LOVE, LOUIS XIV AND ME Part 2

Momentarily Louis was happy with his wife Marie-Thérèse - for a short while he enjoyed the experience of being adored by this placid, rather dull and extremely formal young woman, brought up to believe she could love no one but a royal. When asked lightly if she had ever fancied any of the young men at her native Spanish court, she replied with astonishment: ‘But there were no kings there!’ Then Louis allowed himself to be captivated by the utterly charming English princess Henriette-Anne, his brother’s wife. Louis was twenty two and Henriette-Anne was seventeen. Known to history as Minette, she was the adored sister of Charles II; now I rediscovered her, not only Minette but her spaniel Mimi whom she used to hold in her arms as she danced the court ballet. This summer romance, which included swimming in the Seine and picnicking by moonlight, horrified the court: this was incest by the standards of the time even if technically Henriette-Anne was only Louis’ sister-in-law.

It was a plot worthy of the rising playwright Molière which introduced Louis to his first real mistress, the virginal Louise de La Vallière. In order to cover up his flirtation with his Henriette-Anne, Louis pretended to court her simple, shy maid-of-honour - and of course in true dramatic fashion fell in love with her. Appealing as Louise is, my personal favourite among the mistresses is the next-in-line, the voluptuous and high-spirited Athénaïs Marquise de Montespan. With a sharp wit which frightened the courtiers (they feared going under her windows at Versailles and I too felt nervous as I checked those windows out), Athénaïs was also a passionate patron of the arts. But her real ‘empire’ over the King - the word used - was basically sexual, as witness accounts of the King rushing into her room up to three times a days to make love, too impatient to wait for her ladies to undress her. It hardly seemed surprising that when telling her absorbing story, I suddenly saw a portrait of an anonymous woman in a picture gallery next door to my local Catholic church. With her sumptuous blond curls, pouting mouth and the exophthalmic blue eyes of a modern film star, I recognised the subject instantly. ‘Buy me!” said Athénaïs imperiously. Like Louis XIV I hastened to obey. I used a legacy fro my father, Frank Longford, who, while scandalised by Athénaïs’ private life, would have appreciated the fact that she finally repented. Now she gazes down on us as we eat - appropriately enough as Athénaïs, among other attractive qualities, liked her food and drink.

All this time I was enjoying myself thoroughly in French archives quite apart from the palaces (you shouldn't write biography unless you relish all aspects of the task). But it was studying the next mistress - if that was what she was - that the final click took place. Françoise Madame de Maintenon was three years older than Louis, attractive but no knock-out beauty, who from the position of governess to Athénaïs’ royal bastards ended up as the King’s secret morganatic wife. It became apparent to me that Louis’ increasing fascination with this enigmatic character was rooted in his original deep love for his mother Anne of Austria. Once the fires of passion died down in his early forties, Louis instinctively sought out a woman who was intelligent, devout, strong-minded - and devoted to his interests. It was his ‘salvation’, the need to care for his immortal soul as ordained by his mother, which came to matter to Louis XIV, where once physical love had obsessed him.

So religion as well as sex became a dominant theme of the book - and the relationship between the two. In a curious way, writing as I was in an age when religion in various extreme forms dominates many quarters of the world, it was easier to understand this intense preoccupation with the soul and man’s eventual destiny in the next world. Religion dominates the life of the mistresses as well: not only Athénaïs but Louise ended up deeply repentant, a nun wearing a hair shirt, calling herself Sister Louise de La Miséricorde.

This freedom to examine Louis’ relationships in all their fullness enabled me to introduce some wonderful characters at the court of Versailles, not actually royal mistresses but important influences none the less. There is for example that wonderful bawdy letter-writer, Liselotte Duchesse d’Orléans, the King’s second sister-in-law, whose irreverent comments on Versailles make her a joy to read as a source. Since Louis XIV only died in 1715, a few days short of his seventy seventh birthday, obviously the younger generation of women at court had to come in to the picture. There were his illegitimate daughters by Louise and Athénaïs, a wayward lot, interested in smoking (tobacco in pipes ‘like sailors’ according to an angry witness) and gambling. Above all there was the child-bride of his grandson the Duc de Bourgogne, Adelaide of Savoy who arrived at Versailles at the age of eleven and stole the ageing King’s heart: with his mother Anne of Austria, Adelaide was the great love of Louis’ life.

The beguiling Adelaide charmed me too as well as the King. She was so small on her arrival in 1696 that when the King appeared before the court with her, the impression was given wrote the Duc de Saint-Simon, that he actually had her in his pocket. Even as an adult Adelaide was a pocket Venus unlike the contemporary opulent ideal; a delightful portrait in Turin, capital of her homeland Savoy, which I cam across when researching the archives there, fully conveys that mischievous sweetness which won the King. How sad then to have to recount her tragic early death from which the King never fully recovered! Even now when rereading the scene of Adelaide's pathetic death, I feel a terrible pang - for a young woman who died nearly three hundred years ago.

Naturally such a rich tapestry of a subject made an oblique comment on the condition of women in France during the seventeenth century. Ill-educated if educated at all, serving at court in the hopes of attracting a rich and noble husband, is it any wonder, to be realistic, that the role of the royal mistress was seen as a desirable one, even if religious doubts could never be stilled? Unlike Henry VIII, Louis XIV treated the women in his life with courtesy and generosity: there were no decapitations for the Sun King. Finally, I reached the wry conclusion that it was certainly a better fate being the mistress of Louis XIV than the wife of Henry VIII!

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