Louis XIV and La Grande Mademoiselle, 1652-1693

The French aristocracy ceased from the second generation to be a nursery for men of action. This was the result desired from the policy of keeping it chained to the steps of the throne. The end had been attained at the date of the King's death. Saint-Simon, who cannot be suspected of hostility towards the nobility, certifies to this. When the Duke arrived at power under the Regent, his brain swarming with projects for replacing the aristocrats in positions of importance, and when he sought great names with which to fill great posts, he realised that he was too late. The "nursery" was empty. The difficulty, say the Mémoires

lay in the ignorance, the frivolity, and the lack of application of a nobility which had been accustomed to lives of frivolity and uselessness; a nobility that was good for nothing but to let itself be killed, and that reached the battle-field itself only through the force of heredity. For the remainder of the time, it was content to stagnate in an existence without a purpose. It had delivered itself over to idleness and felt keen disgust for all education, excepting that relating to military matters. The result was a general incapacity and unfitness for affairs.

It is proper to render to Cæsar what belongs to Cæsar. The effacement of the French aristocracy is not to be laid at the door of the great Revolution, which acted only upon an accomplished fact; it was the personal work of Louis XIV.

The higher classes also, contrary to the generally received opinion, suffered from a serious moral abasement. This fact is the more striking, as at no other period has France possessed so many elements for giving to life decorum and dignity. Through a deplorable misfortune, social groups which ought, through their solid principles, to have served as the support of public morality had incurred, one after the other, the serious displeasure of royalty. Among the Catholics, the disciples of Bérulle and of Vincent de Paul had compromised themselves in the affair of the Compagnie du Saint Sacrement. No government worthy of the name can suffer itself to be led by a secret society, whatever the purpose or character of such society may be. The Jansenists had shared with the reformers in the discontent that the least expression of a desire for independence, no matter in what domain, inspired in Louis XIV.

His distrust even reached the interior life of his subjects. Every one, under penalty of being considered a rebel, must feel and think like the King. This was with Louis a fixed idea, and during his reign gave a peculiar character to the religious persecutions. Jansenists and Protestants were pursued much oftener as enemies of the King than as enemies of God.

The hostility of the Prince to the three principal seats of the French conscience, and the destruction of two of these, left the field clear for the licentiousness which marked the end of the reign. Excessive dissipation is always supposed to belong particularly to the time of the Regency, but the abscess had existed for a long time before the death of Louis XIV. caused it to break. A letter as early as 1680 states, "Our fathers were not more chaste than we are; but … now the vices are decorated and refined."318 The evil had made rapid progress under the mantle of hypocrisy, which covered the Court of France from the time of the rule of Mme. de Maintenon. This last well perceived the danger and groaned over it to no purpose. Strangers were struck with the conditions. "All is more concentrated," wrote one of them in 1690, "more reserved, more restrained, than the peculiar genius of the nation can bear."319

The real misfortune was that Louis, who had been brought up and matured in an entirely formal religion, had permitted himself to be imposed upon by scoffers, who came disguised as believers, in order to make their court. The King, who had permitted the representation of Tartuffe, had not sufficiently meditated upon its import.

A final misdeed, and not the least for which the absolute régime is responsible, was the launching of the nation in pursuit of one of the most dangerous of political chimeras, that of the need of spiritual unity. Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes in the name of the fetich that a good Frenchman must be of his King's faith. A century later, the Terror cut off heads in the name of a unity of opinion, because a Frenchman ought to be virtuous in the fashion of Rousseau and of Robespierre. The reader may continue for himself the series, and count the acts of oppression committed in the nineteenth century, while even the twentieth century, young as it still is, presents examples of the attempt to enforce upon the nation a uniformity of thought which, if once attained, would signify intellectual death. For in politics, as in religion, as in art, in literature, in all, diversity is life.

It is through this capital error that the reign of Louis XIV., so glorious in many respects, was the precursor of the great Revolution and really made its coming inevitable. The Jacobins are in some measure the heirs of the great King. Fundamentally, the mania for spiritual and moral unity is simply, under a less odious name, the horror of liberty; a sentiment old as the world, but which in the earlier portion of the seventeenth century had been far from dominant. The word "liberty" occurs again and again in the writings of many people of that period, theorists, jurists, and great nobles, at every point in which they touch politics. The expression contained for them nothing revolutionary. What they were demanding was rather a return to past methods, and, above all, it did not enter their thoughts to associate with liberty the word "equality." It is the eighteenth century, more philosophical, if perhaps less reasonable, that first conceived the idea of uniting two really incompatible things, without perceiving that one of the two was destined to annihilate the other.

If absolute royalty had remained at Paris, it would have clearly realised the point at which the nation no longer was in sympathy with its rule. At Versailles it saw nothing; it shut itself up in its own tomb. The divorce was consummated between the Court and the Capital, one contenting itself with being figurative and ornamental, the other actively controlling opinions, since royalty had renounced the office of directing the public mind and thoughts.

It will be recollected that the rôle of universal arbitrator was played by the "young Court," the youthful King at its head, at the time in which there was daily contact with Paris, and when the Court was always in the advance in ideas as in fashions. The residence at Versailles ended the possibility of these times ever returning; there was no longer any bond between the King of France and the merchant of the rue St. Denis. In consequence, Paris employed itself in the eighteenth century in the evolution of minds. The Court had decided upon the success of the plays of Molière, the Parisian parquet criticised those of Beaumarchais.

If it be considered that the interior politics of Louis XIV. were constantly dominated by a horror of the Fronde, it will be recognised that this abortive revolution brought in its train consequences almost as grave as if it had been successful. This is the reason it has seemed permissible to make the history of the ideas and sentiments existing during the wars of the Fronde and the succeeding forty years circle around the incidents in the life of the Grande Mademoiselle. She was a truly representative figure of this generation, and on this account will always merit the attention of historians, and by a double claim, through the interest in her proud conception of life, and through the importance of the evil for which she was partly responsible and by the results of which she was herself overwhelmed. No one possessed in a higher degree than this Princess the great qualities belonging to her epoch, and no one preserved them so intact without thought of the danger after the retaining of such opinions had become a cause of disgrace.

Neither Retz nor the great Condé showed signs in their old age of their characteristics displayed under the Fronde; both had become calmed. The Grande Mademoiselle remained always the Grande Mademoiselle, and this steadfastness, while sometimes a difficulty, was more often her real title to glory.

1

Letter of January 19, 1689.

2

Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Edited by Chéruel.

3

Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Edited by Chéruel.

4

The Château of Saint-Fargeau still exists, but the interior has been transformed since a great fire which occurred in 1752; the apartments of Mademoiselle no longer remain. Cf. Les Châteaux d'Ancy-le-Franc, de Saint-Fargeau, etc., by the Baron Chaillou des Barres.

5

Cf. Les Sports et jeux d'exercice dans l'ancienne France, by J. J. Jusserand.

6

Les nouvelles françaises, ou Les divertissements de la princesse Aurélie, by Segrais, Paris, 2 vols., 1656-1657. The last of the "Nouvelles françaises," Floridon, ou l'amour imprudent, is the history of the intrigues in the harem which led to the death of Bajazet. Racine had certainly read it when he wrote his tragedy.

7

See Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in the Collection of Grands écrivains. Paris, Hochette.

8

His Polexandre had appeared, 1629-1637; his last romance, La Jeune Alcidiane, in 1651; Cassandre and Cléopâtre, by La Calprenède, in 1642-1647. Arlamène, ou le Grand Cyrus, by Mlle. de Scudéry, was published 1649-1653.

9

Letters of the 12th and 15th of July, 1671, to Mme. de Grignan.

10

See Le dictionnaire des Précieuses, by Somaize.

11

Eugénie, ou la force du destin.

12

Mademoiselle commenced her Mémoires shortly after her arrival at Saint-Fargeau. She interrupted them in 1660, resumed them in 1677, and definitely abandoned them in 1688, five years before her death.

13

Oriane was the mistress of Amadis.

14

La relation de l'Isle imaginaire, printed in 1659, also L'histoire de la Princesse de Paphlagonie. We shall again refer to them.

15

These representations took place in the grand hall of the Petit Bourbon, near the Louvre. (Cf. L'Histoire de Paris, by Delaure.)

16

Letter of October 12th, to the Abbé Foucquet.

17

Mémoires de Montglat.

18

Mémoires du Marquis de Sourches. Cf. L'Histoire du château de Blois, by La Saussaye.

19

Letter of September 3, 1663.

20

Nicolas Goulas, Mémoires.

21

Gazette of August 22, 1654.

22

Four, but the last died at an early age.

23

Mémoires de Bussy-Rabutin.

24

Voyage de Chapelle et de Bachaumont.

25

Mémoires de Nicolas Goulas.

26

Saint-Simon, Écrits inédits.

27

Henriette-Catherine, Duchesse de Joyeuse, first married to Henri de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier, by whom she had Marie de Bourbon, mother of Mademoiselle; married for the second time to Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, by whom she had several children.

28

Henri de Lorraine reigned from 1608 to 1624.

29

Letter of August 10, 1657, to the Comte d'Auteuil.

30

André d'Ormesson died in 1665, dean of the Council of State. Some fragments of his memoirs have been published by Chéruel, in the course of the Journal of his son, Olivier d'Ormesson.

31

Turenne had conquered the troops of the Prince at Étampes (May, 1652), upon the occasion of a review in honour of Mademoiselle and of the disorder which resulted. See The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle. Some weeks later, he besieged the town.

32

Letter to his wife, August 3, 1663.

33

Richelieu had declared war with Spain March 26, 1635.

34

The phrase is by Bussy-Rabutin.

35

See the Mémoires de Louis XIV., edited by Charles Dreyss. The Mémoires of Louis XIV. were not written by himself. He dictated them to his secretaries afterward adding notes in his own handwriting and correcting the proofs. See the Introduction by M. Dreyss.

36

Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Mémoires de Montglat.

37

Montglat.

38

Id.

39

Letters of January 3, 1717, of September 27, 1718, and of July, 1722. Madame adds in this last: "Now, all the circumstances are known."

40

Letter to the Queen, Anne of Austria, October 27, 1651.

41

March 23, 1865, Père Theiner, Guardian of the Secret Archives of the Vatican, replied to some one who had pressed the question: "Our acts of December 16, 1641, in which Jules Mazarin was created Cardinal, do not say whether or not he was a priest. How could he then have been admitted to the order of Cardinal-priest? No doubt he was a priest." The letter of Père Theiner has been published by M. Jules Loiseleur in his Problêmes historiques.

42

Letters of Madame de Maintenon edited by Geoffroy.

43

For further details see the excellent volume of M. Lacour-Gayet, L'éducation politique de Louis XIV.

44

December 24th, Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens.

45

The letter is dated April 21, 1654. Louis XIV. was then fifteen and a half years of age.

46

Mme. de Motteville had heard him express the same idea. Cf. his Mémoires, v., 101, ed. Petitot.

47

Les fragments des mémoires inédits by Dubois, valet of Louis XIV., published by Léon Aubineau in the Biblothéque de l'École des Chartes, and in his Notices littéraires upon the 17th century.

48

Cf. Lacour-Gayet, p. 203.

49

M. Dreyss dates the writing of this portion of the Mémoires about 1670.

50

Letters of June 9, 1654, and April 9, 1658.

51

Segraisiana. Louis XIV. was seventeen when he made this remark.

52

Journal de voyage de deux jeunes Hollandais à Paris (1656-1658).

53

Mémoires de Mme. de Motteville.

54

The fair of Saint-Germain was held between Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from February 3d to the evening before Palm Sunday. The Court and the populace elbowed each other there.

55

Journal de deux jeunes Hollandais.

56

Mémoires of Mademoiselle.

57

Journal de deux jeunes Hollandais.

58

Journal de deux jeunes Hollandais.

59

April 29th.

60

To the Duc de Bouillon and to the son of the Marshal Duc de La Meilleraye, who took the title of Duc de Mazarin.

61

It must not be forgotten that Saint-Simon was presented at Court in 1692. Louis XIV. was then fifty-four, and had reigned forty-nine years. Saint-Simon only knew the end of the reign.

62

Brother of the Superintendent of Finances.

63

In the summer of 1657.

64

Vers d'Atys, opera played in 1676, and d'Astrate, tragedy of 1663.

65

The phrase is M. Jules Lemâitre's.

66

See The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle. For this chapter cf. La misère au temps de la Fronde et Saint-Vincent de Paul, by Feillet; La cabale des dévots, by by Raoul Allier; Saint-Vincent de Paul, by Emanuel Broglie; Saint-Vincent de Paul et les Goudi, by Chantelauze; Port-Royal, by Sainte-Beuve.

67

Village of the arrondissement of Provins.

68

Feillet, La misère au temps de la Fronde.

69

See the volume of Raoul Allier, La cabale des dévots.

70

Marie de Gonzague.

71

En Picardie.

72

M. Emanuel de Broglie.

73

Saul in the Journal des guerres civiles de Dubuisson-Aubenay. He mentions the date of December 2, 1650, upon which "large donations" were sent into Champagne, by Mmes. de Lamoignon and de Herse, Messieurs de Bernières, Lenain, etc.

74

The Parliament of Dijon had a bad reputation with the ministers, who accused it of refusing all reform. This does not excuse such a lack of good faith.

75

Dombes was a small independent principality which had only been definitely united to France on March 28, 1782; its capital was Trévoux.

76

Histoire de France. Tr. by Jacques Porchat and Miot. Paris, 1886.

77

Mémoires de Montglat; Mémoires de Mme. de Motteville.

78

The ball took place on the 3rd. Several days elapsed before the news of the death reached Aix.

79

Mémoires of Mademoiselle.

80

Mémoires of Mademoiselle.

81

Anne de Gonzague.

82

This appeared in 1691.

83

Isle des Faisans was also called Isle de la Conférence, since Mazarin had there discussed the treaty of the Pyrénées with Luis de Haro.

84

Mémoires de Montglat.

85

Mémoires de Mme. de Motteville.

86

Ibid.

87

There exists in the Archives d'Affaires étrangères a fragment of the instructions of Mazarin to Louis XIV., written under the dictation of the King. M. Chantelauze, who discovered it, published it in the Correspondant of August 10, 1881.

88

Motteville.

89

Guy Patin. Letter of January 28, 1661.

90

Motteville.

91

He was even twenty-four when he asked Péréfixe again to give him Latin lessons.

92

Letter of June 27th to the Queen of Poland (Archives de Chantilly). The King dined at one o'clock.

93

Letter of July 15, 1661.

94

"Portrait de Mademoiselle fait par elle-même" (Nov., 1657) in La Galerie des Portraits de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, edited by Éduard de Barthélemy (Paris, 1860).

95

Mme. de Rambouillet died very aged in 1665. Her influence ended in 1650.

96

Le Grand Cyrus. The greater part of the friends of Mlle. de Scudéry are given assumed names. Mlle. Bocquet is called Agélaste.

97

Cf. La Société française au XVIIe. siècle, vol., ch. xv.

98

This is the friend of Mme. de Sévigné.

99

Sister-in-law of the preceding. She married, in 1662, Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Jena.

100

Mademoiselle says in her Mémoires that they "had" them written. This is an error.

101

La Galerie des Portraits.

102

M. de Barthélemy, editor of the Galerie des Portraits, called Honorat de Bueil, marquis de Racan; born in 1589, died in 1670.

103

Or forty-six, depending upon the date of the Portrait, 1658 or 1659.

104

L'École des Femmes was issued in 1662.

105

The expression is from the beautiful Marquise de Mauny, who formed part of the little Court of Saint-Fargeau.

106

From Mme. de Sainctôt, wife of the master of ceremonies and introducer of ambassadors under Louis XIV. She was a friend of Voiture.

107

The others are, Vie de Madame de Fouquerolles, supposed autobiography of a lady mixed up with Fronde intrigues (MS. exists in the library of the Arsenal), and La Relation de l'Isle imaginaire (1658), badinage upon an episode in Don Quixote.

108

Mémoires. François-Timoléon de Choisy was born in 1644. There is some question as to who was his mother.

109

Marguerite Louise d'Orléans was born July 28, 1645; Elisabeth, called Mlle. d'Alençon, December 26, 1646; Françoise-Madeleine, called Mlle. de Valois, October 13, 1648.

110

Born at Tours in 1644. Her father, Laurent de La Baume Le Blanc, Seigneur de La Vallière, dying in 1654, her mother remarried Jacques de Courtavel, marquis de Saint-Remi, maître d'hôtel de Gaston d'Orléans.

111

Cf. Madame, Memoirs of Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, by Julia Cartwright (London, 1894).

112

Lady Derby was a La Trémouille. The sister-in-law to whom the letters are addressed was the sister of Turenne.

113

Or Charles IV.; there are two methods of counting the Dukes of Lorraine.

114

See the very curious volume by M. Rodocanachi, Les Infortunes d'une petite-fille d'Henri IV. The marriage of the Princess Marguerite with the Duke of Tuscany took place April 19, 1661.

115

Mémoires of Mademoiselle.

116

Par Fortin de la Hoguete (1645).

117

L'Image du Souverain (1649).

118

Mémoires pour 1667. Ed. by Charles Dreyss.

119

Portugal had again become independent in 1640.

120

Mémoires for the year 1661.

121

Mignet, Négociations relatives à la succession d'Espagne.

122

Élisabeth de France, daughter of Henry IV., born in 1602. She married Philip IV., in 1615, gave birth to Marie-Thérèse in 1638, and died in 1644.

123

This was the Marshal de Gramont, father of the Comte de Guiche. The "magnificence" and the "galanterie" of his journey to Madrid to demand the Infanta have left lively memories.

124

Souvenirs de Madame de Caylus, Mémoires de Mme. de Motteville, Souvenirs sur Madame de Maintenon, published by the Comte de Haussonville and M. G. Hanotaux.

125

Married on April 1, 1661, at seventeen. Monsieur (Philippe de France, duc d'Orléans) was then twenty-one.

126

Histoire de Madame Henriette d'Angleterre, by Mme. de La Fayette.

127

Histoire de Madame de Henriette, etc.

128

Mémoires de Mme. de Motteville.

129

War between relations in regard to property.

130

Letter of July 9, 1749, and passim, in his correspondence.

131

Cf. La Cabale des Dévots, by M. Raoul Allier.