The World полностью

In March 1661, Mazarin, fifty-eight, was dying. Louis was at the bedside, tearfully bringing water and medicines. He sobbed so loudly he was asked to leave the chamber. The cardinal left France as the greatest state in Europe – an absolutist monarchy of nineteen million people (with England an unstable mixed monarchy of four million), but his death was, Louis wrote to Philip IV, ‘one of the greatest afflictions I could feel’. Soon afterwards, Louis’s mother fell ill with gangrene, abscesses and ulcers. Louis slept at the foot of her bed, and, as he watched her dying, murmured, ‘Look how beautiful she is, I’ve never seen her look so beautiful.’

‘Do what I told you,’ Anne whispered as she died.

‘What I’ve suffered in losing the queen, madame my mother,’ confided Louis, ‘surpasses anything you can imagine.’

Now Louis declared, ‘I am determined henceforth to govern the state by myself,’^* with a mission to win France world dominion in place of his Habsburg cousins. While he enjoyed a string of love affairs (ignored by Queen María Theresa, who just said, ‘I’m not a dupe as they imagine, but I’m prudent, I see things clearly’), Louis devised a new French court. He improved the Louvre (advised by Bernini, who arrived from Rome but hated Paris), but then in 1665 commissioned a new palace at Versailles, where he staged elaborate rituals around his own sacred person to distract his nobles from power and Paris.^*

Louis knew he was giving ‘an infinite value’ to something in itself worth nothing. The court was a multipurpose institution, family hive, power brokerage, job centre, escort agency, marriage market, art bazaar and theatre, served by 10,000 servants. ‘Sit down when you can; piss when you can,’ joked courtiers, ‘ask for any job you can!’ A lack of latrines meant courtiers urinated in the stairwells. When a treasurer was dying, Louis complained, ‘The man’s not dead and sixteen people have asked for his job.’ His usual answer was ‘Je verrai’ – I’ll see.

He had a sense of humour, joking to his ailing artist Le Brun, ‘Don’t die, Le Brun, just to raise the prices of your pictures.’ He understood the theatre of royalty: ‘Kings should satisfy the public.’ Until he was thirty he himself acted and danced on stage – he loved dancing; and it was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a well-off courtier known to his family as Le Nez for his proboscis and to his audiences as Molière, who wrote many of the plays, his mission being ‘to bring laughter to the monarch who makes all Europe tremble’. But behind the pleasure and gossip was a dark struggle for one man’s favour.

SEX, POISON AND WAR AT THE COURT OF THE SUN KING

Louis was a promiscuous serial monogamist, turning the position of maîtresse en titre into a semi-official job. The first was the ambitious, voracious, blue-eyed, blonde and witty Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, born into the grandest nobility and married to the marquis de Montespan. When both the queen and Louis’s existing mistress were pregnant, they unwisely asked Montespan to entertain the highly sexed king, who fell in love with her. For a while he kept both mistresses in adjoining apartments, even as he regularly seduced just about any girls who crossed his path, including servants of all three women. Montespan ruled the court and produced seven royal children. But she was grasping and petulant: her nickname was Quanto – how much? When she herself was supplanted by the most unlikely rival, she lost all perspective.

Montespan chose a safe option as governess for her children: the thirty-nine-year-old Françoise d’Aubigné. Dark-eyed, pious, intelligent, childless, she was the daughter of a murderer, widow of a drunken poet. But to everyone’s surprise, after a run of younger girls, Louis started to fall in love with her, raising her to marquise de Maintenon; and later, in 1683, after the death of the queen, he married her. Maintenon spoke to him plainly, loathed court, believed the minds of men and women were equal and was sceptical of patriarchy. ‘Men are unbearable when you see them at close quarters,’ she said. Instead she ran a school where girls were taught history and mathematics, and soon she herself was powerful, though she claimed she was ‘nothing’. Louis adored her: ‘I always cherish you and respect you to an extent I can’t express,’ he wrote, ‘and indeed whatever affection you have for me, I have even more for you, being totally yours with all my heart.’ Although she was seconde dame d’atours to the dauphine, she now dominated the court.