On 7 June 1654 Louis XIV was consecrated King of France, according to the custom of his ancestors, in the cathedral at Rheims, north-east of Paris. Those princes present did not include his uncle Gaston, in exile at Blois, nor the Grand Condé, now serving his erstwhile enemy in Spain. But the array was magnificent, the ceremony prolonged, beginning at six in the morning, and the whole ritual ostentatiously holy and historic.† Seated in a specially constructed box, Queen Anne was radiant with her son's public triumph; only the presence of the widowed Henrietta Maria beside her provided a kind of memento mori.
But Louis XIV did not only look a romantic ideal at this point: he himself felt full of romance towards women. He loved to play the guitar, the plucked stringed instrument introduced from Spain (where it had been brought by the Arabs).23 He was originally influenced by his mother and the memories of the Spanish court of her faraway, idealised youth. But it was Cardinal Mazarin who saw to it that Louis had the best available teacher, a fellow Italian, Francisco Corbetta, who by the mid-century had published two guitar books for the rulers of the cities of Bologna and Milan, and probably another for the King of Spain.
Playing the guitar was a notably less ceremonious occupation than dancing in the formal Court Ballet: at the same time, what was the Spanish guitar if not a weapon of courtship in the hands of a gallant? It was significant in this context that the return of Mazarin meant the institution once again of a kind of home life, as had been enjoyed before the Fronde, but it was now a home life which included a host of Mazarin's female relations, a lively collection of Italian girls. For the Cardinal had a desire, laudable by most family standards (if not those of the jealous French), to surround himself with his own blood, and arrange ambitious marriages for them.24
These Mazarinettes, as they were known, were seven strong, plus three brothers, and had started arriving in court in 1647. They included the Martinozzis, children of Mazarin's eldest sister; Laura, a few years older than Louis, would marry the heir to the Duke of Modena. Anna Maria married the Prince de Conti who was the younger brother of the Grand Condé.
The Martinozzis were blonde and pliant. The same could not be said of the Mancini girls, five of them altogether, whose ages in 1654 ranged from nineteen to five. These were the children of Mazarin's second sister Hieronyma, who had married up into a higher degree of the Italian nobility. With their zest for life, their combative high spirits, their intelligence and their dark ‘Roman' looks, the Mancinis were very far from being the contemporary ideal, at least in theory. It was not so much that they were dark – although it was female fairness which was constantly praised as representing perfection. It was more the Mancinis' general disdain for conventions. Every preacher, every philosopher preached the need for feminine passivity and submission. As Hortense Mancini, the acknowledged beauty of the family, wrote in her memoirs: ‘I know that the glory of a woman consists in never talking of herself.’ Or as a certain governess would sum it up later, a woman born Françoise d'Aubigné: ‘modesty should be the lot of women … your sex obliges you to obedience. Suffer much before you complain about it.’25 The Mancinis on the other hand were active and early on entered the courtly business of fascination.
The eldest was the sweet-natured Victoire – ‘the only wise one' – who married the Duc de Mercoeur. Olympe, Louis's exact contemporary, was a famous charmer, quite as determined as her uncle to make the best of her chances. The beautiful Hortense, born in 1646 following two boys, looked ‘like an angel'; she was easygoing but wayward; the novelist the Comtesse de La Fayette noted acidly that Hortense, unlike her sisters, had no wit but to some people at court ‘that was yet another mark in her favour’.26 Marianne, the youngest, who would marry the Duc de Bouillon, loved poetry and later saw herself as the protectress of poets, including La Fontaine.
There was however a Cinderella in the family, to quote the ancient folk fairy story which would be published in its French version towards the end of this century in Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose. This particular Cinderella was the middle child, a year younger than the sparkling Olympe. And the role of the vindictive Ugly Sister was played in her life not by Olympe or Hortense – the Mancini girls were always strongly supportive of each other – but by her own mother.
Marie Mancini was the darkest of all the girls and very slender. With her long thin arms and her wide mouth (at least she showed the contemporary rarity of perfect white teeth when she smiled), Marie appalled her mother with her lack of classical looks. The lethargic and anxious Hieronyma Mancini, inspired by a horoscope which predicted that Marie would cause trouble in the future, demanded on her deathbed that the Cardinal should shut Marie up in a convent and keep her there.
Surrounded by these young women in a pleasant domestic atmosphere, it was inevitable that Louis would fall in love with one of them. Or more than one. It was not a question of sexual initiation. There was a tradition among sophisticated European royals that this was the task – or privilege – of an accommodating older court lady. When Louis was hardly in his teens, the enchanting Duchesse de Châtillon, known as Bablon, was alleged to have set her cap at him. A dismissive rhyme was written on the subject by the sharp-penned Bussy-Rabutin: ‘If you are ready / The King is not … / Your beauty deserves more / Than a minority.' Now fifteen, Louis was ready. Just as Charles II, while still Prince of Wales, had been seduced by the opulent Mrs Christabella Wyndham, Louis is always supposed to have been initiated by one of his mother's most trusted ladies-in-waiting (she had taken part in the flight from the Palais-Royal on that fateful night). ‘One-eyed Kate', as the Baronne de Beauvais was nicknamed, was about twenty-four years older than Louis, much closer to his mother's age than his own. The incident was said to have taken place as Louis was on the way back from the baths – ‘she ravished him or at least surprised him' – and to have been enjoyable enough to be repeated on several more occasions.27
The evidence for this is, it is true, based on later gossip. Primi Visconti and the Duc de Saint-Simon both mention the story with confidence, although the former first arrived in France in 1673 and the latter was only born in 1675. Nevertheless there seems enough support to give the story plausibility. Madame de Beauvais was rewarded with a house and pension – conceivably for services to the mother rather than the son, or possibly both. More cogently, the young Saint-Simon remembered her, wrinkled and by this time almost entirely blind, being treated with great respect at Versailles by Louis XIV and accorded that ultimate mark of favour, a talk with the King ‘privately’.28
Where romantic flirtation as opposed to sex was concerned, Louis was originally captivated by Olympe Mancini, with her delicious fossettes or dimples and her ‘eyes full of fire'. Olympe had a dubious reputation: she was described as having a nature ‘little touched with Christian maxims', and there were rumours that Louis slept with her. It was certainly possible. It is true that this was an age when in the marriage-market all girls had to enter, virginity was highly prized and virgins closely watched: the Cardinal's men were after all everywhere. Yet Olympe's subsequent career would show her to be a bold and even amoral woman, not afraid to barter her physical charms for her own advantage – or for her own pleasure. There were always those who took the risk of breaking the rules, and Olympe was certainly among them. In the course of time she was rewarded with a semi-royal match to a Savoyard prince who became the Comte de Soissons. Olympe's condition was that she should remain at the French court. Here her Italian zest and voluptuous looks continued to be generally admired – not least by the King.
Olympe Mancini knew the rules – the rules of the court as laid down by Queen and Cardinal. Yet already Louis was beginning to challenge his mother's authority, especially where his own pleasures were concerned. In 1655, at a so-called Petit Bal held by Queen Anne in her apartments to honour her niece Henriette-Anne, the Queen instructed her son to open the proceedings by dancing with his cousin. Instead of agreeing, as protocol demanded, Louis made it quite clear that he preferred to dance with Vi
ctoire Mancini Duchesse de Mercoeur and took her hand, muttering something about not wishing to dance with little girls (Henriette-Anne was nearly eleven but small for her age). Her appearance, in Louis's graceless expression, reminded him of the bones of the Holy Innocents.29
It was a calculated affront not only to the English royal family but also to Queen Anne's own authority. Furious, she yanked Victoire de Mercoeur from her son's grasp. In vain poor Queen Henrietta Maria ran after Queen Anne with the polite fiction that her daughter had a bad foot and thus no wish to dance. Queen Anne insisted. Louis sulked but in the end the mother's will prevailed. The question must however have been in her mind as in that of other observers of the sullen seventeen-year-old boy: for how long?
* Not only did sexual relations outside marriage constitute a mortal sin by the rules of the Catholic Church (putting the sinner in danger of hell if she/he died without repenting), but taking communion in such a state was a further grave offence. Anne however was noted for being a frequent communicant in an age when not many people were.
* In France there was a contemporary obsession with the idea of homosexuality being ‘Italian’; Primi Visconti, born in Piedmont, was once told, to his great indignation, that ‘in Spain the monks, in France the nobility, in Italy everyone’ was homosexual. Primi Visconti's racy memoirs of the French court where he arrived in 1673 are a useful source, given that he was frequently in the company of Louis XIV.3
* It was a type of breaststroke which was in question, with the face out of the water: proposed by the German professor Nicolas Wynman in his Colymbetes of 1538, as a protection against drowning.
* The close family connection of the European royal families at this date is demonstrated by the fact that the young princes and princesses of France, England, Spain and Savoy were all first cousins, descended from the five children of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis: Louis and Monsieur (Louis XIII); Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier and her Orléans half-sisters (Gaston); Charles II, James, Henriette-Anne and Mary wife of William II of Orange (Henrietta Maria); Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain (Elisabeth); Charles Emmanuel and Marguerite-Yolande of Savoy (Christine).
* The Parlement de Paris was not a parliament in the English sense of the word but a High Court with jurisdiction over a third of the kingdom; there were other provincial Parlements.
* In addition, the sudden death of Ladislas IV of Poland precipitating a crisis in the monarchy, the death of Christian IV of Denmark at a critical moment for his country and a revolt in Moscow against the Tsar Alexis meant that her comment of 1648 was fully justified.
* The term ‘the Grande Mademoiselle' will be used in future here to denote Anne-Marie-Louise, although it was in fact a title used later to distinguish her from her senior half-sister, meaning ‘the Elder Mademoiselle', not a reference to her stature, moral or physical.
* The turn-out of Louis XIV's time was 90 degrees, i.e. each leg turned out 45 degrees from the centre-line, rather than the 180 degrees which has become the norm.
* Louis XIV is always mentioned as being tall by those who knew him, like the Grande Mademoiselle: in another account he was mentioned as half a head taller than Cardinal Mazarin, whom no one described as being short. The myth of the small King elevating himself on high heels is based on a misconception about fashion at the time. Charles II for example, who was well over six feet tall, also wore high heels. Historians now think that Louis XIV was probably about 5'9”.21
† The attention paid to the mere fact of consecration in this period may be judged by the earnest dilemma of a young English Royalist, Mary Eure, in 1653. Needing to be touched for the King's Evil, as scrofula was termed, she could not decide between Louis XIV (as yet unconsecrated) and Charles II (a king without a throne).22
CHAPTER 3
Peace and the Infanta
‘Good news, Madame! … I bring Your Majesty peace and the Infanta.’
– Cardinal Mazarin to Anne of Austria, 1659
By 1657, Louis XIV, approaching nineteen, was evidently of marriageable age. It could be argued that he was the most brilliant match in Europe: and if that was true, the one bride who was equal to him in her superb rank was his first cousin the Infanta Maria Teresa. This was the marriage for which Anne of Austria had prayed so fervently since the two, virtual twins, were in the cradle. Similarly Maria Teresa's French-born mother Elisabeth had impressed on her daughter the incomparable majesty of the role of the Queen of France: otherwise a great Spanish princess could well be happier in a convent. Unfortunately the two countries of France and Spain had been at war so long – and Spain now harboured the Frondeur rebel general the Prince de Condé – that there were considerable obstacles in the way of these wistful dreams.
Meanwhile there were many other royal parents to whom the young King of France appeared as the ideal son-in-law. For example, Louis XIII's sister, Christine Duchess of Savoy, made delicate enquiries about the prospects of her own daughter Marguerite-Yolande.1 There was always much to be said for a Franco-Savoyard marriage (which is why so many of them took place down the centuries of the Ancien Régime). Savoy's geographical position between Austria north of its capital Turin and the Italian duchies of Modena and Tuscany made it of perpetual strategic significance to France. Another possible Italian bride was from the d'Este family: a daughter of the Duke of Modena whose heir had recently married the Cardinal's niece Laura Martinozzi. To almost any Catholic princess – and perhaps a few Protestant ones prepared as Henri IV had done to find the throne of France worth a Mass – Louis XIV represented a magnificent career opportunity.
One way-out suggestion was made by a French theologian presenting an address to the former Queen Christina of Sweden, who was on a European tour following her abdication.2 Perhaps this maddening, eccentric, brilliant spinster, in her masculine wig looking ‘more of a man than a woman’, nevertheless with a highly feminine décolletage, might be the bride from heaven … Christina maintained a steely silence at the suggestion, although the idea of such a marriage certainly represents a counterfactual delight.
What then of the French royal princesses? The Grande Mademoiselle, now thirty, had been recently welcomed back to court with elegant words from the King: ‘let us talk no more about the past.' (Louis had learned early on the gentle and useful art of public forgiveness.) Her half-sisters, daughters of Gaston by a second marriage, were of more marriageable, or rather child-bearing, age by the standards of the time. Although the Grande Mademoiselle would have preferred the King's fancy to fall on any candidate other than these ‘inferior' princesses, Marguerite-Louise at twelve was already ‘beautitul as the day’.3 Then there was the half-French half-English Henriette-Anne, who if scorned as ‘a little girl' by her cousin Louis, still had to be found a bridegroom. Naturally Queen Henrietta Maria dreamed of what would be the greatest match of all, and Queen Anne, with her feeling for dynastic connection – remember all those family portraits – would have accepted the niece who had been her protégée since babyhood if the Infanta remained unavailable.
However, where Mazarin was concerned, neither the money of the Grande Mademoiselle, the beauty of Marguerite-Louise nor the impeccable royal breeding of Henriette-Anne counted in this situation. What was a career opportunity for a princess was a diplomatic opportunity for a King (and his advisers). The marriage of Louis XIV was destined, surely, to be an awesome matter of state. So his duty demanded.
Yet for a moment, a week, a month, perhaps a little longer, it seemed that the steady flame of duty in Louis's heart, so carefully tended by his mother since his birth, flickered dangerously as the far more exciting flame of romantic love flared up beside it. It was a question not so much of his feelings for the Mancini Cinderella, Marie, but his intentions towards her.
Louis was already showing himself susceptible to a pretty face, a languishing glance, and at court especially among his mother's junior ladies-in-waiting there were plenty of attractive girls glad to throw just such a glance in his direction. One of them was Anne-Lu
cie de La Motte d'Argencourt, who, while not a startling beauty, had a bewitching combination of blue eyes, blonde hair and naturally very dark eyebrows (black eyebrows, unlike black hair, were much admired at the time). Furthermore she shared Louis's ‘violent passion' for dancing. Naturally the Queen frowned upon the flirtation, and although Louis gallantly offered to ignore his mother's criticisms, this proposal seemed to the girl to cast some aspersion on her virtue. In the end Queen Anne persuaded her son that it was all a matter of sin and he abandoned his romance for a while – before returning and sweeping Anne-Lucie away in a court dance. Anne-Lucie said afterwards that Louis trembled all the time he held her.4
The authority of Anne and Mazarin was however still in the ascendant. Brutally, Mazarin told Louis that Anne-Lucie had betrayed all his secrets, whereas the girl had merely tried to win Mazarin's esteem by discussing the King with him. Nevertheless, a combination of their anger and the jealousy of the wife of the lover Anne-Lucie actually preferred, meant that she was relegated to a convent at Chaillot. It is pleasing to report that unlike many girls thus dismissed in this period, Anne-Lucie found life there very much to her taste, received many visits (she was not an enclosed nun), and spent the next thirty-five years in total happiness.
Where Anne and Mazarin were concerned, Marie Mancini presented quite a different challenge. Contemporary observers agreed on three things about the Cardinal's niece (apart from the fact that in general they disliked her). These were their conclusions: first, that she was not remotely pretty; second, that she was intellectual, even bookish in a way most young girls were not; third, that for a season she was ‘absolute mistress' of the young Louis XIV, in the words of the novelist the Comtesse de La Fayette, having ‘compelled' him to love her.5 Queen Anne also believed that Marie Mancini had woven a spell: furiously she compared it to that by which the enchantress Armide had captured Rinaldo in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and turned him to sensual pleasures.