“Sire, Marly? Sire, Marly?” The gorgeously dressed ladies curtsy deeply and whisper under their breath as the Sun King passes through the great room. Much depends on whom, he notices. He likes to have pretty women along, especially on one of his relaxing outings to the nearby Cháteau of Marly. In the past he often would have had his eye on one or more of them as possible new mistresses. But now there is another presence at Versailles, modestly dressed and circulating in the crowd at some distance from him, for she is not the crowned queen. But she is the king’s wife, and Madame de Maintenon is a considerable figure at the court. The king loves and admires her and has become monogamous.
In 1688 the Royal Palace at Versailles was quite new, and the vast complex was still expanding. The fine classical Trianon Palace at the far end of the gardens was completed in that year. From the grand entrance court to the Hall of Mirrors to the open colonnade of the Trianon, there were many vistas that suggested immensely magnified sets for some baroque opera. And so they were. In the culture and concept of ruling that had been elaborated by the princes of Renaissance Italy and now was being further developed north of the Alps, the distance between stagecraft and statecraft was not great. The ruler, the one actor who mattered, gauged the effect of his every word and gesture.
Louis XIV was Europe’s greatest master of this theatrical statecraft, and Versailles was designed as his great stage. By 1688 Louis had worked for more than twenty years to undercut the independence of the French nobility. He wanted them to hang upon the royal favor, so that instead of meeting in their castles and provincial capitals to hatch new schemes of self-aggrandizement or rebellion they would spend months in uncomfortable lodgings at Versailles, weighing every bit of gossip, attending every public appearance of the king, watching anxiously to see to whom he would speak, who would be allowed to stand close to him, who would get to hold the candlestick when he went to bed, and who would hand him his dressing gown as he awoke.
Louis’s entire life had taught him the importance of acting like a king. He was born in 1638, a time of immense turmoil and confusion in France. Low ebb came in 1651, when a Paris mob broke into the Louvre Palace and demanded to see the young king; his mother had to agree, and he pretended to be asleep until she managed to get them out. He grew up hating Paris and disorder. He built Versailles and other smaller palaces outside Paris and rarely set foot in the Louvre. He got a poor formal education but excellent mentoring in statecraft and the arts of court life from his first minister, Cardinal Mazarin, who may have been married to his mother. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis immediately announced his intention to be his own first minister, to make all final decisions himself. Soon he was reminding his ministers that he was the state. Even earlier kings of France had sometimes used the metaphor of the gleaming, life-giving sun—not the sun at the center of the cosmos, which was not yet orthodox opinion—as a metaphor for the monarchy. Louis made constant and emphatic use of the symbol, cutting a splendid figure when he danced the role of the sun or of Apollo, the sun-god, in a court ballet. All of Louis’s life the formalities and apparent gaieties of court life concealed hours of document reading and council meetings by the king and his high ministers. By 1664 he had the ideal detail-oriented, control-minded minister to assist him, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. By prodigious effort Colbert and his modest staff of clerks and provincial appointees uncovered many unauthorized claims of nobility and other cases of fraudulent tax exemption, eliminated many useless offices and other claims on the royal treasury, reduced the indebtedness that weighed so heavily on the royal budget, and increased the efficiency and honesty of tax collection. By 1671 net royal incomes had at least doubled. Similar impulses to order, hierarchy, and centralization could be seen in many spheres. Paris and other cities were brought under more effective control, the lawcourts and provincial assemblies had their powers reduced, controls on publication were elaborated. The nobles found that they had fewer chances to build counterforces in the provinces. If they wanted access to the many lucrative offices now directly at the king’s disposal, and if they wanted their sons to earn their spurs in the king’s growing armies, they had to forsake their power bases in the provinces and spend most of their time at the royal court.
If an orderly and prosperous France had been the goal of the policies of the young Louis and Colbert, they could have begun to relax, admire their handiwork, and fine-tune their policies about 1671. But they were even less interested in the comfort and security of the ordinary people than most seventeenth-century rulers. For them, prosperity and order were means to the end of being a prince: magnificence, prestige, precedence, and domination over other rulers. At first Spain was the great adversary, as a result of the long rivalry of Bourbon and Hapsburg, and the presence of Spanish territories on three sides of France (along the Pyrenees, in Flanders, and Franche-Comté to the east). It was expected that the feeble Carlos II soon would die without an heir, and Louis might be able to claim by way of his Spanish queen a share in the territories that bordered on France, in Spanish holdings in Italy, or even in Spain’s vast American empire. Through skillful diplomacy, bribes and subsidies, and playing on common anti-Hapsburg orientations, the king wove a complex web of alliances.
But then French advances into the Spanish Netherlands (Flanders and Brabant, roughly modern Belgium) alarmed the Dutch. Louis pulled back but was deeply affronted by the check to his ambitions from a society of ordinary merchants and burghers, and Colbert resented continued Dutch domination of maritime trade. With the new royal incomes supporting the largest and best-trained army in Europe, Louis invaded and almost conquered Holland in 1672; the Dutch had to open the dikes to stop his armies. William III of Orange came to power; he was to devote his life to building a great alliance to stop Louis XIV. The fiscal strain of full-scale war was now so great that Colbert had to raise taxes and begin again some of the borrowing and other expedients he had worked so hard to eliminate. Louis had to moderate and then halt his advance in the Spanish Netherlands. He turned instead to slower methods, seeking judgments from his tame lawcourts that France had sovereign rights in some border territory and then occupying it. He occupied Strasbourg in 1681 without any such justification. Nothing was done that would provoke a declaration of war, but the continuing pressure caused a steady drift of German and other rulers toward a network of anti-French alliances. When the sovereign bishop of Cologne died in July 1688, both the French and the Hapsburgs made frantic efforts to influence the election of a successor. The candidate supported by the French won a majority, but not the two-thirds majority that his opponents claimed was required. French troops marched on Cologne; its German neighbors reinforced its garrison and reaffirmed old ties with William. French forces also besieged the important Rhine fortress of Philippsburg, and occupied a number of other German cities. The French campaign into the Rhineland was a fine example of military organization. Besieged by forces under the command of the dauphin himself, advised by Vauban, the finest fortifications engineer in Europe, Philippsburg fell on October 29.
There was another European crisis of concern to the Sun King. Ever since 1660, when the Stuarts had overthrown the regicides and regained the English throne, France had cultivated and subsidized English monarchs who seemed to share their religious and political views. Now it seemed that this patient effort was yielding excellent fruit; an open Catholic, James II, was king of England. The French court had little sense of the depth of English popular anti-Catholicism or the other political tensions that made James’s rule so insecure. It seemed the longest of long shots that William of Orange would manage to secure Dutch consent to launch an invasion, make a successful landing, and claim the English throne in his wife’s name. Certainly the Dutch would not have risked their regiments in the invasion if Louis’s armies had been advancing through Flanders. But late in 1688 Louis marched the wrong way, northeast toward the Rhine, not north into Flanders. Seeing the French tied down in that direction, William of Orange was able to commit himself to the invasion of England. By the end of the year William had won and had all the power of England and the Netherlands at the core of his anti-French alliance. Louis now prepared for further interventions in Germany. In 1689 he was to invade the Palatinate, claiming that his sister-in-law had a right to a share in the inheritance of its territories, and his armies wreaked much havoc and destroyed the castle overlooking Heidelberg. But by then the powerful coalition against him was falling into line, and France was at war with most of Europe much of the time until 1715.
At the same time, Louis’s quest for domination and glory had pushed him into a nearly complete break with the papacy. The difficulties were not primarily theological. The French church claimed extensive “Gallican” rights over church appointments and incomes in France; the papacy assented to only part of what was claimed. But the real crisis in 1688 was over the “franchises,” the extraterritorial privileges of the ambassadors of foreign powers in Rome. Most of Europe’s monarchs had modified or relinquished these privileges, but Louis had refused to do so, and now he had sent a career military officer with a thousand soldiers to occupy and fortify the French ambassador’s palace in Rome. Late in 1687 the pope excommunicated the ambassador. In the fall of 1688 Louis sent troops to occupy Avignon, a papal enclave in southern France. It may be that only the death of the intransigent Pope Innocent XI in 1689 allowed the two sides to avoid a complete schism.
One of our best sources on the life of the court at Versailles in 1688 is the diary of Philippe de Courcillon, marquis of Dangeau. In 1688 the marquis already was fifty years old. Like many young noblemen at the time, he had gained some military experience abroad, in Spain, and soon was named colonel of a new infantry regiment. But his real talents were those of a courtier, not a commander. The Spanish-born queen mother, Anne, and Louis’s Spanish queen, Marie Thérèse, liked to speak with him in their native tongue. The courtiers spent many evenings wagering gold pieces on simple card games, and Dangeau was very good at cards; he was rumored to have won a vast fortune in these games. He was not a statesman, not a member of any of the councils where the king spent so many hours reading dispatches and making policy, but he tells us a great deal about the daily life of the court.
News of many aspects of the world of 1688 discussed in this book reached the courtiers of Versailles: the upheaval in Istanbul, the Venetian campaign against the Ottomans and Morosini’s election as doge while on campaign, the arrival of an opulent silver cargo at Cádiz, even the death of the duke of Albemarle in Jamaica. The courtiers commented on the presents, not very splendid, they said, that the king of Siam had sent to the king of France. There was much discussion of the conflict with the Holy See. In the fall everyone hung on the latest news from the siege of Philippsburg, with much talk about how well the dauphin and various nobles were doing. In November and December the reports from Holland and England were confusing and contradictory, then amazing and distressing, and finally disastrous. There is in fact far more in Dangeau’s memoirs about events elsewhere in Europe than there is about life outside the court in France itself.
The main content of his jottings is the life of the court. The king and his brother went hunting or shooting almost every day. There were musical or dramatic performances many evenings, and a great deal of cardplaying. The king usually was present; he spent much time in council meetings and reading dispatches, but he also did a great deal of his royal work—judging people and signaling his favor and disfavor—in these apparently frivolous entertainments. He was always alert, his manners and carriage perfectly controlled. Newcomers to court required some time to get over being terrified of him. In March and April 1688 Dangeau noted the magnificent new costumes, red and blue accented with gold and silver, for the royal wolf-hunting parties. He meticulously recorded who appeared at court and who went where with the king, matters of great importance. So were royal appointments and grants. Here the mercenary structure of French court society shows through the glittering surface of diversion and ceremony. For every appointment, every grant, every death and inheritance, Dangeau records the value of the transaction. Thus on March 30, 1688, “M. de Montgou, colonel of the cuirassiers, is marrying Mlle d’Heudricourt. In support of the marriage, he will have a pension of 1000 écus from the King, and from the young lady 2000; in addition to that she has 22,000 écus in minted silver, and Madame de Miossens, her aunt, promises her 40,000 livres after her death.” On April 8 “The King has given an augmentation of pension of 1000 écus to M. de Villette, commander of a [naval] squadron. Caillavel, captain of the guards, has received the government of Dax, vacant by the death of the late M. de Poyane; this government will bring him at least 1000 écus in income, and is in his home region.” And so on.
A name that was almost always on Dangeau’s lists of the king’s companions for his excursions was that of the marquise de Maintenon. She had come into his orbit as the governess of his children by a previous mistress, the marquise de Montespan. She probably caught him at an age when, like many a middle-aged roué, he was ready to think about settling down a little and taking life more seriously. He married Maintenon within six weeks after the death of Queen Marie Thérèse in 1683. She did not have high enough rank to be made queen of France, and the marriage was kept secret but was widely suspected. Apart from believing in his own appointment by God, Louis had not been very religious. He was chronically at odds with the Holy See and had been mentored in politics by Mazarin, the great enemy of the politically “devout.” But Maintenon was a serious Catholic, and under her tutelage he began to go to mass regularly and to fulfill his other religious duties. She could not intervene in her husband’s governing too openly, but it was understood that he respected her judgment and might say to her with respect and affection, “What does Your Solidity think?” In 1688, Dangeau records, the players of Italian comedies were warned that in the future they must avoid all doubles entendres in their dialogue.
The marquise de Maintenon sometimes is blamed for the most famous, or infamous, of Louis’s actions in the 1680s, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which withdrew all toleration of Protestantism and led to the emigration of many thousands of Huguenots to Holland, England, and even South Africa. But although Maintenon must have rejoiced in the religious “unification” of France, as most French Catholics did, she by no means brought about a policy that was well under way before she gained influence over the king. In 1688 toleration as a matter of principle was an idea still on the far frontiers of intellectual discussion; even the broadminded rulers of the Netherlands believed that they had an obligation to forbid the publication of works that impugned the fundamentals of Christianity. In France Catholics and Protestants long had been in conflict as political forces and as blocs in local society, with much violence and deep hatred on both sides. Louis was predisposed to see any bloc of subjects with special privileges, like those granted Protestants under the Edict of Nantes, as an infringement on his sovereignty and the unity of his realm. Some eminent and earnest Catholics and Protestants were groping at the time for formulas that would lead to a reunion of Christianity, by which the Catholics among them certainly meant some kind of reunion with the Roman Catholic Church, even if somewhat modified. But these projects tended to be under the patronage of the Hapsburg holy Roman emperors, and had no more appeal to the French court than did projects for total submission to the Holy See. The result was that although there were men of high principle involved in efforts to convert French Protestants to Catholicism, the main thrust of the effort was as political and cynical as the diplomacy of Louis XIV and his gradual occupation of small territories along the Rhine. Dozens of decrees barred Huguenots from any activity not expressly permitted by the Edict of Nantes, even the practice of midwifery. A special fund was set up to make payments to new converts to Catholicism. Mob violence and the prosecution of Protestant ministers on flimsy charges led to the horror of the quartering of royal troops in the houses of recalcitrant Protestants, which gave the word “dragonnade” to French and the verb “to dragoon” to English. Very large numbers of Protestants gave way and became at least nominal Catholics. Others fled the country.
By 1685 Louis’s court was so full of stories of wonderful conversions, with none of the details of terror and compulsion, that it was easy for him to conclude that the work of religious unification was almost done and that his final revocation of the old privileges would be a matter of form. That was not entirely true, and since Protestant laymen now were forbidden to leave France, many sneaked out by land or by sea. They took with them their wealth and their skills in industries and trade, contributing to the prosperity of every Protestant state. They carried more and more terrible tales of persecution, confirming the Protestant princes and elites in their determination to oppose French power, and creating the largest black blotch on the shiny image of the court of the Sun King. For 1688 few records can be found of anti-Protestant activity in France; by then all had nominally converted, fled, or gone far into hiding.
Madame de Maintenon was responsible for the Sun King’s involvement in a project that did not directly challenge his male worlds of sieges and wolf hunts, or the mercenary glitter of Versailles, but sought to provide a counterweight of modest and devout solidity in the aristocracy at large. The Royal House of St. Cyr was a boarding school for 250 daughters of poor nobles, with preference given to children of those who had died or been disabled in the king’s service. Girls entered it between the ages of seven and twelve. All wore modest brown dresses with lace trim and white lace caps, the whole trimmed with ribbons, red for the youngest, green, yellow, then blue for the oldest. Each of the teachers, who were not nuns, had under her charge a quasi family of girls for whom she worked out a schedule of lessons in reading, writing, religion, and quite a lot of fine needlework. Madame de Maintenon was seriously interested in education; she had had an anxious youth and had spent some good and important years caring for the king’s bastards. Having persuaded the king to found and endow St. Cyr, she was able to work out there her vision of an education for young women that would be cheerful, religious but not of the convent, and would value charm and beauty. Some graduates might choose to become nuns, but many others would become good wives and participants in the most pleasant and serious kinds of salon conversations. For the carnival season in the spring of 1688 the girls performed for each other scenes from the Bible and from the works of Corneille and Racine. At the end of the year rehearsals were under way for one of Madame de Maintenon’s great moments of triumph, the performance on January 26, 1689, by the girls of St. Cyr, in her presence and that of the Sun King, of a splendid new drama by Racine, Esther, retelling the Old Testament story of the humble, devout, and virtuous woman who ascended to the side of a powerful king.
But by that time Madame de Maintenon already found much to worry about at St. Cyr. It was too close to Versailles, and a visit there became a popular diversion for the courtiers. The teachers and the girls of course were very much excited by all the attention. On December 10, 1688, the king abruptly dismissed the young superior of the school, who seemed to be especially caught up in the excitement of court favor. Madame de Maintenon found it very hard to chart a middle way between the petty restrictions of convent life and excesses of unladylike cleverness and boldness; gradually the convent won out, and in the 1690s all teachers had to take final vows as nuns.
Madame de Maintenon’s Christianity was a nice complement or corrective to excesses of male control, but no threat. It was not always so when women turned to God. In 1688 Madame de Maintenon was given many anxious moments, and the Sun King at least a few annoyed ones, by the strange figure of Jeanne de Guyon. Already as a girl inclined to a life of constant internal prayer, she had turned further inward in response to the abuse heaped on her by her husband and mother-in-law through twelve years of marriage, embracing her suffering as her “cross.” After her husband died, she was able to devote herself altogether to internal prayer and most of her modest means to charities for converts from Protestantism in the Geneva area. She moved through a time of utter spiritual desolation to a way of “bare faith” that was beyond visions and enthusiasms. She began to write and was amazed by some of the things she found in her own writings. In addition to spells of illness, which she embraced as a special cross, she developed a childlike simplicity and a special devotion to the Child Jesus. Many who encountered her were disconcerted by the outward manifestations of this mix of mysticism with maternal themes (although she was not a good mother) and a deliberate, childlike passivity. Bishops were fascinated by her deep sayings but then wanted her to move on. When she arrived in Paris in 1686, she had just published her most famous work, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer. Prayer of the heart needed no forms and no words or only very familiar ones like the Our Father and could be continued by anyone in any condition at any time. Madame de Guyon aroused great interest in devout circles in Paris, but soon many were alarmed. Her teachings seemed too close to the quietism of the Spanish Jesuit Molinos, who had been arrested in Rome in 1685. The differences from other Catholic teaching may seem slight to the outsider, but the difficulty was that any teaching that encouraged a belief that the individual soul could reach God without the mediation of the church seemed to threaten the authority of the church. Since all involved were and hoped to remain in communion with the Church of Rome, the debates did not reach into the lives of ordinary individuals the way the Catholic-Anglican-Puritan struggles did in England. But they did represent something basic: a collision between the determination of the king and his bishops to enforce religious discipline and the unquenchable Christian impulse to inwardness and singularity represented by Madame de Guyon. And of course the very idea of a woman’s daring to write about God was offensive to many.
In 1687 there were public attacks on A Short and Easy Method of Prayer that eventually led to its being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1689. A priest who was Madame de Guyon’s close adviser was arrested. Then on January 29, 1688, she was arrested and confined to the Convent of the Visitation, where she had no sympathizers, was treated quite severely, and embraced this new cross of passive suffering. But some of her supporters had ways to reach Madame de Maintenon, who, after her own careful investigations, was impressed by Madame de Guyon’s devoutness and not convinced that she posed any threat to orthodoxy or public order. Madame de Guyon was released from her arrest on September 13, 1688. The controversy over Quietism, like others among French Catholics, continued in wordy vehemence for years to come.
The marquis of Dangeau tells us that there were a number of days in 1688, beginning in January, when the king and a small party went to the far end of the great park of Versailles to the Trianon. Here there had been a small, delicate palace of singular beauty, covered with ceramic tiles. It now had been razed, and the king was going to watch the last stages of the construction work on a larger and more austere structure, the Grand Trianon, which still stands. It is especially notable for its tall columns of tan marble veined with pink, the severe classical shapes nicely setting off the random play of the warm colors, and for the black and white diamond pattern of the pavements in the courtyard and colonnades. It was a fine place for a stroll in good weather and one of the finest of the great stage sets for the Sun King. Somehow the king and his party were even able to eat an occasional meal at the Trianon, brought in, as were all the king’s meals, from kitchens far away. Some wonder if he ever had a hot meal. It was only on November 13 that Dangeau recorded that the building was “completed and furnished.” On December 3 an Italian comedy, presumably shorn of doubles entendres, was performed there in the presence of the king and most of the court. On December 18 an opera was performed there by the musicians and dancers of the Paris Opéra, on the twenty-seventh a ballet. By then the French court knew that the queen and infant son of James II had fled and were safe in France and that James had been turned back when he tried to flee England. On December 30 and 31, 1688, and January 1, 1689, Louis and his court were entirely occupied with the elaborate ceremonies, marred only by one dispute over precedence between two dukes, for the induction of three ecclesiastics and twenty-four lay nobles into the Order of the Holy Spirit.