“Those of the arts which do not depend entirely on the mind, such as music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, had progressed little in France before that period we call the century of Louis XIV,”142 Voltaire wrote in 1751. That bold statement neatly - and wrongly - disposes of architects like du Cerceau and Salomon de Brosse, or the painters of the second School of Fontainebleau, although Voltaire goes on to praise Poussin, whom he credits for the beginnings of painting in France. What Voltaire, that incarnation of the Enlightenment, really means, though, is that the sort of integrated decor for which France became so famous, and so envied, was begun under the Sun King.

That Louis XIV, always with the advice of Colbert, only picked up on a preexisting trend is certain: Already during the Fronde, a few rich Parlement men were feeling their way to a new kind of splendid environment that owed more to art than to the sole use of precious materials; then, at Vaux, it all came together, so effectively that the king and Colbert simply took over Fouquet’s team: Within weeks of the surintendant’s fall, Le Brun, Le Vau, and Le Nôtre were at work on the royal houses, but even then their achievements, with the single exception of the Palace of the Tuileries, remained fragmentary. A façade here, a few rooms there, a piece of garden elsewhere, did not yet amount to a revolution in taste: As so often, it took politics to give the arts the wide field they needed.

The king himself fully realized that being a patron was part of his image; indeed, when it came to music, he had no trouble at all. Gifted himself and highly appreciative of composers and performers alike, Louis XIV promptly enlarged the royal orchestra and had it play not just at concerts but also during all his meals. Opera, under the overall direction of Lulli, was given new impetus, so that performances multiplied; by 1680, it elicited as much interest, and occasionally controversy, as the theater, and Louis himself was the most enlightened and appreciative of critics.

Painting, however, clearly held less appeal for him; indeed, there is good reason to think that he reacted more strongly to beautiful objects - which he collected avidly - than to great art. Not that he was a Philistine, but while he could not live without music, and was therefore constantly commissioning new pieces, it seems very probable that he only bought paintings so as to have a collection worthy of a great king. Indeed, there is something almost impersonal in the orders sent to a variety of agents in Italy throughout the seventies. Buy a lot of the best, they were told, an exhortation not unlike those uttered by certain turn-of-the-century American millionaires. Clearly, rather than satisfying the king’s yearning for the work of a particular master, these purchases were meant simply to bolster his reputation. Even when he bought every Poussin that came on the market, as he did throughout the reign, it was less an expression of personal taste than an effort at gathering the work of the man who was widely acknowledged as the only painter of genius France had ever bred.

In the end, however, whether or not the king was deeply moved by art did not matter: He knew very well that encouraging the best painters and sculptors of his time was a good way to make himself illustrious, and the connection between art and architecture, which he had discovered at Vaux, served as just the right kind of spur. Even better, one member of the Vaux triad, Le Brun, was the very man to underline that connection; already in 1663, therefore, the painter was granted a patent of nobility - his arms included a golden sun and a fleur-de-lis - and within a year, he had become Chancellor of the Académie de Peinture and Director of the Manufacture des Gobelins. Both posts were eminently suitable for this gifted man who, besides being a talented painter, was, first and foremost, a designer and organizer of genius.

Here, the Gobelins played a particularly important role. Set up by Colbert, who had regrouped a number of small, independent tapestry makers, the Manufacture Royale soon branched out into all aspects of the decorative arts, producing furniture, mostly made of solid silver, and various objects - vases, ewers, boxes, etc. - as well as the tapestries for which it has remained famous. Now that Le Brun was, in effect, its chief designer, the Gobelins could achieve just the sort of integrated look which was that artist’s great contribution.

Still, there can be no good decor without good architecture, and, here, Louis XIV was lucky: During the first forty years of his personal rule, from 1661 to 1700, he was able to work with two architects of genius, Le Vau and Mansart. For a king with a passion for building, this situation was ideal, especially since Mansart was able to function equally well whether the project was a huge palace or a tiny pavilion. Still, it would be a mistake to assimilate all the successive construction campaigns undertaken from the very beginning of the personal reign. Before 1668, piecemeal projects dominate: The Tuileries were completed, a new façade was added to the Louvre, some small expansions took place at Versailles and Fontainebleau; after 1668, and for almost twenty years, one massive concern, the creation of the most splendid palace in Europe, takes over; finally, starting in the eighties, the king’s pleasure pavilions - Trianon, Marly - introduce a new style altogether, even as work continued at Versailles, where the chapel, begun in 1701, was only completed in 1710.

Versailles itself, the huge palace with its sumptuous decor and majestic gardens, began to fascinate from the first day it was open. It still does today, but while it has been much admired, it has also been described as an act of monstrous self-indulgence, the expression of a grotesquely inflated ego. Its cost, countless critics have charged, bankrupted the nation; its very splendor ruined the monarchy because its gilded salons created so artificial an environment that Louis XIV lost touch with his people.

None of these accusations, in fact, will stand up to examination. Far from being the caprice of a luxury-mad monarch, Versailles probably saved France not just treasure but blood as well, for it was in itself a major political venture, and one which proved to be wholly successful. Between 1540 and 1652, France had been ravaged by six civil wars; any pretext - religion, the minority of the king, or plain, unvarnished greed - had sufficed; even when the monarch won out at the end - not an unvariable occurrence - the cost was enormous. After Versailles, the civil wars were over.

Nor was it so very expensive. Luckily, all the records have survived, so that we know, in great detail, just what was spent on even a doorknob or a lock, and adding it all up over the years, the grand total comes to exactly 25,725,836 livres (about $168 million) - a large sum to be sure, but one which France could well afford since it was spent over some thirty years. Clearly, however, comparative figures are in order. We do not know, obviously, what the French gross national product was in the seventeenth century; not only was the very notion some 250 years in the future, but it would also be well nigh impossible to establish for a preindustrial society where many transactions were still in kind. The yearly budget, though, can provide us with a standard, remembering always that taxes took in a far smaller proportion of the national wealth than is the case today.

In the 1670s, a time when war had not yet radically inflated government expenditure, the yearly budget hovered between 85 million and 90 million livres, and during the two great construction campaigns, those of 1670-72, and 1677-1682, expenses ran as follows: 1670: 1,632,800 livres; 1671: 2,481,408 livres; 1672: 2,022,499 livres, with 1673 coming in at a mere 491,171 livres. This sum represents at most, in 1671, a little less than 3 percent of that year’s income of over 87 million livres. By 1680, receipts were up to 91 million livres, and the amount spent on Versailles, 5,640,804 livres, was higher than any other year, but even then, it came to only 5 percent of income, and there were many years when the outlay was minimal. Thus, whether it is analyzed year by year or taken as a whole - 25 million against well over 2,600 million budgeted - it is clear that Versailles was very far, indeed, from bankrupting the state.

That was due in great part to Colbert’s ceaseless endeavors. “You do marvels about the money and every day adds to the satisfactions you give me. I am pleased to tell you this,”143 the king wrote Colbert in 1678, and in truth, the minister saw to it that Versailles was built as inexpensively as if it had belonged to the most penny-pinching of private owners. Competing bids were almost invariably solicited; the army, instead of being left idle in peacetime, was used for some of the rough labor; estimates were strictly adhered to; fluctuations in prices were watched with care. As a result, what struck most observers as unrestrained lavishness was, in fact, the result of what might almost be called scrimping - with the consequence that, often, chimneys drew poorly, windows did not shut tight, and discomfort was the rule in winter.

Colbert, of course, oversaw much of the work, but even he could not at the same time be at Versailles and in Paris, where he was running an assortment of ministries. So in the late seventies, he appointed one of his sons, the marquis d’Ormoy, as his representative on the site. The resulting correspondence is vivid and instructive: Its subjects run from delays (Versailles, too, was brought in late) to cost overruns to precise descriptions of a section of decor, and always the king looked, judged, and ordered changes. On October 20, 1679, for instance, Ormoy wrote his father: “I have just had the honor of following the King everywhere. He went into the grands and petits appartements* and into the Hall of the Ambassadors where His Majesty stopped for refreshments and ordered me to have the said hall gilded, along with the following small room, and to have gold initials put on the ceiling. Put wooden panels above the doors. Put marble mantelpieces above the fireplaces; that does not have to be done quickly. On the staircase,† fix the shell of the fountain because it is leaking on one side . . . Fix the broken windowpanes in the salon . . . have a door opened between the antichamber of the Queen’s grand appartement and her guardroom. Hurry the construction of the Queen’s small staircase . . .

“The King did not want to see the water of the pipe to Trianon because . . . the rainwater silted up the wells.”144 This supervision was all typical, as were Colbert’s ceaseless exhortations to his son because his questions were not always answered the very same day.

That Louis XIV took the most personal interest in Versailles is beyond question: Every single detail was first approved on the plan, then checked once it had been carried out, and often modified. As a result, the palace was almost as much his work as it was the architects’ and the designer’s - so much so that the building of Versailles became an essential part of the king’s life - but first, the reasons behind the whole huge enterprise require elucidating.

Far from being the result of the king’s own taste for building, as had been the case with the construction of Louis XIV’s ancestors, Versailles is, in fact, both the embodiment of a policy and the machinery through which it can be applied; far from being frivolous or self-indulgent, it is nothing less than an act of state. That it should also be so beautiful is one consequence of its purpose for which we have reason to be grateful. For, essentially, the palace is a golden trap in which to catch the princes and the great aristocrats.

Already in 1662, the Court’s increasing splendor was doing just that, but clearly, occasional festivities were not enough. The king’s goal was to attract the once dangerous grandees, not for a few weeks, or even months every year, but for good. That, in itself, would sever them from their power bases in the provinces and keep them where they could be watched: The posts were controlled by the government and all interesting mail opened, read, and reported on. Further, the expenses inherent in the ever glamorous life of the Court were likely to put the nobles even deeper in the king’s dependence: Once their income proved insufficient, they would have to rely on pensions and salaries as a supplement, and that implied being where the king saw and remembered them. Naturally, Louis XIV was careful to emphasize the necessity of actual attendance at Court by coldly saying “I don’t know him” of people whom he had not seen in a while.

Still, constant presence had to be made bearable, so the setting and the entertainments must be magnificent; most important, the king had to have a palace large enough to house this suddenly much larger Court. Then, too, the increased size of the Court, and the permanent presence of its members, meant that the etiquette could become both more all-encompassing and more complicated. By multiplying the positions around himself, the queen, and the royal family, Louis XIV could catch many more great nobles; by exciting constant jealousy between the different officeholders and the different ranks of the aristocracy, he could also ensure that the energies which had once provoked civil wars would be spent in quarreling about the right to a stool or the order of entrance into the royal bedroom.

As if that were not enough, the very existence of the palace bred yet a new kind of preoccupation for the Court. For the first time, there was room enough to house, if not quite every courtier, at least most of them, so the competition for apartments was fierce, and more than one duke had to make do with a small, dark, all-purpose room. Not being housed at Versailles, however, was considered to be catastrophic: Since only constant attendance on his majesty put one in a position to ask for favors, and since a prerequisite for this presence was a lodging, all of a sudden even the richest of grandees were glad to exchange their own vast châteaux and sumptuous townhouses for a garret; although, from the 1680s on, they began to build themselves residences in the town of Versailles.

None of this Court life would have been possible without Versailles. Of course, seen in that light, its cost becomes insignificant; better still, it is very much more than just a successful political machine. Here, for the first time, we see the enriching of a country by its buildings. The castles built by François I or Henri IV, the palazzi ordered by the Farnese or the Orsini, were all expressions of personal achievement. Versailles belonged to France as much as the king, as was made plain by the fact that, from the very beginning, its state apartments and gardens were open to all decently dressed visitors; it is a measure of the king’s success that the palace’s power of attraction has only grown with the centuries.

Nor is it merely a question of splendor: Without question, Versailles is also a major artistic achievement. Not only was a new style born there, it also remained a center of artistic growth throughout the reign and set new and dazzling standards. Magnificence, of course, was ever the order of the day; marble, gold, and silver were everywhere, but, far more important, the quality of every visible element of the decor reached unprecedented heights, so that the rest of Europe, henceforth and until the Revolution, looked to France for guidance in all artistic matters. Indeed, from Caserta to Schönbrunn, from Aranjuez to Tsarskoe Selo, the progeny of Versailles is scattered all over the continent.

As it is, what we see today is only the latter Versailles, version number three, so to speak, and precious little of it at that, since it was modified throughout the eighteenth century, then, more drastically still in the nineteenth.

It all started with Louis XIII’s hunting lodge, slightly embellished and enlarged in the early 1660s; then, in 1668, Le Vau was commissioned to design a new façade on the park side which would greatly expand the palace. At this stage, however, only what is now the central part of the building was built: Neither of the two vast lateral wings was yet contemplated, and where the Hall of Mirrors is today there was an open terrace. After Le Vau’s death, in 1670, his plans were carried out by François d’Orbay; and then, in 1676, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, at the king’s order, drew up a whole new palace which, incorporating the existing building, made it immensely larger. And although there have been later additions - the Chapel, the Opera, the two outermost wings in the Cour d’Honneur - from then on, seen from the outside, Versailles looked much as it does today.

Of course, the interior changed as well, but already in the seventies, splendid enfilades existed in which the king held court. That in itself helped modify the very nature of the monarchy. Even before Versailles, of course, the king had stressed that he stood above all other men. Bossuet, that inspired orator and obedient subject, made it all very clear already in 1662: “[Kings] are gods, although they die, but their authority does not,” he said in a sermon on the duties of kings, adding, a little later: “The royal throne is not the throne of a man but the very throne of God.”145 Still, had the king been tiny, undignified, or reclusive, these comparisons would have seemed absurd.

In this case, however, fate was generous: Even as a young man, Louis XIV was astonishingly majestic; he looked good in public and had perfected a way of never granting or refusing a request on the spot “Je verrai” (I will see), he always said - which prevented unpleasant moments. He knew just how to speak to everyone, how to be polite without being condescending or short. And most important, he was quite happy to live out his life in public. Except when he was working with his ministers, or actually having sex with one of his mistresses, therefore, he lived out his entire life in the open, and ordered his occupations so that they followed an invariable schedule.

“Never was a prince less ruled by others,” Primi Visconti, an Italian observer noted in 1673. “He wants to know everything: through his ministers the affairs of state; through the présidents those of the Parlements; through the judges the least little things; through his favorite ladies the latest fashions; in a word, there seldom occurs, in the course of a day, an event of which he is not informed and there are few people whose names and habits he does not know. He has a penetrating glance, knows everyone’s most private business, and, once he has seen a man or heard about him, he always remembers him.

“Besides that he is very orderly in all his actions. He always rises at eight, remains at the Council from ten to twelve-thirty, at which time he goes to mass, always together with the Queen and his family. Because of his intense and persistent desire to control all the state’s business, he has become very clever . . . He has an extraordinary talent and can often resolve problems which neither the ministers nor their secretaries could understand . . . At one, after having heard the mass, he visits his mistresses* until two, and then he invariably dines with the Queen in public. During the rest of the afternoon, he either hunts or goes for a walk; most of the time, he holds another Council when he returns. From nightfall until about ten, he talks to the ladies, or plays cards, or goes to the theater, or attends a ball. At eleven, after his supper, he visits his mistresses again. He always sleeps with the Queen . . .

“In public, he is full of gravity, and quite different from the way he is in private. Having several times found myself in his bedroom with other courtiers, I noticed that if the door chances to be opened, or if he comes out [from his private apartments] he immediately changes his attitude and his face takes on another expression, as if he were walking on to a stage: in a word, he always knows how to be a king . . . If one wants something, one must ask him directly, and not others. He listens to all, takes the memoranda, and always answers ‘I will see’ in a graceful and majestic way . . .

“He is helped by a robust state of health and a strong constitution . . . It is a fine show to see him coming out of the castle with the bodyguards, the carriages, the horses, the courtiers, the footmen, and a multitude of people in a mass running all around him . . . The King is almost always alone in his carriage. Sometimes, however, when he goes hunting or walking, he brings a few courtiers with him.”146

Other men were kings; Louis XIV was monarchy incarnate, in an age where, England always excepted, it was an acknowledged idea that the celestial hierarchy was mirrored on earth at the royal courts. And while increasingly throughout the seventies, the Court resided at Versailles, the king moved through his day as majestically, as predictably, as the sun through the heavens. Still, although he was incomparably above even the closest members of his family, he was surrounded by lesser stars, and they, too, helped set what was to become a universal pattern for the Court of a great king.

The queen, in her way, was as unchanging as her husband; she was, however, a good deal less impressive, and, of course, completely powerless. Louis XIV unquestionably respected her; he did his duty as her husband with great frequency, a fact we know because, invariably, the next morning Marie Thérèse would be seen to pray much longer than usual, no doubt in order to thank the divinity. Her amusements were few - attending religious services, eating, surrounding herself with dwarfs and small dogs - but they satisfied her, and she would have been perfectly happy had it not been for the king’s mistresses, whom she always, and ineffectively, hated. Still, she did just what was expected of her and always behaved in public with perfect dignity.

That had not been true of the second lady at Court, Madame. As the sixties passed into the seventies, the princess had become all too aware that the king was no longer interested in her; she retaliated by making her husband’s life as miserable as she could. There were constant scenes, after which Monsieur, never given to hiding his feelings, would lament his fate before one and all. Then, not only was Madame involved in intrigues with various factions at Court, she was also, most probably, unfaithful to her husband. In 1669 and early 1670, her position improved because Louis XIV used her as an intermediary between himself and her brother, King Charles II of England; it was, in fact, largely through her good offices that the Treaty of Dover, which linked the two nations, was concluded. Being needed, she also suddenly had a greater weight at Court, and the king, who before had most often sided with Monsieur, now started to defend his sister-in-law.

Here, once again, was a demonstration of Louis XIV’s apparent remoteness from normal human feeling. Not only was Monsieur kept absolutely in the dark as to his wife’s activities - he was notoriously indiscreet - but also Madame, in whom Christian charity was not the most visible of virtues, now prepared to make his life a living hell. Everything, of course, was under the king’s detached but all-knowing eye, and when the poor duc complained about it, he found that he could expect no help: As long as Madame was useful, she could behave just as she pleased.

That was the situation when on the afternoon of June 29, 1670, Madame, who was strolling on the terrace of St. Cloud, asked for, and drank, a glass of chicory water. Within an hour, she was seized by the most dreadful stomach pains; she was quickly carried to her bed, but the pains only got worse and were soon followed by convulsions; within hours, amid the most excruciating suffering, the princess breathed her last.

“Poison was immediately suspected,” the austere Ormesson noted, “because of all the circumstances of the illness and because of the bad relations between Madame and Monsieur which Monsieur, with reason, found offensive. That evening, the body was opened [for the autopsy] in the presence of the English Ambassador and several physicians of his choice, some of them English, as well as the King’s physicians. They reported that Madame’s body was severely diseased; one of her lungs adhered to the ribs and was completely spoiled, the liver was all dried up, bloodless, and with a great quantity of bile filling the body and the stomach, from which the conclusion was that no poison was used: if it had been, the stomach would have been pierced and spoiled.”147 The physicians’ report notwithstanding, the rumor that Madame had been poisoned, probably on her husband’s order, continued to spread, so much so that it has not completely died down to this day. In fact, no such supposition is necessary to explain her death.

Tuberculosis had long been a scourge of the English royal family; not so many years before, one of Henrietta’s brothers, Henry, duke of Gloucester, had died of it, and the description of the state of her lungs is in itself eloquent. That she died of peritonitis, probably of tubercular origin, is the most likely explanation, although acute appendicitis is also a possibility. In any event, Madame had long been in very bad health, coughing, losing weight until she was only skin and bones. The rumor that she was poisoned was, of course, provoked by the startling rapidity of her death, but in truth, she had already been wasting away for a long time. It should also be said, in all fairness, that Monsieur, in spite of his quick temper, would have been incapable of killing a fly, let alone his wife. There is a great distance between complaints and murder; for Monsieur, that distance was impassable.

“Many people, at Court and in Paris, much regretted Madame’s death,” Ormesson added. It is easy to see why: Odiously selfish as she could be on occasion, Madame radiated the sort of charm we have come to expect of movie stars, and she was also lively, intelligent, interested - a striking contrast to the dull, limited queen. That, perhaps was what spurred Bossuet when he came to write her funeral oration; what is at any rate certain is that he wrote one of the finest texts in the French language, one which has been quoted from that day to this one.

It is, of course, impossible to reproduce it in full: Bossuet, after all, spoke for over an hour, but even a few brief quotes will show the heights eloquence could reach in the seventeenth century.

“O vanity! O emptiness! O mortals ignorant of their own destinies! Could she have believed it ten months ago?* And you, Messieurs, could you have thought, when she shed so many tears in this place, that she would so soon gather you here to mourn her? . . . No, after what you have seen, health is but a word, life but a dream, glory mere appearance, graces and pleasures a dangerous amusement only . . . All that fortune and a high birth, and also the greatest qualities of mind can do to raise a princess high was brought together, then annihilated in her . . .

“O disastrous night! O fearful night in which, suddenly, like a thunderclap was heard that astonishing news, Madame is dying, Madame is dead . . . Everywhere cries resound; everywhere suffering, despair, and the image of death are present. The King, the Queen, Monsieur, the Court, the People, all are stunned, all are desperate . . . In most men, changes come slowly and death usually prepares them for its last stroke, but, like the flowers of the fields, Madame passed from morning to night.”148

The Court, however, was too self-involved to be really moved by this admirable flight of eloquence: Madame was mourned only by Charles II; as for the king, after shedding a river of tears, he forgot her before the week was out, and negotiations were started to find Monsieur a new wife. Indeed, all observers noted that this lack of feeling was typical: People were useful only as long as they lived; once dead, someone else had to be courted; Louis himself, after all, had long since stopped loving Madame.

By the early seventies, in fact, he had also just about stopped loving La Vallière, although she was still the maîtresse en titre. “The duchesse de La Vallière’s influence was greatly diminished,” Visconti noted, “and the marquise de Montespan was high in favor . . . She had fair hair, large azure-blue eyes, a well-shaped aquiline nose, a small, red mouth, very fine teeth, in a word a perfect face. As for her body, she was of medium height and well-proportioned, but when I first saw her, she had already put on weight. Her greatest charm was a special grace, wit, and way of turning a joke which so pleased La Vallière that she could not bear to be parted from her and was always praising her to the King . . . which made him curious to know her better.”149

That was soon done: Mme de Montespan and the king were clearly made for each other; just as La Vallière had appealed to a younger, less emancipated monarch, so Montespan, this splendid creature whose appetites matched Louis’s own, was the perfect mistress for the next stage of the reign. There was a problem, though: Mme de Montespan was married, and it was not only that the king’s double adultery seemed far more sinful than an affair with the unmarried La Vallière: The husband would not cooperate, much to every one’s surprise. After all, as Visconti noted in 1674, “there is not a single lady of quality who does not yearn to become the King’s mistress. Many women, whether married or not, have told me that to be loved by one’s monarch was no offense to their husbands, to their father or even to God himself . . . and the worst is that the families, the mothers, the fathers, and even certain husbands would be proud of this.”150

M. de Montespan’s steadfast refusal to see the light quickly proved an embarrassment: Sin was one thing, scandal quite another, and the marquis did all he could to make himself obnoxious. In 1673, for instance, he retired to his estate in Gascony, where he had a requiem mass celebrated for his wife’s soul, put himself, his children, and his servants in mourning, and went about deploring his loss. Another time, he took to displaying himself in Paris with horns, the cuckold’s symbol, attached to his hat; most of the time he went about insulting his wife in language so unrestrained that “whore” was the very least of it.

That, as well as the annoying business about the double adultery, was the reason why the chroniclers, at this period, constantly wrote of the king’s visits to his mistresses, in the plural. Mme de Montespan’s apartment was reached through La Vallière, who was thus made to serve as a screen: Louis XIV appeared to be visiting the former mistress when, in fact, he had merely walked through her rooms on his way to the marquise, showing, typically, virtually no concern for the duchesse’s feelings as she was thus left behind.

By 1674, however, no one had any doubt at all that Mme de Montespan alone mattered. Her very appearance proved it. On June 6, for instance, from Dole, which he was busy conquering for the second time, the king wrote Colbert: “Madame de Montespan absolutely refuses to let me give her jewels; but so that she will not lack them, I would like you to order a handsome small coffer in which you will put what I will list hereafter, so that I can easily lend her whatever she would like. It seems extraordinary, but she will not listen to reason when it comes to presents.

“You will put in that coffer a pearl necklace, which I want to be fine; two pairs of earrings, one in diamonds, which I want to be fine, the other of mixed stones; a box and some links of diamonds; a box and some links of mixed stones which can be taken apart and used with the diamonds as well. We must have stones of every color so that they will be available. We must also have a pair of pearl earrings.

“We must also have four dozen buttons, of which the stones can be changed in the middle, the outside being made of small diamonds, that will go with everything; we must have stones ready for this . . .

“You must spend freely on this, it will please me.”151 And five days later, the king ordered an even more significant (and expensive) present: An estate having been bought at Clagny, some three miles from Versailles, work was begun on a château designed by Mansard, and although it was torn down during the Revolution, we know from seventeenth-century engravings that it was both large and splendid.

Still, the anti-Montespan pressures were strong: The Church, respectfully but firmly, deplored the double adultery. Because Louis XIV normally took communion at Easter, that was an especially sensitive time: If the affair continued, the “Most Christian King” must stay away from the altar, and, in 1675, Bossuet finally convinced him the scandal was too great. Not for nothing was this time the century of Corneille and Racine: Louis and the marquise parted in public, both weeping torrents and expressing the most edifying sentiments. She then moved to Paris while he duly took communion, and after some six weeks, the bishops decided that it was safe for her to return to Court. So in order to avoid any possible awkwardness, a meeting between the former lovers was arranged in the presence of a group of elderly and respectable ladies. At first, all proceeded according to plan; then the king took the marquise off near a window; he was seen to whisper in her ear; she whispered back in his. They came back to the middle of the room, and facing the ladies, Louis bowed and the marquise curtseyed. Having done so, both moved into the next room, closing the door behind them. In short order, unequivocal noises filtered through the panel, and nine months later, when Mme de Montespan gave birth to a baby girl, any last, lingering doubt the ladies might have felt was finally eradicated.

By May, the marquise was back at the peak of favor. On the twenty-eighth, the king wrote, “Mme de Montespan wrote me that you had ordered the purchase of some orange trees [for Clagny] and that you always ask her what she would like; continue to do as I have commanded you in this as you have done until now.” On June 5, he reiterated: “Go on doing whatever Mme de Montespan wants,”152 and on the eighth, he amplified this order: “a great deal of money has been spent [on Clagny] and that proves that nothing is impossible for you in order to please me. Mme de Montespan has written me that you have carried out my commands perfectly and that you are always asking her what she wants: always continue to do so. She also tells me that she went to Sceaux* where she spent a pleasant evening. I have advised her to go some day to Dampierre† and have assured her that Mme de Chevreuse and Mme Colbert would be happy to receive her there. I feel sure that you will do the same. I will be pleased to have her amused, and these [evenings] will be very apt to entertain her.

“Confirm that this will happen. I am pleased to let you know all this so that you can see, inasmuch as it is in your power, that she is entertained.”153

What these letters reveal, however, is not just that Louis XIV was anxious to please the marquise: Typically, all these orders were addressed to Colbert, whose many responsibilities included everything connected to the king’s private life. Just as Monsieur had written to him when he wanted to be reconciled with his brother, so he was expected to look after the mistresses and their illegitimate children as well as the building of Versailles, the smooth operation of the state manufactures, what, today, we would call the Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Budget, international trade, the navy, and just about anything else which was neither War nor Justice.

Naturally, this reliance only happened because he carried out his many functions with spectacular efficiency and honesty; as a result, he developed a very particular relationship to the king, one in which real affection existed. While Louis XIV, in the course of his reign, grew to feel respect for the capacities of certain other ministers - Louvois, Colbert’s great rival, is an example - he always kept them at a certain distance; they knew they pleased only because they were useful. With Colbert, however, the tone is very different, perhaps because Louis, who never forgot anything, remembered that it was in part to him that he owed his triumph over Fouquet, so he sometimes sounds more like a concerned friend than an imperious master. On April 15, 1671, for instance, he wrote: “Madame Colbert has told me that your health is not too good, and that the speed with which you intend to return [from Rochefort] might harm you.

“I write you this note to order you not to do anything that would make you unable to serve me, when you arrive back, in all the important business with which I entrust you.

“In a word, your health is necessary to me, I want you to preserve it and to believe that I speak to you like this because of the trust and friendship I feel for you.”154 Friendship! That was not a word Louis XIV used casually and here it gives the full measure of the minister’s importance.

No less instructive, however, is a letter the king wrote Colbert just nine days later, because the minister, during a Council meeting in which the navy’s position had been discussed, had argued on after his master had announced his decision. In its mixture of reproof, domination, and care, it expresses the very essence of the new monarchy. “I was sufficiently master of myself the day before yesterday to conceal from you that it pained me to hear a man whom I covered with favors speak to me in the way you did,” Louis wrote on April 24. “I have felt much friendship for you, my actions have shown it, I feel it still today and believe that I show it clearly enough when I tell you that I constrained myself one single moment for you and that I did not want to tell you what I am now writing you so as not to put you in a position where you might displease me still further.

“That feeling is due to my remembrance of the services you have rendered me and to my friendship for you; be glad of it and do not risk annoying me any more, for after I have heard your arguments and those of your colleagues, and then decided on all your requests, I never want to hear another word on those subjects.

“See if the navy does not suit you, if your position is not what you wish, if you would prefer something else; speak freely. But after the decision I will take, I do not want to hear a single argument.

“I am telling you what I think so that you can work on a sound footing and will not take the wrong measures.”155

It would be difficult to state the position more clearly: The king was always willing to listen to advice before making a decision, but because he was absolute, God’s representative on earth, his decisions, once made, must be obeyed without further discussion. In this particular case, Colbert’s trespass had been due to jealousy: Louvois was getting more money for War than he was for the navy, and in his answer to the erring minister’s apology, Louis XIV made his position clearer still. “Do not think that my friendship for you will lessen, if your services continue it cannot happen, but you must render them such as I want them, and believe that all I do is for the best.

“The preference you fear I may give others must not pain you. I only want to avoid injustice while working for the good of the state. That is what I will do when you are all with me.

“In the meantime, believe that I have not changed toward you and that my feelings for you are such as you may wish.”156

Louis XIV had just made himself very plain, and Colbert heard the warning: Never again did he discuss a royal decision, but as we look back with the full benefit of hindsight, we are entitled to ask whether that, in fact, was the most productive of attitudes. The king’s reasons are clear: He would do whatever was necessary to avoid having a dominating minister and rely on God to inspire him with the right choice. Still, time after time, he chose to ignore excellent advice simply because it did not please him. When, for instance, Colbert pleaded that it was not possible to fight frequent wars, run the most splendid Court in Europe, and build Versailles, Trianon, and Marly all at the same time, he undoubtedly had a point. By 1671, for the first time in the history of the monarchy, he was producing a large surplus, 3,625,353 livres, while the debt was being retired at a steady rate. Already in 1680, the surplus had given way to a deficit of 4.5 million livres - very manageable still, but obviously alarming and due to the king’s refusal to curtail his expenditure. As a result, French historians have blamed Louis XIV for creating a lasting financial mess.

In fact, even a 4.5-million deficit still represented only 5 percent of the budget - a negligible figure to our modern eyes, and the king got good value for his money. When his wars resulted in the acquisition of important provinces (which, indeed, have remained French ever since), when his buildings turned out to be masterpieces admired throughout Europe, then the money cannot be said to have been wasted. Thus, it is a surprising, but real, fact that, when he relied on his instinct and ignored Colbert’s representations, Louis XIV was doing a great deal for the ultimate glory and welfare of France. There are, in the end, more important goals than a balanced budget, something the uneducated monarch understood better than his enormously competent minister.

Just because Louis XIV reserved the decisions to himself, however, does not mean that he was unaware of the details of his government: Besides determining policy, he watched jealously over its implementation. More, he took pride in his unrivaled knowledge of even the most distant parts of his realm. It is, for instance, interesting to read a letter he wrote in May 1671 to M. de Baas, Governor of the Isles of America, as the French Caribbean islands were then called, partly because of the care it denotes, partly because of its air of tolerance.

“Having learned that the Jews who have settled at Martinique and in the other islands inhabited by my subjects have incurred considerable expenses for the cultivation of the land, and that they are still fortifying their towns, which is useful to the population, I write you this to tell you that I want them to enjoy the same privileges as the other inhabitants of the same islands; they are to be given their full freedom of conscience, while the necessary precautions will be taken so that their religious ceremonies will not offend the Catholics.”157

This letter, obviously, has a double implication. The first and most obvious is that nothing was too inconsiderable for the king’s attention; the second, and more surprising, is that he was no enemy of toleration. A clear distinction can thus be made between his attitude to the Protestants, on the one hand, and his understanding of religious freedom on the other; as usual, this contrast was based on politics. The Protestants had formed almost a separate country within France; even in the 1670s, they represented a potentially dangerous minority, not by their power to convince but by their eventual ability to resist the royal government. Since it was the king’s great goal to ensure that his writ was unchallenged, he had an obvious reason to wish the Protestants converted to Catholicism. No such resistance was to be feared from the Jews, however, and so no attempt was made to convert them: More, their religious observances were to be protected. Coming from a monarch who eventually became almost a byword for fanatical Catholicism, this openmindedness needs to be noted.

Again, because Louis XIV became so radiant a symbol of monarchy, he is now often seen in modern terms as the first of a long line of dictators. In fact, precisely because he was the king, and thus secure, his method of ruling and of presenting himself was the very opposite of that adopted by someone like Mussolini. While modern “great leaders” have been reduced to pretending universal competence, Louis XIV invariably required, and usually deferred to, the opinions of experts. Nor did he ever downplay the importance of those people who served him. To take only one example among many, his behavior when Turenne died in July 1675 was typical.

“That evening, when all the courtiers were crowding around the table at which the King usually dines, he had barely appeared before he said gravely: ‘We have lost the father of the country’ . . . The next morning, so that people could see that the realm was not short of generals, and to lessen the effect of this loss, the King made Schomberg, d’Estrades, Navailles, Rochefort, Luxembourg, La Feuillade, Duras, and Vivonne marshals of France. Since this last was the brother of Mme de Montespan, people said that seven had been raised by the sword and one by the scabbard.”158 In fact, Vivonne was a brave, experienced, and effective general, and Louis XIV’s regard both for Turenne and for France’s position after his death was eminently sensible.

Common sense, that often despised quality, may well have been the king’s greatest boon. That he should have retained it in the midst of constant flattery is all the more admirable: The first consequence of his new system was that he had now become the target of every ambitious man and woman at Court, and that his smallest word was taken as gospel. In 1674, for instance, there was the story of the duc Mazarin, the cardinal’s nephew by marriage, and the man who had lent the king money at the time of Fouquet’s dismissal.

“It is enough,” Primi Visconti noted, “for the King to speak of someone for that person to be eagerly sought or completely rejected. On that subject, I have heard that when Mlle de La Vallière was the favorite, the duc Mazarin had told the King that he had had a revelation that night that His Majesty was to behave better; to which the King answered: ‘Well, I dreamed that you were mad!’ Immediately everyone, down to his own footmen, treated the duc as if he had been a madman so that he no longer dared show himself at Court. Several years later, the duc understood his mistake. He told the King how low he had fallen and begged for help. The King, at his lever, first talked about hunting with Mazarin, then, turning to the courtiers, he said that the duc had wit. Hardly had the duc left the bedroom before more people crowded around him than around the King.”159 It was, however, part of Louis’s extraordinary psychological stability that he saw through these marks of adoration; indeed, throughout the reign he occasionally made fun of his flatterers.

One of these sycophants, the maréchal de Grammont, repeatedly suffered from these demonstrations. There was the time, in 1664, when, according to Mme de Sévigné, the king showed him a sonnet, commenting that he thought it very poor. The maréchal wholeheartedly agreed, upon which the king announced that he was its author. Some ten years later, one day at the king’s dinner, he offered Grammont a piece of a pear he was eating, saying it was delicious; once again, the maréchal concurred, only to watch as the king told several other courtiers to taste the pear, which was, in fact, no good. Certainly, these stories show a lack of respect for Grammont, but then again, they were testimonials to the fact that the king demanded respect and obedience, not flattery.

Indeed, he could on occasion be positively ingenious in giving pleasure to the people close to him, In 1673, “His Majesty gave* M. le prince de Marcillac the office of grand master of the wardrobe in a manner which charmed everyone. He had one of his pages take him this note: ‘I am sending you La Hébertye from whom you will hear some news which will, I think, please you. I rejoice with you, as your friend, for this gift I make you as your master.’“160 And far from disdaining his subjects, he insisted that anyone of particular interest come and see him: “Although His Majesty is ordinarily busy with affairs of State, he still gives some moments to things worthy of the curiosity of his great mind, especially since he wants to be aware of everything. That is why when he found out that the Sieur Denis had made discoveries relating to magnets and the weight of air, he had several of his experiments carried out before him, which he admired and he thus caused the Sieur Denis to receive much praise.”161

Under these circumstances, it seemed quite normal when the king continued to raise his illegitimate children to a high rank. In 1673, three of Mme de Montespan’s offspring were acknowledged and raised to the peerage by letters patent: three-year-old Louis-Auguste, who was created duc du Maine, one-year-old Louis-César, who became comte de Vexin, and newly born Louise-Françoise, now comtesse de Nantes,162 while in 1676, one more of these offspring, Louise-Marie-Anne was in her turn named Mlle de Tours.

That step, obviously, was a first but not uncommon: Across the Channel, Charles II was proceeding in much the same manner. Soon, however, Louis XIV went a good deal further. In July 1675, he told Colbert that the comte de Vermandois was to be given the same rank as the prince de Conti, “just below that of the princes of the blood royal”163; in 1680, he signed letters patent signifying to all that henceforth these four children would bear the family name of Bourbon, as if they had been legitimate.164 Within the next decade, it became clear that the légitimés, as they were known, were being moved closer to the position of genuine members of the royal family. Inasmuch as the king saw himself as above the constraints of mere mortals, this step made sense: In his eyes, it was more important to be descended from him than from the brother of his great-grandfather, as was the case of Monsieur le Prince. Indeed, the constant identification of Louis XIV with Greco-Roman deities may have finally begun to alter his perception of himself: The bastard children of Zeus-Jupiter, after all, peopled the ancient world and were themselves demigods.

This quasi-divine status, of course, fits in nicely with what might be called the Versailles Plan: The domestication of the once ferocious aristocracy now took place in mythological surroundings, and André Félibien caught that note when he described a garden pavilion, the Grotto of Thetis, which was built there in 1672. It is impossible to quote in extenso from the forty pages of small type Félibien needed for a full description, but even then, an impression can be given.

“One can say of Versailles,” Félibien wrote, “that it is a place where Art alone is at work, and that Nature seems to have forsaken it so as to give the King occasion to bring forth, in a sort of Creation, so to speak, several splendid places . . . Nowhere has Art been more successful than in the Grotto of Thetis . . .

“This building, square in shape, is placed near the palace . . . it is a mass of rusticated stone opening by arcades closed by iron gates that are even more cleverly worked than they are rich. Above the central door there is a golden sun whose spreading rays form the bars of the three gates . . . three large reliefs adorn the front of this building; the central one shows the sun setting into the sea, the other two are full of tritons and sirens rejoicing at his coming; there are also other, smaller round reliefs showing maritime cupids playing with dolphins.”165

As usual, all these mythological allusions were meant to be easily understood: The Grotto of Thetis was the place where the Sun - i.e., Apollo and, by extension, the king - takes his rest once he has come to the end of his daily ride through the heavens. Magnificence and novelty were also important, however. The grotto’s only light came in through the three doors; inside, the walls were covered with small, rough stones, contained, however, within strips of marble; while the statue bases were also of rusticated stones, all the rest of the decor was made of mother-of-pearl. In the vestibule and the three salons alike, there were “paintings” worked in shells and various ornaments of coral, enamel, and mother-of-pearl; the fleur-de-lis, crowns, and “L” motifs were picked out in gold against a blue ground while various aquatic symbols were carved in amethysts. Nor was this ostentation all; the pilasters marching around the walls were made of shells with a central panel in which two large L’s were picked out in pearls on a ground of amethysts while, just above their capitals, were baskets filled with shell fruit and flowers from which a jet of water fell in one of the many black marble basins that had been positioned through the rooms. Then there were festoons of fruit and flowers framing sirens, tritons, and dolphins spouting water, along with mirrors, cornucopias, and sculpture-filled niches. In the center of the main room, water sprang up from a jasper table, struck the ceiling, and fell into a basin, while at the back, the Girardon group of Apollo and the Nymphs,* one of the masterpieces of French sculpture, was seen for the first time. And as if all that still weren’t enough, each room also had its chandelier.

“It is,” Félibien tells us, “an azure globe on which three branches, forming the sides of a triangle, are joined at the top to make three lyres complete with strings of gold thread. These branches are azure, but bordered with small yellow shells which are like a gold cord. At the bottom they are enriched with big mother-of-pearl leaves each with a large pearl in its center. At the top, the lyres are joined by festoons of different shells holding up a gold crown; at the bottom there are six mother-of-pearl dragons whose tails twine around the azure globe; their wings are spread and they look as if they might fly away except that their necks are chained by more festoons. Each holds in its mouth a candleholder made of shells where candles can be fixed at night but from which water can also spring up to the vault.”166 Nor were the surrounding gardens neglected. The Mercure galant, whose magazine format precluded it from describing the grotto as completely as Félibien, added: “The miracles wrought by M. Nautre [sic] are no less considerable, The great numbers of orange trees planted right in the ground [i.e., not in pots] prove this as well as the fully grown trees which have been transplanted to widen the main allée, something which had never been done before now.”167 Outdoors as indoors, dazzlement was the order of the day.

 

Ordering a splendid court, domesticating the aristocracy in Europe’s most splendid palace, exacting the most unquestioning obedience from all his subjects, all that only represented one aspect of the king’s life. Just as important, just as carefully planned, was war. Because, in our own time, war has taken on such a devastating character, the word very properly evokes fear and abhorrence: There can be no excuse, ever, for starting an aggressive war. None of this horror, however, was true in the seventeenth century. Wars were not only shorter and far more limited - guns still most often missed their target, rifles were cumbersome and inaccurate, and took a long time to reload - but they were also only fought part time: There was a campaigning season, from April to November; in winter, the contending armies went into their winter quarters to be safe until spring.

Then, too, the act of fighting was still considered praiseworthy: There was glory to be earned, bravery to be displayed. Great generals were widely admired, and conquered territory seemed highly desirable. This last, no doubt, was especially true in France: Not only was it the strongest and most populated country in Europe, but it had also failed to reach what have been since considered its natural limits, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the modern border with Belgium. That the province of Franche-Comté, French-speaking and French-surrounded, should be Spanish clearly made no sense, and while Louis XIV never forgot his gloire, the wars of the seventies, with one exception, aimed at giving France more reasonable borders.

Unfortunately, the exception was a very sizable one. In the entire course of his long reign, Louis XIV never made a worse foreign policy mistake than when he decided to attack Holland. Vanquished, it had nothing much to offer him, and if it should resist effectively, it could only damage his reputation. To the king himself, though, the reasons seemed good enough: The Dutch had been instrumental in forcing him to make peace in 1668; by crushing them, he would remove a menace from his flank when the war with Spain resumed; and it is impossible to deny that he had been irked by the Republic’s pride.

As it was, he did not move until he felt sure of victory. Madame, just before her death, had been pivotal in concluding a treaty of alliance with Charles II, thus ensuring that the Dutch would also be opposed by Europe’s greatest maritime power. The princes whose possessions were near the Rhine were bribed into acquiescence. The Treasury was prosperous and Colbert was ready to provide more money when needed. Finally, the army was superbly trained and supplied thanks to Louvois’s tireless efforts; with generals like Condé, Turenne, and Vauban, the great engineer, it was clearly invincible.

Having thus carefully prepared his victory, the king left St. Germain on April 29, 1672. On June 12, the king and the army reached the Rhine and crossed it, defeating the Dutch in the process, and raising the reputation of France to the skies. Indeed, a century later, the crossing of the Rhine was still celebrated. “That air of grandeur which heightened all the king’s actions,” Voltaire wrote, “the rapid success of his conquests, the splendor of his reign, the idolatry of his courtiers, finally the people’s, and especially the Parisians’, taste for exaggeration . . . all that made the crossing of the Rhine seem like something prodigious.”168

The first results of this victory were themselves brilliant. On June 20, Utrecht surrendered; within a few days, the French had reached the suburbs of Amsterdam. Had they taken Muyden, the Little town which controlled the sluices opening or closing the dikes, Amsterdam must have fallen, but the commander of the regiment sent to seize it, the marquis de Rochefort, failed to realize the importance of his mission and was defeated by its defenders. At that point, much against the advice of William Prince of Orange, their new commander in chief, the Dutch government, led by Jan de Witt, petitioned for peace, and it was then that Louis XIV, drunk with his own power, made a costly mistake. First, Louvois, a man famous for his arrogance as well as his effectiveness, was chosen to treat with the Dutch envoys; the Foreign Secretary, Arnauld de Pomponne, had only been in office a year, feared Louvois, and was generally timid; finally, the king himself, encouraged by Louvois, decided to demand exorbitant terms. The results were swift: On July 1, William of Orange became Stathouder, a position of great power, and on August 20, de Witt, who symbolized the peace party, was massacred, under the Prince’s indifferent eye, by an enraged mob. At the same time, all the sluices were opened and Amsterdam became an island: It could no longer be taken; indeed, by allowing even its richest land to be flooded, Holland made itself a purely maritime power, and there, it was superior to all. Already, at the battle of Sole Bay, Engel de Ruyter, the great Dutch admiral, had defeated the combined French and British fleets; now a stalemate was reached, and the war which was supposed to be short, easy, and victorious dragged on. Since no more spectacular victories could be expected, the king went home to be present at the celebration of his conquests, and the army was left to hold a hostile and inundated country.

He was greeted with rapture. In Paris, monuments went up in the tradition of the Roman arches of triumph; Boileau celebrated the crossing of the Rhine in an epic poem while van der Meulen painted it; always obliging, the Mercure galant printed a variety of laudatory verse of which this one is a fair sample: “Quoique vous puissiez attenter / Louis de votre sort sera toujours l’arbitre/ Et se dormant à vous sous cet illustre titre / Il vous rendra bien plus qu’il ne peut vous ôter; . . . / En vous soumettant à sa loi . . . / Vous perdrez vingt tyrans pour acquérir un Roi” (No matter what you may try / Louis will always be arbiter of your fate / And as he gives himself to you under that illustrious title / He will give you far more than he can take away; / As you bow to his law / You lose twenty tyrants and gain a single King).169 Not exactly a sparkling poem, but, no doubt, sincerely meant: Never was the praise given the king more fulsome than on his return from this useless campaign.

Of course, with Holland underwater, but unwilling to treat, and the French army settling down to a blend of sieges and antiguerrilla warfare, the conflict, which was supposed to end with the fighting season, dragged on. And naturally, Louis XIV’s enemies joined in: Along with Emperor Leopold I and the elector of Brandenburg, the Spanish governor in nearby Flanders sent troops to help the Dutch. As for the people of the occupied areas, they, too, turned against the French with a deep, burning hatred, not so much because of the invasion, but because both the maréchal de Luxembourg, a great strategist who was given to the most rapacious looting, and Louvois, who always thought fear a good ally, ravaged towns and villages alike. The king, when he heard about this marauding, was horrified and ordered it stopped, but it was too late: All over Europe, the French were seen as a present danger.

In January 1673, as if to mark a change in the course of the reign, the man who had written so many plays and divertissements for the king’s pleasure died suddenly. In Molière, France and Louis XIV were losing one of the greatest playwrights ever to set pen to paper. Perhaps the time for comedies had passed: Now, grander themes demanded attention, and in the spring, the fighting resumed. Since, clearly, it was time for some new triumph, the king decided to besiege Maestricht, one of the Netherlands’ key fortresses; in doing so, he scrupulously followed the advice given him by Vauban, the greatest living military engineer. It turned out to be yet another progress in the art of war.

“Vauban used for the first time the parallel trenches invented by Italian engineers serving in the Turkish army before Candia,” Voltaire noted. “He added mustering centers the better to gather the troops and rally them in case of enemy sorties. Louis, during this siege, showed himself more exact and harder-working than ever before. By his example, he accustomed to patience and hard work a nation which had until then been accused of having only that fiery courage which fatigue soon dispels. After an eight-day siege, on June 29, 1673, Maestricht surrendered.”170 Unfortunately, the world had changed: Not even the fall of the city could bring the Dutch to terms. Only eight days before, de Ruyter had once again beaten the Franco-British fleet; within days, Leopold I of Austria and Charles II of Spain (or rather his Council*) declared war on France. Since, at the same time, the king of England, prudently heeding his aroused Parliament, was preparing to negotiate with the Dutch, and the small Rhenish states were defecting as well, Louis XIV now found himself without significant allies just when he was opposed by the old Habsburg coalition. The results came soon enough: On September 14, the small fortress of Naerden, which was held by the French, was forced to surrender to the Prince of Orange. Militarily, it was an insignificant setback, but as the first French defeat since 1661, it seemed to many a taste of things to come.

If 1672 had, despite the conquest of so many Dutch cities, ended at best in a draw, 1673 seemed less promising still: With Europe leagued against France, the fall of Maestricht hardly mattered any longer, and because wars are expensive, the winter was marked by a series of small tax rebellions: For a monarch who had prided himself on lightening the tax load while balancing the budget and maintaining the most splendid court in Europe, this setback was serious. In this case, however, appearances were partly misleading: Although the new military expenditures (somewhat diminished by the contributions exacted from occupied Holland), added to the subsidies paid both the king of England and his opposition, came to an unexpected 25 million in a year when the deficit was meant to have been an insignificant 1,376,971 livres,171 the money could still be found easily thanks to Colbert’s excellent management. As for the uprisings, which were repressed with great firmness, they soon subsided.

Most important, however, was the attitude of the king himself. In the twelve years preceding 1673, partly through talent, partly through chance, he had known nothing but success - and perhaps been carried away by it into attacking Holland. Now, as the game became more difficult and defeat a real possibility, people watched to see what he would do; far from showing fear, or even worry, he proceeded to give the example of calm assurance. All through the winter of 1673-74, the Court was as festive as ever, and if Louis XIV worked even harder than before, that could surprise no one. What did cause considerable astonishment, however, was his next move: Just as he seemed about to be faced with adversaries far more powerful than himself, he went on the attack. Condé was sent off to fight William of Orange in the Netherlands; Turenne was stationed on the Rhine where the emperor’s troops were expected to attack; the king himself, at the head of yet another army, proceeded to conquer the Franche-Comté for the second time.

As usual, however, this apparently dauntless monarch was taking minimal risks. The key to the Franche-Comté was the attitude of the Swiss: Without their cooperation neither Spain nor Austria could send in enough troops to defend it, and they simply counted on the fact that the fiercely independent cantons would prefer not to have Louis XIV as a neighbor. The king, on the other hand, paid them to refuse passage to the Habsburg troops. The conquest, after that, was a foregone conclusion: The siege of Besançon, the province’s capital and chief fortress, lasted a mere nine days; six weeks later, the entire Franche-Comté was annexed to France. It has remained French to this day, “a monument to the weakness of the Austro-Spanish ministry and the strength of that of Louis XIV.”172

Attacking Spain, especially under these conditions, was easy; the Franche-Comté was geographically isolated, the Spanish army slowly disintegrating for lack of money and generals, and the government itself divided and weak. Austria, however, was a very different proposition. Leopold I was energetic, if not very bright; he had competent advisers, and his troops were led by Montecucculli, one of the best generals of the age. As a result, it took all Turenne’s talent, and after his death in 1675, Condé’s, to resist the imperial armies. For the first time under Louis XIV, France itself was invaded, but the enemy incursion into Alsace was soon repulsed: Not only was Turenne a master tactician, he went on fighting when all sensible men put their troops into winter quarters, and so he won a major battle against the imperial army at Turckheim on January 5, 1675.

That allowed him to cross the Rhine once more and conquer most of its right bank, with utterly disastrous consequences for its inhabitants. The Palatinate, which had been the emperor’s ally, was utterly and systematically ruined on Louvois’s orders. This destruction was meant as a warning of what Leopold’s other allies could expect if they continued the war; instead, it stiffened their will to fight - they knew what to expect if they were defeated - and caused hatreds that lasted for more than a century, all without bringing an end to the conflict.

Indeed, it was increasingly clear that the war, never in real danger of being lost, apparently could not be won either. Turenne’s death in July 1675 - he was killed by a cannonball - was immediately followed by a new invasion of Alsace, at which the king gave Condé the command of the army. The imperial troops were swept away once more, and then, at the end of the campaigning season, Monsieur le Prince, who was only fifty-four years old but already declining, retired to his castle of Chantilly. Luckily, Montecucculli did the same on his side, so that, by the end of 1675, neither army could boast a general of genius.

Once again, however, appearances were misleading. Just as Turenne lay dying, the duc de Vivonne, Mme de Montespan’s brother, attacked and defeated the Spanish fleet near Messina, and starting in 1676, the French began to accumulate victories. In April and May 1676, Bouchain and Condé were taken; in March and April 1677, Valenciennes and Cambrai followed; in March, 1678, Ypres and Gand fell in turn. All the sieges had been conducted by the king in person, so that, every year, he could point to new conquests. In Germany, after losing Philippsburg in 1676, the French army went on to win battle after battle in 1677 and 1678; on April 11, 1677, at the battle of Mont-Cassel, in Flanders, William of Orange, who was accustomed to being defeated by Louis XIV, was now beaten by Monsieur, “who charged with a courage and a presence of mind that no one expected from this effeminate prince. Never has there been a clearer example that bravery is not incompatible with softness; that prince, who often dressed in women’s clothes and had a woman’s tastes, behaved like a general and a soldier.”173 These remarks of Voltaire’s, accurate as they are, need perhaps still more emphasis: Monsieur did, indeed, dazzle everyone. The Mercure galant, naturally, published a poem by Isaac de Benserade, a fashionable author of plays, libretti and occasional verse. It was addressed to the king. “Un frère généreux par ton example instruit / Cherche tes ennemis, les combat, les détruit / Et vient mettre à tes pieds sa brillante victoire./ De l’encens qu’il mérite il n’est point satisfait / Il veut qu’on te le donne . . .” (A courageous brother learns from your example / He seeks out your foes, fights and destroys them / And put his brilliant victory at your feet. / He is not satisfied with the praise he has won / He wants you to have it . . .).174

That was enough for the king. He ignored the fact that Monsieur was absolutely loyal to him, and that his habits made him a laughingstock. Primi Visconti, for instance, could not refrain from commenting on them: “Monsieur,” he wrote, “looked after his toilette and dressed during the campaign exactly as if he were on his way to a ball . . . He went, all made-up and languid, to the most perilous and exposed places . . . He is so naturally brave that he seems unaware that he is risking his life and yet he looks like a woman because he is always repairing his make-up; he covers himself with ribbons and jewellery, he never wears a hat so as not to muss his wig and because he is short, he wears very high heels on which he is perched so that I really do not know how he keeps from falling. The King, on the contrary, dresses richly and conveniently, without all those unnecessary adornments.”175 Still, Louis refrained from visiting or even congratulating his brother and saw to it that Monsieur never again commanded an army: The very last thing he wanted was a brave and popular brother who might, even now, become a rallying point for the opposition. Similarly, he ignored Monsieur le Prince’s pleas that his son succeed to his command: Henceforth, no member of the royal family would ever again be in a position to become a hero.

By the spring of 1678, it seemed clear that France had the upper hand, so on April 9, the king made new offers for peace. Because, after all these years and all these battles, the Dutch had come to seem relatively unimportant, the conditions he offered them were lenient; most important, he gave up Maestricht and his other conquests, but Spain as usual was to pay for all. France demanded a large slice of the Spanish Netherlands (Flanders), including the towns and cities of Bouchain, Condé, Ypres, Valenciennes, Cambrai, and Maubeuge, along with the Franche-Comté; from the emperor, he wanted a free hand in managing Strasbourg, then an imperial fief; the elector of Brandenburg, who had attacked Sweden, France’s old ally, was to disgorge his conquests; finally, the duke of Lorraine, whose states had been occupied by the French, was allowed back only on condition that France retain the right to move its army through the duchy how and when it chose.

Given the military situation, these were not unreasonable conditions, but they obviously fell short of a complete French triumph, something the king was very unwilling to admit publicly. So he masked this deficiency by transforming what should have been a negotiation into an ultimatum, and amazingly enough, it worked: On August 10, at Nijmegen, the Dutch signed a treaty which embodied all the French demands; Spain and the emperor soon joined them.

 

France, as defined by the Peace of Nijmegen, was unquestionably the first power in Europe: The alliance of Holland, Spain, and the Empire had been unable to prevent it from gaining a significant accretion of territory, and while the allies disbanded their armies as soon as the war was over, Louis XIV kept his at full strength. This decision resulted in costs that had always been too heavy for his predecessors, but could now easily be borne. In 1680, in spite of the vast sums spent on six years of steady campaigning, in spite of the building of the third Versailles, the deficit was only 4.5 million in a budget of over 96 million,176 and that last number was, in itself, a major achievement. In 1675, the budget had risen as high as 113 million livres.177 Well might the king write Colbert, on March 10, 1678: “You are doing wonders with the money and I am more pleased with you every day.”178

As for the king himself, never had his glory been so brilliant. In 1680, the Paris municipality awarded him the title of Grand: henceforth, in all public inscriptions, on all public buildings, in every document, he was to be known as Louis le Grand; indeed, for the rest of the reign the medals bear the words Ludovicus Magnus. The praise offered him all through the war was - in France, at least - universal. In 1674, for instance, the Mercure was reporting: “[During the siege of Maestricht] nothing was ever seen to equal His Majesty’s activity. This great monarch seems to be everywhere at once; he goes himself to check every posted troop; he is always on horseback; he spends his nights under the tent. All follows his impulse, he gives the orders for everything; and there is so much prudence, wisdom, and experience in everything he orders that the greatest generals . . . never displayed more.”179

Three years later, it was: “Grand Roy, porte en tous lieux la guerre / La Fortune guide tes pas / Le dieu Mars te prête son bras / et Jupiter te prête son tonnerre” (Great King, take war everywhere / Fortune guides your steps / the god Mars lends you his arm / and Jupiter lends you his thunder).180 And when prose succeeded verse, the Mercure’s readers were told: “The King’s vigilance, intrepidity, and tirelessness cannot be expressed. He was within the trench two hours after it was dug and went all the way . . . to its head. A few days earlier, a cannonball went just past the Sieur de Givry, Equerry of the Petite Ecurie, who is never far from His Majesty”181; again, a month later: “Never has a monarch given so many orders himself or spent so many days on horseback than [Louis XIV] before Cambrai. He visited everything, acted immediately, ordered everything, was everywhere.”182 By May, verse was once again required: “Miraculeux héros, vainqueur inimitable / Par tes fameux exploits tu te fais admirer . . . / L’Alexandre orgueilleux qui se fit adorer / Se verrait s’il vivait réduit à soupirer / D’être moins grand que toi . . .” (Miraculous hero, inimitable victor / Your famous exploits have made you admired . . . / That proud Alexander who had himself worshiped / would be forced to sigh, if he lived today still / that he is not so great as you).183

That is only a small sample, and at Court, naturally, the praise was as exaggerated as it was ceaseless, although there was an occasional discordant note: The nobles, after all, followed the king to war and they had occasion to notice that he was often less than heroic. To us, accustomed as we are to generals in chief sitting in perfect safety well away from the battlefield, this behavior is hardly surprising: No greater catastrophe could have befallen the army or the country than the king’s death, but to many aristocratic officers, who still believed in the medieval tradition of dauntless (if often disastrous) charges, this very necessary prudence sometimes seemed like cowardice, and there were rumors to that effect of which Louis was very well aware. As it was, they were unquestionably unfair: Given the occasion, the king showed his courage clearly enough. In one of the trenches at the siege of Lille, for instance, “he [provoked] by his bravery a fine retort from a soldier who saw that he was exposed to enemy fire and that a page of the grande Ecurie had been killed behind him. The man took him roughly by the arm and said to him: ‘Go away, is this your place?’“184

Even the king’s victories struck those courtiers as less than admirable: Taking city after city by means of superior siege techniques was perhaps good enough for an engineer - a sort of person for whom they had nothing but contempt. A monarch, however, should lead his troops into battle: Henri IV, Louis’s grandfather, had been famous for telling the army to rally around the white plume on his helmet.

Of course, these mutterings, which were restricted to a tiny circle, hardly mattered in the real world, but they showed that the old spirit of rashness and rebellion was not dead, merely contained. The king expected no less: The very fact that such rumors still circulated proved the success of his policies and the need to continue them. Far from relaxing because the war had ended, he applied himself to his tasks as a ruler with even more energy.

The construction of Versailles was pushed forward, and the Court, now thoroughly convinced that pleasing his majesty was the only path to success, was more servile than ever. Not a penny was paid by the Treasury without the king’s authorization, not a place given, not a promotion granted, and an observer could legitimately note in 1680: “Thus the King had reached the height of power; all obeyed him inside and outside the realm. He only had to wish in order to obtain; even the weather seemed to favor him; when he wanted to hunt, or to go for a walk, if it was raining, it stopped, which I have noticed particularly since I have been in France. Besides all this, he had wealth, glory, and above all perfect health: in a word he only lacked immortality.”185 And another observer noted: “King Louis the Great, by making peace at Nijmegen, had reached the apex of human glory . . . Satisfied with his conquests, he had given peace to Europe in just the manner he pleased.”186

It was, in fact, at about this time that the king’s identification with the sun, and Apollo, the sun god, came to seem less like a piece of hyperbole than a factual description. Like the sun, nothing could stop him; like the sun, he dazzled all who looked at him. His very appearance confirmed it: As his face had changed from the slightly rounded shape of his youth to the hawk-like mask of maturity, he had adopted the great leonine wig which gave him still more presence and majesty, “The King is not handsome,” an observer wrote, “but he has regular features; his face is marked with smallpox [a common defect in the seventeenth century]; the eyes are as you will have them: majestic, lively, cheerful, voluptuous, tender, or awe-inspiring; in a word, he has presence and . . . a truly royal look: even if he were only one of the courtiers, he would stand out among them.”187 And then, the splendor of the Court added yet another element to his semidivine state.

During a stay at Fontainebleau in August 1677, for instance, the king was seen to wear, besides the usual number of new suits, twelve especially splendid costumes ordered for him by the prince de Marcillac, his grand master of the wardrobe. We know at least what one of these looked like thanks to the slightly breathless reporting in the Mercure galant: “[At a ball] the King appeared with a suit of gold lamé embroidered with gold and silver. His jewels were shaped like so many buckles and besides these, he carried a sword on which the precious stones were worth more than 150,000 livres.

“The Queen seemed covered with jewels of an extraordinary size. Because her gown was black, and its fabric used only to make them brighter, one can fairly say that they dazzled. Monsieur’s costume was covered with jewels arranged like the long buttonholes of the Brandenburg coats . . . The time spent at Fontainebleau was so full of pleasures that, on the nights of médianoche,* when the opera or the play ended too early, there were small private balls until midnight.”188 The operas in question, the Mercure tells us, were all by Lulli (Thésée, Alceste, Athis); the plays were by Molière (L’Avare, Le Misanthrope, L’Ecole des femmes), Racine, and Corneille - surprising since he had long been out of fashion. Hunting, of course, was a major amusement, but nothing was more impressive than the balls: Splendid though the royal family looked, the courtiers did almost as well. After a minute description of the newly fashionable hairdo - a complex arrangement of curls and one very wide braid - the Mercure goes on, as was its wont, to describe every detail: “All the coiffures were adorned with jeweled clasps with a pearl center. All kinds of pearl or jewel bows, replacing the usual ribbons, were set on the sides . . . Their gowns were all covered with jewels, especially on the scarves, and the seams, along with big bows on the front. Their sleeves were adorned in different ways with ties, buttons, or just cabochons of precious stones. The whole front of their skirts was also similarly adorned and the [overskirts] were held back by big diamond clips. Several more jewels formed a bow behind . . . The undersleeves were made of lace, slashed along the length, and turned up at the bottom with a different sort of lace, which held more jewels above and below . . .

“The buffet after the first ball was superb . . . The four tiers had, at the bottom, eight large baskets of fruit; in the corners there were little circles of candied fruit; the next level had four more baskets and the corners were the same as below. At the top was a large square of fruit that was two feet high. All the rounds and ovals were full of fruit and candied fruit filled all the squares that line the table . . . everywhere . . . there were torches and candlesticks . . . along with crystal saucers bearing quantities of goblets full of iced waters, and there were rare porcelain vases filled with all kinds of compotes . . .

“Imagine then this dazzling array of lights which were reflected one in the other as the torches were reflected in the crystal adorning the candlesticks and the candles in the gold of the torch holders; this was made brighter still by the sheen of the caramels and the candied fruit. Add to that the colors of the fruit, the ribbons in the baskets and the crystal of the saucers and the effect produced by the jewels worn by Their Majesties and the forty ladies who sat around the table.”189 We forget, in this age of electricity, how magical night lighting could be: The scene as described by the Mercure, must, indeed, have been awe-inspiring.

Just as the Court became increasingly more splendid, so the king’s private life assumed almost the dimensions of a matter of state: Besides his official mistresses, he had always had brief, often unknown affairs that might last less than a week; others might prove enduring but equally discreet, that with the princesse de Soubise being a perfect example. The princesse was beautiful and, naturally, willing; her husband, a member of the ambitious Rohan family, was the soul of tact; as a result, the king slept with Mme de Soubise now and again over the years while showering her family with favors, but the liaison never became fully public.

In the late seventies, however, all that was changed, and the king’s new amours became quickly and fully known. First, there was Mme de Ludres. “The King went off to war on March 1 [1677] at the very time when the courtiers thought him occupied with nothing but games, ballets, and a new love. That happened because Mme de Montespan, who had first persecuted Mme de Ludres, believing her influence definitively at an end, has called her back near her. That return, however, renewed the King’s desires so that he was seen, more than once, followed by Chamarande, his premier valet de chambre, who was in charge of the negotiations, going in a private* sedan chair from the château vieux at St. Germain to the château neuf where Mme de Ludres was lodged.”190 That he was now tired of Mme de Montespan was perhaps not surprising: The lusty //marquise had become enormously fat and even more demanding; worse, she made the most dreadful scenes when she failed to get her way, so the king, whose eye never ceased roving, now began setting up official rivals. Unlike La Vallière, however, Mme de Montespan was firmly determined to stay at Court, partly in the hope that she would recapture her lover.

In the meantime, however, there was no doubt at all that a new star had risen. “Solely because they believed her to be loved by the King, all the princesses and the duchesses stood up when she came in, even in the Queen’s presence, and only sat down again when Mme de Ludres asked them to do so, just as it was done with Mme de Montespan. And it was through this mark of distinction given to Mme de Ludres that the Queen learned about the King’s new infidelity . . . The Queen, then, had grown accustomed to these affairs but Mme de Montespan was enraged by them. I watched, at the Tuileries, Mme de Ludres and Mme de Thianges* exchanging venomous glances. They bumped into each other when they met.† Mme de Montespan did everything she could to hurt her rival but Mme de Ludres was herself responsible for her downfall. She had as her sole adviser a certain poet called Benserade‡ and as her sole confidante a certain Marianne, the daughter of an apothecary who was married to one Montataire, a wretch with neither influence nor friends. In order to make him more valued, [Marianne] thought of using him as an intermediary between Mme de Ludres and the King. This last, who had already given the job to Chamarande, was so surprised to find himself face to face with Montataire that he stopped seeing Mme de Ludres and ordered her to retire to a convent, offering her 200,000 livres which she did not accept.”191 In one respect, however, Visconti misunderstands the king: What caused Mme de Ludres’s dismissal was not surprise; there was nothing Louis XIV hated more than indiscretion, and that applied as well to an affair as to matters of state. Chamarande, obviously, could be trusted to keep his mouth shut; Montataire was likely to talk: No more was needed to make Mme de Ludres expendable.

This circumstance was especially true in a court filled with young and pretty women whose greatest ambition was to become the king’s mistress; sure enough, within a few weeks, Louis XIV fell in love with a blonde whose dazzling complexion and lithe figure were enhanced by her youth and obvious willingness. “ Mlle de Fontanges . . . was tall, with a good body and very pretty but, as she was fair-haired, those who were jealous of her said she was a redhead, for there is in France a prejudice according to which red-haired women are nasty and smell bad. Red-haired men are also supposed to be nasty, but they save themselves by wearing a wig,”192 the Italian Visconti noted.

Not only was Mlle de Fontanges a perfectly genuine blonde, she was also quiet, pliable and not terribly bright - the very opposite, in fact, of Mme de Montespan, whose legs, according to a sharp-eyed observer, had now reached the girth of an average man and whose temper was worse than ever; then, too, the king had reason to suspect she was slipping him a variety of love potions which were giving him fits of dizziness. There was also that old matter of the double adultery, made more annoying still by M. de Montespan’s provocative behavior. Colbert, the indispensable man as always, was set to watch over him. The result was an abundant correspondence of which the following is a fair sample. From Colbert to the king: “I received yesterday, Sire, Your Majesty’s letter of the seventeenth and will carry out punctually Your Majesty’s orders as regards M. de Montespan. Upon which you must know that some three or four years ago, when you ordered me to see to it that a suit he had before the Parlement be judged so that he would no longer have any reason or pretext to remain in Paris, I carried out Your Majesty’s order. The suit was tried and I believe he left.

“About two weeks ago, M. de Montespan came up to me and asked me to recommend to M. de Novion a suit he was engaged in, and the outcome of which he awaited before retiring to his province, but I did not do so because I did not think I should be mixed into his business without orders. If Your Majesty thought it necessary to thus press the said M. de Novion, perhaps he [Montespan] would then leave.”193 This letter was written on May 28, 1678. The orders were no doubt given, but on June 15, the king was writing Colbert: “I hear that Montespan is talking indiscreetly. He is a madman and you will please me by having him closely followed . . . I know that Montespan threatened he would come and see his wife. As he is quite capable of doing so, and as the consequences of this are to be feared, I rely on you to prevent him from appearing. Do not forget the details of this business and above all let him leave Paris as soon as possible.”194 It was not only that Montespan was quite likely to barge into his wife’s apartment and make a dreadful scene: Even in Paris, he behaved as scandalously as possible, and obviously none of this fit in with the image of Olympian detachment the king was anxious to preserve.

There was no such drawback with Mlle de Fontanges, but then again, she lacked those intellectual qualities Louis apparently found indispensable. So from the first, the Court watched for signs that the affair would not last - especially since another star was rising on the horizon. Already in 1675 it was noticed that the king liked to spend time with the lady in question, nor, given his habits, did anyone doubt that she had become his mistress. Indeed, from the moment in January of that year when he had created her marquise de Maintenon, the gossips had watched the two with great care.

Still, the new marquise was not likely ever to become really important. Her title, after all, was not unconnected with her functions as governess of the king’s illegitimate children. Real Enfants de France, born of the queen, could only be watched over by a duchess; given the way Louis XIV was beginning to feel about his bastards, it was clear that they, too, should have a titled lady in attendance. Then, Mme de Maintenon was Mme de Montespan’s protégée; the two ladies were friends, partly because they were both brilliantly intelligent and each appreciated the other’s mind. Besides that, Mme de Maintenon was unquestionably devoted to the children placed under her care; the more so, no doubt, because she was wholly unattached. All this dedication was duly appreciated by the king, but the notion that the former widow Scarron could ever play a major role at the most splendid Court in the world was simply laughable.

It was, in fact, the very modesty of the then Mme Scarron’s position which had led to her being chosen as governess of Mme de Montespan’s growing brood of royal children. Because of the double adultery, the king had, at first, been anxious to keep these children a secret, but then, times had changed. The children had become légitimés; they were seen at Court, publicly acknowledged as what they were even by the queen; their governess had also come out of the shadows.

She was, as Louis XIV was quick to appreciate, altogether an exceptional woman. The abbé de Choisy, who liked her, gave this picture of her: “She had looked after the education of M. le duc du Maine* which had given her a thousand occasions to show what she could do, her wit, her judgment, her straightforwardness, her piety and all the other natural virtues which do not always win hearts as fast as beauty, but which settle their conquests on a much sounder, almost indestructible base. She was no longer very young but her eyes were so alive, so brilliant, and there was such sparkling wit in her expression when she spoke, that it was difficult to see her often without feeling an inclination for her. The King, accustomed since his childhood to being surrounded with women, was delighted to find one who only spoke about virtue; he did not fear that people would say she ruled him; he had seen that she was undemanding and incapable of abusing her close connection with him.”195

In 1675, when she began to be noticed, Mme de Maintenon was forty - well past maturity in seventeenth-century terms - but she looked very much younger than her age and was, indeed, highly attractive. To her intellectual qualities, she added one that she had learned in the course of her difficult life, one the king prized especially highly: absolute discretion. And the fact that she behaved with the greatest modesty helped put her in contrast with the flamboyant Mme de Montespan. Even her appearance made her unique: In a court where women dressed in sumptuous, brightly colored materials and were covered with jewels, she never wore anything but black.

Finally, she was not only pious but intelligently so and capable both of sustaining a lengthy theological discussion and of making it lively: For a monarch who was genuinely pious himself, and who was increasingly worried about the sins entailed by his liaison with Mme de Montespan, this attraction, too, was powerful. As for the lady’s less attractive qualities - a certain hypocrisy, a definite thirst for power, a tendency to complain at enormous length - they were not yet in evidence; thus what the king saw, as he came from one of Mme de Montespan’s frequent scenes, was an attractive, intelligent, and serious woman with whom he could have a real conversation.

That he did so is the best proof that he cared more for merit than birth or position; for Mme de Maintenon’s career had been checkered in the extreme. She was born in a family, the d’Aubignés, who belonged to the very small nobility. Her father, who was essentially a crook, had gone from jail to jail so that the little Françoise was raised by relatives, first in faraway Martinique, then in the Poitou, where she served as maid-companion to her cousins. Any son of reputable marriage was obviously out of the question since she was absolutely penniless: Clearly, she would have to earn her living as a companion to some noble lady or governess to her children.

Had she also been plain, or dull, that, no doubt, would have been her fate, but from the first, she was extremely attractive and wonderfully bright. When she followed her aunt to Paris, she quickly gained the reputation of being excellent company, and then, in 1652, at the age of seventeen, she launched herself into the most unexpected and the most grotesque of marriages. Paul Scarron, her groom, was a well-known comic poet, the author of the first burlesque novel in the French language, and a man of culture and wit. He was much appreciated in Paris and counted many nobles among his friends, but he was also, at the age of forty-two, utterly crippled by rheumatism, unable to walk even a few steps by himself, and in constant pain. As a result, he looked very much older than his age and was impotent though by no means uninterested in sex.

There was every reason why the marriage should have been disastrous; in fact, it was highly successful. The new Mme Scarron liked her husband and admired his talent while he, on his side, enjoyed his wife’s looks and intelligence. She made a comfortable (but not at all luxurious) home for him and in short order found herself at the head of a salon frequented not just by intellectuals, but also by a few dukes and some of the great ladies who ruled Paris society. This position was a not unenviable one, and Mme Scarron made the most of it. Unfortunately, the seventeenth century was not a good time for authors, financially, at least: They depended on patronage for their living, and during the years of the Scarrons’ marriage, the Fronde’s aftereffects dried up that source of income. Still, when the poet finally died in 1660, his widow was so well esteemed that Anne of Austria, who knew her to be utterly penniless awarded her a pension.

There followed a period of her life that we know almost nothing about, and then Mme Scarron was recruited to take care of the king’s illegitimate children. Her antecedents were such, therefore, that she could be no menace to Mme de Montespan, a fact of which that lady was very well aware and which no doubt figured largely in the two women’s friendship. Facts of that nature, however, have a way of changing, and while his feelings for Mlle de Fontanges were not affected by those he entertained for Mme de Maintenon, the king nonetheless was seen to pay more and more attention to the governess. By 1679, Mme de Montespan was beginning to find herself in the same position as La Vallière some ten years earlier. Of course, she fought back - with tears and scenes, then, more startlingly, with religion. The sight of the marquise visiting churches at odd hours of the day and spouting the scriptures must have seemed irresistibly comic at first; there can be no doubt that it was all a maneuver to regain the king’s love by preempting Mme de Maintenon’s favorite topic. Oddly enough, it worked, if in an unexpected way: It did not gain her the king, but she did become genuinely pious.

Before she settled for regular attendance at mass, however, Mme de Montespan had tried a few less orthodox methods. In due course, the king found out what they were, and the knowledge offended and frightened him: Neither the marquise nor, indeed, France was quite what he had thought them.

* The grands appartements were the state apartments and included the king’s bedroom; the petits appartements were the king’s private rooms.

† The Escalier des Ambassadeurs; it was torn down in 1751.

* Mmes de La Vallière and de Montespan.

* When her mother’s funeral service was celebrated in the same cathedral.

* Colbert’s country house near Versailles.

† The large and splendid château which belonged to Colbert’s son-in-law, the due de Chevreuse.

* A double gift was involved: the permission to be grand master and the price of the office. All Court offices were venal: The king chose their holders, but they had to pay their predecessor or his heir a very large sum.

* That admirable group was repositioned in an open kiosk when the grotto was torn down in the late 1680s, then transferred on Marie Antoinette’s orders to her own grotto in the garden of the Petit Trianon. It is there today.

* Charles II was only thirteen.

* Midnight suppers.

* Without the royal arms on the side panel, that is.

* Mme de Montespan’s sister.

† Because each tried to precede the other.

‡ Far from being “a certain poet,” Benserade was one of the king’s favorite writers and the author of much occasional verse read during Court festivities.

* The duc du Maine, who was born on March 31, 1670, was the king’s favorite among his illegitimate children.