Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Read Online Free PDF Page A

shed for so long over the question of his promiscuity and his ‘salvation’, were never quite forgotten; it was significant that when Louis XIV was dying and wished to commend Madame de Maintenon to the Regent, he praised her for the good advice she had given to him, her usefulness above all on the subject of this salvation.
    In this story there have after all been remarkably few accounts of happy marriages: Liselotte spoke for many when she described marriages as ‘like death … you can't escape’. But it is possible to argue that Louis XIV was happily married twice – once to a young woman who brought him the international stature he desired then and who gave him no trouble, as he said, except by dying, and once to the saviour of his soul.
    In the meantime Louis was certainly lucky during the ‘perilous season’ itself. Handsome and godlike as all contemporary observers agreed, and with the aura of royalty to act as an aphrodisiac, there was never any question that Louis would enjoy the favours of the ladies if he wished. It was hardly a disagreeable fate to be seduced by the young Louis XIV, but in any case the evidence is that the ladies met him more than halfway, enjoying the pleasure and also the material rewards. With Louis there are no stories of crude abductions, violations, unwilling maidens: this was for Athénaïs's husband, Montespan, not her lover the King.
    This view does not, of course, take into account the strictures of the Catholic Church on adultery. Sex outside marriage put a person in a state of sin. The immense popularity at court of the plain-speaking preacher Bourdaloue (much admired by Louis XIV), the aristocratic crowds who flocked to hear him, demonstrate the seriousness with which the issue was taken. Fortunately all the mistresses of Louis XIV, like the King himself, managed to die as so many penitents in a state of grace.
    Certainly, with one or two possible exceptions, the women in the life of Louis XIV were not victims and did not see themselves as such. And there was a point in the King's favour which even the critical Saint-Simon admitted: he was kind and generous to his former mistresses. * It is true that the court was not always an ‘enchanted palace’. The women from time to time may have witnessed the canvas and cardboard scenery, the ropes and pulleys backstage, in Françoise's evocative phrase. But there was another equally potent side to court life as described by Madame de Sévigné: ‘the hunt, the lanterns, the moonlight, the drive, the meal in a place carpeted by jonquils …’ The women were there too.
    It may be cynical to suggest that there were many worse options in the life of a seventeenth-century woman of a certain class than to be the mistress of Louis XIV, but it is also realistic. Primi Visconti, observer of Louis's court, believed that ‘ladies are born with the ambition to become the King's favourite’ and there was certainly something in what he said. The alternative for the vast majority of women was to accept the robust advice of St Jeanne de Chantal: ‘Put yourself in God's hands and then your bridegroom's.’ Others, lacking a bridegroom, simply put themselves in God's hands in a convent, but it was a life which did not suit everyone who ended up there, and educational initiatives for girls were otherwise in their infancy, as Madame de Maintenon understood.
    The number of Louis's minor flings cannot be computed with any certainty, particularly during the period when he was indulging in what are now called one-night stands (in his case one-afternoon stands). We do not know how often he enjoyed himself chez les dames, as the contemporary phrase had it, but materially at least no one suffered from the experience. The known number of his children is also fluid: there were at least eighteen of them including his six legitimate children by Marie-Thérèse. He thus had roughly the same number of bastards as Charles II, although the latter had no legitimate