; then rumours began to come in that he had won a decisive battle against the Austrians and
the Dutch, led by Prince Eugène and Lord Albemarle, and that Albemarle was taken prisoner. It was many years since such news had come from the front; now nobody paid much attention, it seemed far too good to be true. However it was soon confirmed. Villars had not only beaten the apparently invicible Eugène at Denain but he followed up this action by taking Douai, after which Eugène and his allies lost more territory in three months than they had won in the past three years. Napoleon was always to say, speaking of those times, ‘Denain saved France'. The King, who had held firm during ten of the most difficult years in French history, now had his reward. God had remembered him at last; and he gave thanks to God.

The various treaties of Utrecht were all signed by 1713 and concluded the war. England was awarded Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Gibraltar. France kept her pre-war frontiers intact. France and Spain declared that their two crowns were always to be kept separate. Louis recognized the Protestant succession in England and was obliged to refuse to harbour the Old Pretender in France. He also agreed to destroy the fortifications of Dunkirk. The Duke of Savoy regained Savoy and Nice which the French had taken. The Netherlands were returned to the Empire. There were also various trade agreements between France and England. The cause of this long war, Philip V, remained on the throne of Spain, and it was occupied by his descendants until 1931.