Louis XIV Read online

  The king, naturally, headed one of the groups, and his colors were crimson and white, those of the second team blue and white, those of the third green and white, all heavily embroidered with gold and silver; for greater glamour, all the knights’ costumes were loose imitations of ancient Roman fashions, with beplumed helmets; all rode lavishly caparisoned horses. To make it more splendid, there were great troops of pages, spear carriers, and attendants of various kinds, awash in plumes and ribbons. Although a competition actually took place - a ring had to be speared - the point was obviously to give as magnificent a spectacle as possible.

  Of course, entertainments like these were expensive; quite where the money came from, only a very few people knew. The war was still draining great sums; worse, the total confusion of the royal finances, which had always existed but had grown altogether spectacular during the Fronde, was now such that the Treasury was perennially empty. Still, the money was not lost for everyone: As taxes began to yield more, thanks to the end of the civil war, the financiers who collected them under a complicated system of contracts with the Treasury simply kept larger and larger sums for themselves. Fraudulent operations of all kinds multiplied, and while the king himself almost had to beg Mazarin whenever he wanted a little money, he watched a small group of his subjects grow spectacularly rich. Indeed, his very own Superintendent of Finances seemed to have a marked talent for enriching himself at the king’s expense: By 1658, Fouquet had started to build what was obviously a château of unparalleled magnificence. That the sight was galling hardly needs pointing out, nor can Louis XIV have enjoyed seeing the courtiers flocking around the cardinal in their endless quest for preferment while paying relatively little attention to their sovereign. And it says something for the strength of the young man’s devotion to the state that he allowed it all to continue without ever saying a word: As long as Mazarin was the best prime minister for France, then the king was willing to put up with a great deal.

  That aspect of the young Louis XIV’s character should not, however, be overemphasized: Much of the time, he was simply a pleasure-loving young man. There was the time, for instance, when he snubbed his cousin because no young man of sixteen wants to be seen with a little girl of eleven. “One evening [in 1655], the Queen asked the Queen of England to come and see the King dance in private … and made sure that the company, though small, was worthy of the royal guests. The King, who was all too accustomed to putting the Cardinal’s nieces first, asked Mme de Mercoeur to dance the first branle with him. The Queen, who was surprised by this mistake, rose quickly from her chair, pushed Mme de Mercoeur away from him, and told him to go and ask the princess of England … Later that evening, he was again scolded by his mother, but he answered that he did not like little girls … The Queen behaved to him with respect and tenderness in public, but when he made some small mistake, she used the prerogatives of a mother.”62 The point, obviously, is that Henrietta of England, as a king’s daughter and his cousin, had precedence, even if she was young, plain, and dowdy, and that it was also unkind to ignore her since she lived in exile and poverty with her notoriously difficult mother.

  Still, when it came to glamour, there could be no doubt about it: The cardinal’s nieces outshone everyone: Not only were they all well able to dress splendidly and in the latest fashions, they had also inherited their uncle’s intelligence, and when, in February 1657, yet another of these young women appeared at the Louvre, the king immediately paid attention to her. This time, however, people were surprised: A gawky adolescent hardly seemed like suitable competition for the beauties of the Court.

  If, in fact, Marie Mancini had lived in the late twentieth century, she might well have been a model: Tall, thin, dark, with huge black eyes and a dazzling smile, she contravened every canon dear to the seventeenth century, when to be fair, plump, and cute seemed far more desirable, but the fire in those disproportionate eyes dazzled the king, as did a kind of fierce intelligence and stormy emotiveness with which he was wholly unfamiliar.

  From the very first, Louis XIV noticed the odd, unusual girl whose conversation was so unlike that of her sisters: At the onset of the age of classicism, the king had come face to face with romanticism, and for the moment at least, he quite liked what he saw. It was not until some fifteen months later, however, that his feelings underwent a drastic change. During the Court’s stay in Fontainebleau that summer, it was noticed that Louis was spending much of his time deep in conversation with Marie, and that, despite what all agreed was her plainness, he seemed attracted to her. Soon, they began to realize that this instance was not the king’s standard flirtation with one of Mazarin’s nieces: Instead of merely entertaining him as best she could, the young woman had clearly fallen head over heels in love with him.

  For Louis, that experience was new. He was already used to immediate and easy conquests, but these types had remained purely physical. Now, for the first time, he was being loved, passionately and devotedly, for himself: There are few young men who would not, at the very least, be flattered by this attention, nor under the circumstances, was it very difficult to reciprocate so ardent an offering. That is exactly what happened: By August, 1658, the king was obviously in love with Marie Mancini.

  That was all very well up to a point. While the cardinal might not be very happy about it, if his niece simply had a fiery affair with the king, and if that affair moved along to its predestined end, then all would be well. And that, after all, seemed the obvious outcome. Unfortunately, Marie saw no reason why Louis’s position should alter what would otherwise be the result when two young, unmarried people fall in love, so instead of marrying someone else, then inviting the king to her bed, she proceeded to behave in ways which at first seemed merely odd, then worrisome, and finally almost sacrilegious: Princes may marry shepherdesses in fairy tales, but in seventeenth century Europe, kings stuck strictly to their own kind.

  The very notion that a girl of no birth, and who was only at court because her uncle was prime minister, had set her sights for the sovereign was bad enough; far worse, she would, if successful, ruin the efforts of nearly thirty years: Already that summer, the subtle cardinal knew, through a variety of secret contacts, that the king of Spain was at long last ready to negotiate in earnest and that the inevitable concomitant of a peace treaty would be the betrothal of king and infanta. Then, too, Anne of Austria, for all her graciousness, had strict standards. The only bride worthy of her son, she felt, was her niece, and there could be no question of some little Italian standing in the way.

  Still, that hardly seemed probable, so the king and Marie were allowed to enjoy their romance. And since Louis was now twenty, his age was used to exert a little diplomatic pressure on Spain: On October 25, 1658, the court set off for Lyon; there, it was to meet with another of the king’s cousins, the princess of Savoy,* and it was heavily hinted that a marriage agreement was the likely result. Of course, far away in Madrid, Philip IV heard the news, just as Mazarin meant him to do, and his response was simple. “Esto no puede ser, y no sera,”63† he said, and promptly sent forth his negotiators.

  In the meantime, the king and Marie behaved like two young people in love. They saw each other constantly, rode off together, laughed, sighed, even cried on occasion; then, on November 24, they arrived in Lyon. By that time, Marie felt quite sure that Louis loved her, and since it apparently never occurred to her that true love is not always rewarded, she took the forthcoming meeting with Marguerite of Savoy very much in her stride. As for the king, he behaved as if nothing was amiss: Upon meeting the princess, he rode back to his mother’s carriage and told her: “She is very attractive, and very like her portraits. She is a little dark, but that does not prevent her from having a very good figure.”64 Louis’s equanimity is perhaps not so very surprising after all: Neither Anne of Austria nor Mazarin had ever thought of the meeting as anything but a ploy to soften Philip IV, and the king, no doubt, was well aware of this ruse, especially since it was at Lyon that the cardinal received
a secret envoy from Spain.

  Don Diego Pimentel’s presence in Lyon meant everything: Until then, the cardinal and Philip IV had communicated via traveling monks and merchants, so as to avoid all appearances of negotiations and the loss of face consequent to their being broken off by the other party, but Pimentel was one of the king’s ministers. That night, Mazarin gave the good news to the queen, and the two Savoys, mother and daughter, were let down gently. For Marie Mancini, however, who knew nothing of all this intrigue, it simply looked as if Louis had turned the princess down because he was already in love with her; both the queen and Mazarin unwittingly encouraged her in her error: When the Court left Lyon to return to Paris, Louis and Marie rode back almost alone.

  For Marie, the trip was a triumph: As she passed through towns and villages, the people treated her almost as if she were queen; once in Paris, the romance continued to flourish. There were little concerts, with music written by a young foreigner named Lulli; there were balls in which Marie shone with a beauty now generally recognized, and costumed dances, to one of which she came as a shepherdess bearing a silver crook; even more important, there were countless evenings of just sitting and talking; just in case any doubts still lingered, the king bought a celebrated pearl necklace from the impoverished queen of England for 70,000 livres ($375,000) and gave it to Marie.

  That he should have been able to do so depended, of course, on the cardinal’s providing the money, and the reason Mazarin was willing to do so was that, throughout that winter, Louis’s obvious love for Marie was a major diplomatic asset: In his negotiations with Pimentel, he could point out that, as far as he was concerned, the Spanish marriage was only an extra complication. Far from France’s asking for the infanta’s hand, Spain was finding itself forced to offer it. Even diplomatic ploys have their limits, however; in this case, Anne of Austria was the one to blow the whistle.

  Had Marie become the king’s mistress, she would have had no complaints; only, while everyone thought it quite normal to have the sovereign sleep with married women, girls were considered off limits, so Marie was constantly watched by Mme de Venel, her eagle-eyed chaperone. Had Marie agreed to a match of convenience, then she could have loved the king to her heart’s content, but when it became clear that she had no intention of marrying anyone but Louis, and, worse, that Louis himself was really in love, and might even consider making Marie his wife. Then Anne of Austria began to worry, and just in case the cardinal was dazzled by the glory of putting his niece on the throne, she made her feelings very clear. “I do not believe, Monsieur le Cardinal,” she told him in the spring of 1659, “that the King is capable of behaving like a coward; but if it were possible that he ever thought about it, I warn you that France would rise in revolt against the both of you, that I would put myself at the head of the rebels and would take my [younger] son with me.”65

  The choice was now clear: Either Louis XIV could behave like a coward by giving in to his feelings, or he could act like a king by doing his duty. The cardinal himself had no doubt about which it should be, and Marie being a minor and his ward, he was in a good position to make his will prevail. Obviously, the solution was to send her away from the Court, which he proceeded to do in June. “The King,” Mme de Motteville tells us, “who loved her dearly, was so moved by her sufferings in being taken away from him that his passion carried him away to the degree that he told Cardinal Mazarin … that he wanted to marry his niece …

  “The minister … did himself honor by refusing the King’s offer, saying to him that he [the King] was carried away by the violence of a passion which he would soon repent and that he would reproach [Mazarin] for not having stopped him when the whole kingdom rose against him to prevent his being dishonored by so unworthy a marriage. He added that he had been chosen by the late King his father, and then by the Queen his mother, to be his adviser; that he had served him until then with an inviolable faith and that, therefore, he was not about to take advantage, either of the King’s admission of his weakness, or of the authority which he [Mazarin] enjoyed over his realm, to allow him to do something so contrary to his reputation …

  “The King was thus forced to allow so painful a separation, and saw Mlle de Mancini off to Brouage … It was not without shedding tears along with her, but he did not give in even when she told him: ‘You are crying yet you are the master’ …

  “The King was greatly to be praised because he knew that his sufferings were due to the Queen and realized, in spite of his feelings, that this was like what happens when a surgeon cures an illness with an incision. He cried with her, complained not about her but with her …

  “The Queen told me: ‘I pity the King, he is in love yet reasonable at the same time; but I have just told him that I am sure he will thank me one day for the suffering I have caused him, and because of what I see in him, I do not doubt that will be the case.’ … The next day, June 22, Mlle de Mancini left … There were many tears on both parts.”66

  In fact, convinced though he might be by his mother’s arguments, Louis was suffering so badly that he could not bear to give up. He promptly started a secret correspondence with Marie, which was almost as quickly discovered by Mazarin. Clearly, the situation was grave: The Court was about to leave for Saint Jean de Luz in order to sign a treaty with Spain of which the marriage would be an essential clause, so on July 12, 1659, he sat down and wrote Louis XIV a letter such as few ministers can ever have written to their sovereign.

  “You will allow me to tell you, with all the respect and obedience I owe you, that although my willingness to do whatever you wished has always been extreme, when I found myself able to so behave without damaging your service or your reputation, and although I wish that on this occasion I could do the same, still, my reputation is at stake along with that of a person whom you honor with your kindness and it will undoubtedly be irreparably wounded if you do not consent to stop the relationship which you continue so publicly. I beg you to do so. And being, as you are, the kindest and most reasonable of men, I cannot doubt that for those reasons alone you will do me this favor, still, I want to receive it as the greatest reward you can give me for the little services I have been so happy as to render you, and I dare say also that, in the present situation, you also owe it to yourself, you are about to set off to carry out something which cannot occur if you continue the said relationship, which causes you a greater wrong than if the person in question were at court and if you were behaving to her as you did in Paris … And since I care even more for your honor than for that which can affect me the most directly, I cannot refrain from telling you all this … I beg your pardon if I press you to do something which, at first, will go against your inclinations and hope you will believe I would give my life so as to be able only to suggest things that would be pleasant for you.”67

  The phrasing of this letter tells more, even, than its contents: These endless, complicated, and sinuous sentences show very clearly how difficult Mazarin felt his task to be, and how important it was that he succeed. In fact, he had taken just the right attitude, no doubt in conjunction with the queen. While the twenty-year-old monarch was beginning to feel that, in all matters, his will must prevail, still the thoughts of honor, reputation, and glory invoked by Mazarin were even more powerful than love. Already, Louis XIV was first a king, then a man; he knew his duty; while that is a notion which, in our time, we have learned to disdain, nothing could have been more important in the seventeenth century: A man - or a woman - who scorned duty deserved only contempt. And when it came to choosing between Marie Mancini and the infanta, Louis’s duty was absolutely clear. Because he was so very much in love, with the queen’s permission, he did see Marie one last time, on August 13; once again, many tears were shed, but when the king left, he was on his way to Saint Jean de Luz and his duty.

  That very day, Mazarin, who had gone on ahead, met the Spanish prime minister, Don Luis de Haro, on an island in the middle of the Bidassoa, the river which divided France and Spain, but he wo
rried about the king as much as about the negotiations; while Louis XIV was, indeed, separated from his beloved, he continued to talk about her and correspond with her, so that the cardinal, in turn, started writing endless letters, but to the king, in which he criticized his niece so strongly that the proud monarch began to rebel; when Mazarin found out that M. du Terron, the man he had chosen to look after his niece, was encouraging her correspondence with the king, he exploded. “So a relationship which had altogether ended after all the efforts I made to that end (going even so far as to tell the King I would resign and meant to leave everything and take ship with my nieces to go wherever I could if he did not break with her) is now about to start again, more than ever, because of the said Terron who, in one word, has tried thus to make his fortune,”68 he wrote Colbert in a rage.

  The situation, in fact, was even more dangerous than Colbert, Mazarin’s faithful assistant, knew: The king, exasperated by the tone of Mazarin’s letters, had well and truly accepted the cardinal’s resignation; at which point, his blackmail having failed, Mazarin had simply gone on negotiating as if nothing had happened. At last, the infanta was mentioned, and then Marie, whom her uncle had kept informed, realized that all now depended on her. Like the true romantic she was, she nobly renounced her illfated love, and so told the king, who promptly gave way to tears. On November 7, 1659, the Treaty of the Pyrenees, matrimonial clause and all, was signed; Louis XIV, who had just become the most powerful monarch in Europe, felt nothing but despair.

  * The Parlement was responsible, in part, for maintaining order in the capital.

  † The Parlement was composed of several tribunals which sat separately: They had come together during the Fronde in order to fight the government.