Meanwhile Louis's undercover love affair with Louise de La Vallière flourished. In theory it had to be conducted in secret because of the sensibilities of the two Queens, the mother and the wife, although very little was ever secret at the French court. But a far more experienced and wily opponent to Louis's illicit amours was now about to engage him in battle, a contest that would last for the next twenty odd years with neither side conceding defeat or receiving total victory, although both had their triumphs. This was the Catholic Church.
The power of the Church in seventeenth-century France over the conscience of its followers, who were the vast majority of the population, was enormous and should not be underestimated even where an ‘absolute' King was concerned. The betrayed Marie-Thérèse, with the sensitivity of a woman in love, probably became aware of what was happening sooner than most people thought, despite difficulties of language and her grand isolation. In the autumn of 1662, on the eve of the birth of her second child, she made some public remarks in Spanish about ‘that girl, the woman the King loves' which indicated that for some time she had not been fooled. Ignorant of the art of intrigue, however, there was nothing much Marie-Thérèse could do about the situation, beyond bemoaning it to Queen Anne, particularly as the King's promised conjugal ardour did not diminish.
Queen Anne, an altogether more doughty operator, as witness her dismissal of Marie Mancini, had a different perspective. In a sense she had brought the La Vallière affair about by her horrified reaction to the over-close friendship with the King's ‘sister' Henriette-Anne. No one knew better than this majestic survivor that great men tended to have mistresses, even if her own husband's loves had been platonic. The Spanish kings, including her brother Philip IV, had had numerous entanglements, and as for the French! It was significant that the most popular king in French history was Louis's grandfather Henri IV, the role model of manliness and swagger, who had been a philanderer on a serious scale. But Queen Anne was not a cynic and she was sincerely pious. What worried her was the thought of Louis's immortal soul, the state of sin into which he had plunged himself. There was no resignation here, only a helpless sadness.
The Catholic Church however was not helpless. And Louis's religion, in which he had been so carefully trained by his mother, might be simple, as commentators sometimes pointed out, but it was sincere: and because it was simple it was not for that reason shallow. He understood, since it had been constantly reiterated to him, that kings had been put in charge of their peoples by God, but that kings were for this reason answerable to God. These feelings, incidentally, were in quite a different category from his attitude to the Church in France as an organisation, and its connection to the overall government of the Pope in Rome. His relationship with Louise was adulterous (that is to say, as a married man he was committing adultery while she of course was not).
It was the matter of an adulterer receiving Holy Communion that became the symbolic battlefield of this epic struggle, since the King publicly attended the Mass daily – in his entire life, he only missed attending daily Mass two or three times – and any falling away in receiving Communion drew public attention.31 The reason was not really very difficult for outsiders to perceive. Already Fouquet, in his unwise approaches to Louise, had noticed the royal ‘backslidings' where taking Communion was concerned and drawn the correct conclusion. This was a mini-scandal for those who cared to note it. But ahead of King Louis, as the year 1662 dawned, loomed an annual occasion which became central to the drama of his illicit affairs: the occasion when he made his Easter duties (faire ses Päques). By the rules of the Catholic Church, a professing Catholic had to make his or her confession at Easter or thereabouts, followed by Communion.* This was an extremely public event for a monarch, a testing time. What was more, notable prelates were invited to preach the Lenten sermons, not always as compliant to weakness as the private confessor.
Every king had his personal confessor, and the Jesuits, traditionally confessors to the kings of France, had a more relaxed approach to the subject of human frailty than some of the mighty monastic orders who did not. A quick confession and a firm promise of amendment, totally sincere at the time, could be followed by Absolution and Communion; the confessor would hope that a soft approach would bring the (moderately) penitent monarch to virtue by slow degrees.
The Jesuit Father François Annat, over seventy at the time of this first crisis of the King's marital life, had been Louis's confessor since he was sixteen, and as was his duty had nursed him through his various adolescent troubles. He practised discretion and detachment: the confessional was after all secret, and as Louis approvingly remarked later, he did not get mixed up in any intrigues. Father Annat was a great enemy of extremism in the Catholic Church, so-called ‘Jansenism’.33* He had written a work attacking the type of austere Catholic who thought that ‘those not chosen were predestined to damnation' – a doctrine of grace close to Calvinism – some twenty years earlier, Quibbles of the Jansenists. Saint-Simon later denounced Father Annat as a ‘supple Jesuit' responsible for tolerating much wrongdoing. It is difficult however to see how a less ‘supple' confessor would have survived so long at the King's side, with the aim all along of one day drawing in the long rein and bringing him back to the path of virtue.
The views of the great prelates were, on the other hand, a great deal less supple. What went on in private in the confessional, promises made and broken, did not concern them. What went on in public, to the edification or scandal of the entire nation, did. The celebrated series of Lenten sermons which led up each year to the great public feast of Easter with the absolute necessity of a public Communion from the monarch (if in a state of grace, that is) were very different from the private counsels of Father Annat. It was a crucial factor in the first phase of the affair of Louis and Louise that the Lenten sermons of 1662 were to be given by the rising orator and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet.
Aged thirty-five in 1662, Bossuet was a follower of St Vincent de Paul, whose attitude to the poor he much admired and promulgated in a series of sermons: ‘No, no, oh rich men of our time!' he once declaimed in the face of a large body of them. ‘It is not for you alone that God causes his sun to rise.' Queen Anne (herself an admirer of St Vincent de Paul) heard Bossuet preach with approval in 1657 and he was then made preacher-extraordinary to the King. In 1659 he delivered a sermon in Paris on ‘The outstanding dignity of the poor in the Church'. At his first court sermon he announced to the great ones before him that ‘honours' would not follow them into the next life. It will be obvious that in an age when flattery was the daily bread of court life, this man was not a flatterer. At the same time his lessons were delivered in such magnificent style that everyone flocked to hear them. Sainte-Beuve, in a happy image, would describe his style of oratory as ‘like the stops of a huge organ in a vast cathedral nave'. His solemn, handsome countenance only enhanced the impression Bossuet made.34
All this time, while the King made love and both Queens lamented, there was one person whose attitude to her religion was quite as literal as that of the two pious royal women. This was Louise de La Vallière herself. After a few months, she could hardly bear her sense of her own sinfulness, so painfully coupled with her abject devotion to the King. On top of it all, Louise, who was no court politician, had become unwittingly involved in an intrigue between Henriette-Anne and the dashing Comte de Guiche when details of it were confided to her by a fellow maid-of-honour, Françoise de Montalais.35 Louise incurred the temporary displeasure of Louis, who could not believe that his sweet little mistress had kept anything from him. All this acted further on a palpitatingly guilty conscience.
On 2 February Bossuet began preaching his series of Lenten sermons at the Louvre. On the one hand he commended Queen Anne, comparing her to Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. On the other hand he was soon ripping into the King's immoral behaviour, under the scarcely disguised figure of the biblical David who had in his early life been swayed by unlawful passion for another ma
n's wife. (There was no perceived connection here with the ‘other' David, a soulful figure praising the Lord with his harp, of whom a portrait bought from the Mazarin estate hung in the King's own room.) Biblical imagery was and remained a convenient ruse for denouncing the all-powerful sovereign of the country: not only David but Solomon and Ahasuerus were royal wrongdoers who could be usetully cited.36
It was all too much for Louise. On 24 February she bolted from the court to the Convent of the Visitation at Chaillot.
* The Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin by Louis XIV, begun in 1661, went through several versions; although the King received considerable assistance, he always had an essential role in the publication, thus the sentiments are his.5
* It can still be seen today at the palace of the Institut de France, a magnificent monument, spared the depredations of the French Revolution because it was used as a grain store.
* The King wrote from Dijon in 1668: ‘If I didn't love you so much I wouldn't write because I have nothing to say to you after the news which I've already given to my brother.'15
* Alexandre Dumas, in the third novel of The Three Musketeers series published in the mid-nineteenth century, The Vicomte de Bragelonne (sic), builds on this story, before passing on to her subsequent fate in Louise de La Vallière.
* A laVallière is still noted in Larousse as a necktie with a large bow.
* Vaux-le-Vicomte remains to this day a magnificent monument to the high style of the so-called grand siècle – and to the perils of Icarus trying to fly higher than the Sun King.
* Modern scientific and genetic knowledge enables us to see that the desperate intermarrying of the Habsburgs, for reasons of state, was not calculated to produce healthy offspring (Carlos was the son of an uncle and niece). Marie-Thérèse and Louis, first cousins on both sides, got lucky with the healthy Dauphin, although their luck did not last. At the time frequent infant deaths in the children of great persons were attributed more sternly to the wrath of God with the parents concerned.
* Easter Communion had been obligatory in the Catholic Church since the fourth century and is still today a precept that must be fulfilled at least once a year ‘during paschal time' unless there is good reason to the contrary. Even the seventeenth-century state prisoner known as ‘the Man in the Iron Mask' was allowed to doff his mask to receive communion at Easter.32
* The name was applied by the hostile Jesuits to the beliefs of the followers of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen. Jansenism was not therefore a body of doctrine.
CHAPTER 5
Sweet Violence
Beauty embraces me wherever I find it, and I can easily yield to the sweet violence with which it sweeps me along.
– Molière, Don Juan, 1665
On 24 February 1662 Louis XIV was in the midst of receiving the Spanish envoy, come to congratulate him on the birth of his son the previous November, when the news was whispered to him: ‘La Vallière has taken the veil!' The stately diplomatic visit was hurried along in a way that was hardly consonant with the dignity of Spain. And then Louis, swirling a dark grey cloak about him to cover his face, mounted his fastest horse. He galloped the three miles to the convent at Chaillot where his mistress had taken refuge.
The tearful reconciliation was sweet to both sides. Louise confessed all she knew about the tentative intrigue of Henriette-Anne and Guiche. A carriage was commanded and Louise returned to the court. She was in time for the rest of Bossuet's Lenten sermons: the general theme was the horrifying fate of those, especially kings, who died impenitent. According to Christ, Dives, the sinful rich man, was in Hell, Lazarus, the good beggar, in Heaven. One who did not die impenitent was of course the saint Mary Magdalen. And the organ-voiced orator preached about her too. His terms were resounding: ‘the heart of Magdalen is broken, her face is all covered in shame …' In spite of, or more probably because of, her own sense of shame, Louise was among the many people – men as well as women – in seventeenth-century France who adopted Magdalen as their favourite saint.1 Some of the most beautiful motets by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, suitable for women's voices, were titled Magdalen Weeping and The Dialogue between Magdalen and Jesus: ‘Weep, lament, Magdalen,' commanded the plangent texts. ‘That is what the love of the sweet Saviour asks of you.’2
It has been noted that Henriette-Anne, not a noticeably Magdalen-like figure to the outward eye, had a painting by Correggio of the subject; the widowed Françoise Scarron had another version. With the exception of the Virgin Mary, no saint of either sex was painted so often at this period. There was even a tradition that Magdalen, fleeing persecution, had come to rest at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume near Aix and had been buried there: the road to La Sainte Baume was one of the most popular routes in France for pilgrims.* Somehow the figure of the Magdalen expressed the obsession of the times with sin – sin and salvation following penitence.
In fact the saint represented a collage of various women from the Gospels. In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great had announced that Mary Magdalen, Mary of Bethany and the penitent woman in St Luke's Gospel who used precious ointment on the feet of Christ were all the same beata peccatrix, blessed sinner, redeemed whore. Since women loved to be painted in the role of the Magdalen, it was an important part of the representation that Magdalen's long hair, with which she had dried the feet of Christ, could be painted as flowing down across her bosom, sumptuously and of course penitently (long hair was the sign of a virgin, and married women were not generally painted with their tresses so erotically visible). It was significant that all the chief lovers of Louis XIV were painted as the Magdalen at one time or another; and so were the four chief mistresses of Charles II, whose first and longest-serving lover Barbara Villiers prided herself on her beautiful hair.3
The affair of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière flourished on her return and for the next year without further interruptions; the tears of Marie-Thérèse, shed in front of her mother-in-law, and the embarrassing discussions she was insisting on having about fidelity by the summer of 1663 did not really count. Queen Anne also wept and prayed, but no official cognisance of the situation had to be taken: Louise was a secret love, not a maîtresse en titre like Barbara Villiers. As for the girl herself, she continued to assure the King of her devotion, which left her asking for nothing more than his love. How happy they could have been in another world where he was not the monarch, she was supposed to have exclaimed. And as for Louis, if not exactly in love with her at this point, since his maximum point of love was probably in the weeks and days before he conquered her resistance, he was happy enough with his young and charming mistress.
An English observer, Edward Browne, who was touring France with Christopher Wren, was charmed by the sight of her: ‘returning to Paris, the King overtook us in a chaise roulante with his mistress La Vallière with him, habited very prettily in a hat and feathers [probably the hat trimmed with white feathers which was part of the new uniform designed for the King's friends] and an especially fashionable jacket called a Just-au-corps.' To the Englishman the pair looked settled and content. In another incident whose ‘Condéscension' on Louis's part deeply impressed the courtiers that witnessed it, the King covered Louise's mass of tumbling fair hair with his own hat when she lost hers out riding. Such chivalrous gestures recalled the moment in his youth when he had thrown away his own sword because it had accidentally caused hurt to Marie Mancini.4
But there were incipient problems. First, the King liked to give: it was part of his nature, his concept of his role, that the Sun King was bountiful. Louise however was neither greedy nor extravagant and thus gave him few opportunities for that warm feeling of generosity beloved of wealthy men. Her brother, the Marquis de La Vallière, benefited and received a position at court, but someone else, less of a hidden violet, could provide the Sun King with the opportunity to spread his rays further. Second, while the King might not consciously be seeking another serious entanglement at this point, he understood the feelings express
ed by Molière's Don Juan: ‘Constancy is only good for fools. Every beautiful woman has the right to charm us … As for me, beauty embraces me wherever I find it, and I can easily yield to the sweet violence with which it sweeps me along.'5*
The third problem was of a different nature. In late March 1663 Louise de La Vallière fell pregnant; this could not have been totally unexpected, since there is no reason to believe that the King used contraception at this or any other moment.
Contraceptive knowledge did exist, and given that the need was as old as society, always had. The condom, made of animal membranes, although generally seen as an eighteenth-century prophylactic invention, was already in use in the middle of the seventeenth century, as recent archaeological discoveries have demonstrated.6 Of more ancient and more universal provenance were tampons made of different materials, sponges soaked in vinegar or other astringents, or similarly constituted douches. These had always been used by prostitutes, and where the necessity existed, a too-rapidly-increasing family or an extramarital affair, doubtless by many others. Madame de Sévigné believed that her beloved daughter fell into the former category. ‘What, haven't they heard of astringents in Provence?' she enquired bitterly after the birth of Juliette's third child. Saint-Simon mentioned with approval that French duchesses rarely had more than two children, compared with the over-fertile Spaniards: in France, dukes knew how to limit their families. Then, as has been mentioned, there was the practical preventive of coitus interruptus, what the French Church called disapprovingly étreinte réservée (embrace withheld). Denunciations by the preachers of this so-called ‘sin of Onan', a biblical character who was suppose to have wasted his seed on the ground, makes it clear that withdrawal was widely used and, given a cooperative male, certainly the easiest method of avoiding conception.7