Jonathan Keates
MESDEMOISELLES SOLEIL
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King
By Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 388pp £25)

‘Nothing succeeds like excess’ should have been the personal motto of King Louis XIV of France. His long reign (1643–1715) was a triumph of overstatement in everything from the flowerbeds at Versailles, whose plants were changed every day, to the royal breakfasts, where the monarch gorged on a banquet large enough to have nourished several families for a week. Flattery, on a scale undreamt of since the days of Nero or Caligula, sustained a dual epiphany of the god-king, either as a benign Apollo charioted amid pasteboard clouds at the climax of a court ballet, or as warrior Mars astride a caracoling charger, trampling Flanders and the Palatinate beneath its hooves.

Splash, dash and panache, however, were not quite so much Louis’s style where women were concerned. Among several arresting aspects of Antonia Fraser’s book is the paradox which reconciles one of history’s most image-conscious rulers with a more reserved individual, capable of loyalty and discretion in affairs of the heart and not a complete stranger to emotion. Louis was a tyrant, with all the selfishness intrinsic to his position, but he was never a monster, and women were plainly drawn to him by something stronger than the banal magnetism of absolute power.

The biggest what-if aspect to Louis’s personal life lay in the choice of a consort, made for him by his mother, Anne of Austria, and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Had the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa been more alluring and sophisticated, Louis, though hardly the uxorious type, might have felt less inclined to wander. In fact she seems to have made no effort, as France’s Queen Marie-Thérèse, either to assume the less rigid manners of her adopted country or, more significantly, to support her young husband in his determination to restore dignity and magnificence to the French crown. Surrounded by her Spanish entourage of dwarfs and dogs, she was interested in little beyond gambling and visiting convents. No wonder that, although the King spent almost every night of their 23-year marriage in his wife’s bed, he advised his first-born son to ‘ask of God a princess who was agreeable to him’.

Louise de La Vallière, his sister-in-law’s lady-in-waiting, was a rather tastier prospect. Possessed of what one contemporary called ‘the grace more beautiful than beauty’ and referred to by another as ‘a violet hidden in the grass’, this first in line of the royal mistresses emerges, in Fraser’s account, as the most attractive, not least because her intense passion for the King was continually at war with a sincere Catholic piety. Louise had needed to convince herself that losing her virginity to her sovereign was a sacred duty. When at length, after bearing him two children, she renounced the office of maîtresse en titre to become a Carmelite nun, it was through her own long-meditated resolve. Wearing a hair-shirt, she sought the Queen’s pardon for her wrongdoing, but though Marie-Thérèse granted it with surprising magnanimity she was no doubt delighted to be present when, some days later, the fair sinner donned the habit of a postulant. Louis himself had shed bitter tears at their final interview.

By now, however, the King was chasing fresh game in the shape of Athénaïs de Montespan, married to an impecunious Gascon marquis and bent on furthering her own prospects if not her husband’s. Spirited and shameless, she held out to Louis what Fraser calls ‘the great sexual adventure of his life’, jaunting off to Flanders on campaign with him and dancing in the ballets at Versailles, where the besotted monarch assigned her a suite of sumptuously furnished apartments and showered her with jewels. Louise de La Vallière’s retreat to the cloister was hastened by such a meteoric ascent, which had already proved too much for Athénaïs’s cuckolded husband. Planning the most sordid of revenges on the royal seducer, the Marquis de Montespan attempted (unsuccessfully) to rape his wife, after having paid several visits to poxed Parisian whores in the hope of passing his infection to the King.

Nemesis for Athénaïs took a form less grotesque than syphilis, though just as insidious. As governess to her five bastard children by Louis she had appointed her friend Françoise Scarron, a middle-aged widow, companionable and resourceful yet always sedulous in preserving her reputation amid circles where women made losing theirs a mark of good taste. Fraser aptly describes Françoise as ‘laminated by her virtue’. Some visceral grasp on a changing Zeitgeist, in which preachers became as modish as dancing-masters and the ageing Louis started to fret over the welfare of his immortal soul, surely pointed out her way. When the King gave her the château of Maintenon near Versailles, with a title attached, Françoise’s destiny as his second wife, following the death in 1683 of dreary Queen Marie-Thérèse, must have seemed divinely ordained.

Though Louis’s marriage to Madame de Maintenon took place in secret (a nocturnal ceremony in the chapel at Versailles with the Archbishop of Paris officiating), gossip at once accorded her the status of uncrowned consort. She was universally seen as A Good Thing and hailed as ‘the Glorious Protectress of the Realm’, nurturing His Most Christian Majesty’s Catholic conscience, peacemaking among court factions and encouraging female education by founding a school for the daughters of impoverished gentlefolk. The Pope sent her a gold medal and Louis conferred the inestimable privilege of sitting down in his presence on the woman he nicknamed, only half in jest, ‘Your Solidity’.

The term suggests a comfy old biddy, but Antonia Fraser is at pains to emphasise Françoise de Maintenon’s subtle and refined deployment of an influence unimaginable to most of her female contemporaries. When the King died in 1715, she received condolence letters from European royalty and tributes from the French clergy, over whom, after all, Louis had more authority than the Holy Father in Rome. Only the Duc de Saint-Simon, mega-bitch memorialist of the monarch’s last decades, and the irrepressible Liselotte von der Pfalz, second wife of Louis’s brother Philippe d’Orléans, found anything mean to say about Françoise. The former called her ‘that witch, forgotten and as good as dead’, while the latter dismissed her as ‘die alte Schlump’, ‘the old slut’.

No serious study of a king’s reign can ignore his mistresses, but Love and Louis XIV is, so far as I know, the first to survey this whole era exclusively and convincingly in terms of the sovereign’s private affairs. Fraser’s perspective extends well beyond the royal bedchamber, emphasising Louis’s pleasure in female company with compelling portraits of figures such as King Charles II’s enchanting sister Henrietta Anne (Liselotte’s predecessor in the unenviable role of Duchesse d’Orléans), the Amazon Grande Mademoiselle, and Cardinal Mazarin’s predatory gaggle of Mancini nieces. Thus the Grand Monarque himself emerges as affable, courteous and indulgent, in short a properly functioning human being, of a kind more common among royalty then than now.

The book contains a few minor factual errors. Molière, for example, never wrote a play called ‘Alceste’: the name is that of the leading character in his Le Misanthrope. There was no such person as ‘the Duke of Hanover’: history refers to Liselotte’s uncle Ernst August as either the Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg or the Elector of Hanover. Otherwise Fraser’s narrative is balanced, wise and entertaining. This is clearly the book she was born to write.