Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Leslie Carroll Page B
Authors: Leslie Carroll
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managed to sire several healthy children with his many mistresses, among them Louise de la Vallière and Athénaïs de Montespan. He acknowledged seventeen of his royal bastards (he fathered about as many as his English cousin Charles II), and he married them off to legitimate Bourbons.
Louis XIV’s largely neglected queen died on July 30, 1683; she had never become terribly proficient at French, and the king had never learned Spanish. It is believed that a couple of months later, on October 10, he secretly married his maîtresse en titre , or officialmistress, Françoise d’Aubigné, the marquise de Maintenon. Although the marriage was never publicly mentioned, it was an open secret and lasted until Louis’ death.
Though her role is probably exaggerated, Madame de Maintenon’s influence is considered a major factor in Louis’ decision in 1685 to revoke the Edict of Nantes, a law passed by his grandfather Henri IV, which had granted the Huguenots (the French Protestants) religious and political freedom. During the early 1680s the Huguenots suffered institutionalized religious intolerance in France; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the bitter icing on a nasty cake.
For the better part of Louis’ reign, France became involved in one foreign war after another and her cast of allies shifted with alarming regularity. The control of the Spanish Netherlands (what is now Belgium) was under contention. The succession of the Spanish throne was contested. Louis wanted to press into Austrian Hapsburg terrain wherever possible. And he had an on-again/off-again enmity with England.
Among Louis’ primary foreign policy goals was territorial expansion. His explorers ventured beyond Europe’s borders, extending French colonialism to North America, Asia, and Africa. Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette discovered the Mississippi River in 1673. In 1682, de la Salle followed the route of the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and staked a claim to the Mississippi basin in his sovereign’s name—naming it la Louisiane . And Louis dispatched Jesuit missionaries to China in an attempt to sunder the Portuguese hegemony there.
Consequently, by the early 1680s, France was the dominant power in the world. The French crown, in the person of Louis XIV, also exerted considerable influence over the Church as well as the aristocracy. He used both ritual and the arts to maintain his control over the kingdom, effectively deifying himself. Representations of the king were ubiquitous, and often allegorical—in painting, sculpture, frescoes, tapestries, and medallions. More than three hundred formal portraits were painted of him, and he commissioned at least twenty statues of himself. The duc de Saint-Simon, a prolific diarist and memoirist in the court of Louis XIV, observed of the king that “There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly,adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.” And to make sure people revered him, in 1680 the sovereign began to refer to himself as “Louis the Great” on his own coins.
Even Napoleon begrudged Louis XIV his ego trip, calling him “the only king of France worthy of the name.”
Add to that the remark made by historian Antonia Fraser that Louis “was as much marked by his industry as by his hedonism.” After all, this was the man who was considered so obsessed with sex that he had to make love twice a day.
He fell ill with a gangrenous leg in August 1715 and refused to let the surgeons amputate, although he had braved serious and painful operations in the past. He once underwent an anal operation without anesthesia, and lost part of his jawbone when a dentist used red-hot coal to cauterize an abscess in his mouth.
Aware that he would be succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, who would accede to the throne as Louis XV, the old king penned a few words of advice for his little heir. “Do not follow the bad example which I
Louis XIV’s largely neglected queen died on July 30, 1683; she had never become terribly proficient at French, and the king had never learned Spanish. It is believed that a couple of months later, on October 10, he secretly married his maîtresse en titre , or officialmistress, Françoise d’Aubigné, the marquise de Maintenon. Although the marriage was never publicly mentioned, it was an open secret and lasted until Louis’ death.
Though her role is probably exaggerated, Madame de Maintenon’s influence is considered a major factor in Louis’ decision in 1685 to revoke the Edict of Nantes, a law passed by his grandfather Henri IV, which had granted the Huguenots (the French Protestants) religious and political freedom. During the early 1680s the Huguenots suffered institutionalized religious intolerance in France; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the bitter icing on a nasty cake.
For the better part of Louis’ reign, France became involved in one foreign war after another and her cast of allies shifted with alarming regularity. The control of the Spanish Netherlands (what is now Belgium) was under contention. The succession of the Spanish throne was contested. Louis wanted to press into Austrian Hapsburg terrain wherever possible. And he had an on-again/off-again enmity with England.
Among Louis’ primary foreign policy goals was territorial expansion. His explorers ventured beyond Europe’s borders, extending French colonialism to North America, Asia, and Africa. Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette discovered the Mississippi River in 1673. In 1682, de la Salle followed the route of the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and staked a claim to the Mississippi basin in his sovereign’s name—naming it la Louisiane . And Louis dispatched Jesuit missionaries to China in an attempt to sunder the Portuguese hegemony there.
Consequently, by the early 1680s, France was the dominant power in the world. The French crown, in the person of Louis XIV, also exerted considerable influence over the Church as well as the aristocracy. He used both ritual and the arts to maintain his control over the kingdom, effectively deifying himself. Representations of the king were ubiquitous, and often allegorical—in painting, sculpture, frescoes, tapestries, and medallions. More than three hundred formal portraits were painted of him, and he commissioned at least twenty statues of himself. The duc de Saint-Simon, a prolific diarist and memoirist in the court of Louis XIV, observed of the king that “There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly,adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.” And to make sure people revered him, in 1680 the sovereign began to refer to himself as “Louis the Great” on his own coins.
Even Napoleon begrudged Louis XIV his ego trip, calling him “the only king of France worthy of the name.”
Add to that the remark made by historian Antonia Fraser that Louis “was as much marked by his industry as by his hedonism.” After all, this was the man who was considered so obsessed with sex that he had to make love twice a day.
He fell ill with a gangrenous leg in August 1715 and refused to let the surgeons amputate, although he had braved serious and painful operations in the past. He once underwent an anal operation without anesthesia, and lost part of his jawbone when a dentist used red-hot coal to cauterize an abscess in his mouth.
Aware that he would be succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, who would accede to the throne as Louis XV, the old king penned a few words of advice for his little heir. “Do not follow the bad example which I
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