The Sun King (28 page)

When Bourgogne was sixteen, Anjou fifteen and Berri thirteen, Spanheim summed up the characters of the brothers and the Duchesse de Bourgogne thus:

Bourgogne's letters show an amazing piety, they could have been written by a Victorian clergyman; they have no spark of the originality, gift for language and nobility which inform every one of his grandfather's utterances. He greatly disapproved of his father. When the latter nearly died from eating too much fish, Bourgogne hoped that God would take advantage of this illness to make him lead a better life in future. The Duchess fell ill; he wondered what he had done to displease the Almighty; when she got better he made all sorts of good resolutions. He had a faithful, affectionate nature; he never forgot Fénelon though he hardly saw him again after the disgrace (once or twice on his way to the front); he loved his brothers very much and worshipped his wife. Physically he was far from attractive, thin from too much fasting, short, almost hump-backed, often ill. At that time it seemed unlikely that he would make a great king of France. However, Louis XIV placed high hopes on him and admitted him to his Council when hardly out of his teens.

Mme de Montespan, who had been melancholy ever since the death in 1704 of Mme de Fontevrault, died herself in 1707, while taking the waters at Bourbon. She had a fainting fit, was given an emetic and expired a day or two later, calmly, religiously and without fear. The King was told the news at Marly as he was going out hunting; he showed no sign of emotion but, after he had killed his stag, he went for a walk alone. When he returned to the château, the Duchesse de Bourgogne asked him whether he felt sad; he replied that he had regarded Mme de Montespan as a dead person from the moment she left Versailles. But Mme de Maintenon hid herself in her privy and wept bitterly.

In 1708, the King thought it time for Bourgogne to take part in the war. He had been to the front with Tallart 1702 and 1703, but had seen little fighting, merely some camping out and the siege of a small town which had soon fallen. Luckily for him he had stayed at home in 1704 to be with the Duchess when her baby was born, so he had not seen Tallart losing the battle of Blenheim. The Marshal's son had been killed beside him and he himself languished in prison at Nottingham for the next seven years.

Berri was to go with his brother and so was the ‘Chevalier de Saint-Georges', the Old Pretender. These young men had never done any soldiering at all. The three of them were put in charge of the Duc de Vendôme, a great-nephew of Mazarin and a left-handed grandson of Henri IV. Vendôme was very friendly with du Maine, who supported him up to the hilt in order to give an air of importance to the whole species of bastards and who arranged for him to marry the ugliest of M. le Duc's sisters. Saint-Simon said one would have to be very ambitious to marry Mlle d'Enghien, and very brave to marry M. de Vendôme, whose nose was quite eaten away by syphilis. Vendôme was disgusting
and, at the age of fifty-four he looked like an old, fat, dirty, diseased woman. He was one of the King's most unaccountable favourites — he treated Louis XIV as nobody else dared to. When they were in the middle of working out the campaign of 1708 Vendôme suddenly left Versailles to go and amuse himself with the financier Crozat and only came back again when it suited him, in spite of urgent messages from the King.

He was enormously rich; his country seat was the Château d'Anet; the King bought his town house and built the Place Vendôme on its site.

At the front Vendôme paraded gluttony, sloth, sodomy, and practically all the deadly sins — and amused the soldiers, who adored him. They deserved a little amusement; their lot had never been so hard in any of the King's wars, owing to the constant breakdown of staff arrangements. Louis XIV thought that Vendôme was his best general; he was a born leader but he had one grave failing. He was too fond of entering the thick of the fight and leaving the operations to take care of themselves. The holy set at Versailles said that God would never bestow victory on one so wicked. Vendôme got to hear of this and observed that he did not imagine that Marlborough went to church much more than he did. Incredible as it may seem, the King hoped that the presence of Bourgogne would check the licentiousness of this hardened old fellow, who was to be nominally under his orders.

The campaign was a disaster in every way. Bourgogne had no soldierly quality, he was too sensitive and took no pleasure in the fighting. The cruelty with which Vendôme's soldiers treated the peasants, destroying their crops and raping their daughters, appalled him almost more than the horrors of the battlefield. He soon had only one idea — to stop the whole thing. The officers who were put to look after him also had only one — to bring him back alive. Unfortunately all this was well known at Versailles, so that after Eugène and Marlborough had carried off the great battle of Oudenarde. Vendôme was believed when he said that it had all been the fault of Bourgogne. According to Vendôme's dispatches, night had fallen upon an indecisive field; he intended to stay upon his positions, when he could easily have won the battle the next day; but Bourgogne had insisted upon a retreat. In truth, the French army was beaten and on the run and Vendôme alone was responsible. He had disobeyed strict orders from Versailles and (in the words of Sir Winston Churchill) ‘embarked upon the one thing the Great King had always forbidden, an infantry battle in broken and enclosed country'. He had then indulged his love of hand-to-hand fighting, ‘crashing about like an enraged animal' instead of remaining at the post of command. Back at his headquarters, after dark, he pretended to think that the soldiers could be rallied to begin again; his officers told him that if he stayed he would be alone upon the field; there was no alternative to a retreat. ‘Very well, gentlemen, I see that your minds are made up; so we shall have to retire. As for you, Monseigneur,' he said, staring with
bloodshot eyes at Bourgogne, ‘you have wanted this for a long time!' Such words, addressed to the eventual heir to the throne, amounted to high treason: the bystanders waited for Bourgogne to order his arrest. But he said nothing, merely looked very sad — and was despised for it. He told Beauvilliers afterwards that he had offered up his deep humiliation as a sacrifice to God. Some of the officers wanted to carry the three princes to a safe place in a coach, escorted by five hundred soldiers, but Vendôme rightly said that this would be too shameful, so finally they rode off the field, while Nangis fought a brilliant rearguard action. Vendôme made straight for Ghent where he fell into bed and slept for thirty hours without bothering to find out what had become of his army. After this
débâcle
, he subsided into a sulky lethargy and left Bourgogne in full control. The young man lost Lille and other towns, entirely by his own fault — after much wavering he generally took an unlucky decision. One of his officers, exasperated, said ‘I don't know if you will have the Kingdom in Heaven but as to an earthly one, Prince Eugène sets about it better than you do'.

Meanwhile the King continued his usual existence. Only once was a look of anxiety (
son visage altéré
) noticed on his face. He went out hunting all day, to the despair of the courtiers because the post bags from the front were only opened at his return. Nearly all had loved ones in the army, and it may be imagined how feverishly they longed for letters. In the raging controversy which followed this fatal campaign most people took Vendôme's side. Unfortunately Bourgogne had given the impression of not caring for the outcome: he never looked worried when things went badly, and instead of concentrating on military problems he was often on the tennis court or in church. Even Fénelon said that he had paid too much attention to his confessor, who ought not to have interfered with the conduct of the war. On his return to Versailles and his beloved wife, he was altogether too cheerful and carefree for one whose army had suffered such dire reverses. Mme la Duchesse, now thoroughly embittered by the treatment of her love, the Prince de Conti (still unemployed), wrote an unkind poem about Bourgogne which went the rounds, and was not the only one. The King, much affected by the loss of Lille, talked of going in person to win it back the following summer. One of the fine traits of his character was his generosity to subordinates when things went wrong. He never blamed his generals. He had written and condoled with Tallart for losing the battle of Blenheim and for the death of his son; when Tallart finally returned from England, looking very old, he made him a duke. After Ramillies, all he said to the defeated Villeroy was: ‘At our age, M. le Maréchal, one is not lucky'. He now received both Bourgogne and Vendôme most kindly, though a few weeks later, on the insistence of Marie-Adélaïde, Vendôme had a short disgrace, was removed from Flanders and sent to the Spanish front, where he succeeded brilliantly. Bourgogne never went to the wars again. But there was one good result of all this: the Duchesse
de Bourgogne, vehemently on her husband's side, was shaken out of her futile existence and began to show the stuff she was made of.

The next year, 1709, was perhaps the most terrible that France has ever known. On 12 January the cold came down. In four days the Seine, all the rivers and the sea on the Atlantic coast were frozen solid. The frost lasted for two months, then there was a complete thaw; as soon as the snow which had hitherto afforded some protection to the land, melted away, the frost began again, as hard as ever. The winter wheat, of course, was killed, so were the fruit, olive and walnut trees and nearly all the vines; the rabbits froze in their burrows; the beasts of the field died like flies. The fate of the poor was terrible and the rich at Versailles were not to be envied — the fires which roared up the chimneys night and day hardly altered the temperature of the enormous rooms; spirits froze on the very chimney-pieces. The Princesse de Soubise died of cold at sixty-one and so did Père de La Chaise.

He had long been failing and had often asked to retire but the King insisted on keeping him, until he was more like a corpse than a man, with no memory or judgment left. He was succeeded by Père Tellier, a Jesuit, who came to be loathed so much so that he was perhaps chiefly responsible for the expulsion of his Order from France. A sort of Rasputin, with ardent, black eyes in a false, terrible face, ignorant and wildly ambitious, he was a peasant and boasted of it to the King, who was unimpressed since in his eyes the peasantry and the bourgeoisie rated exactly the same — the only non-royal people slightly superior, in his eyes, to the rank and file of his subjects, were dukes, Fagon, who witnessed the first interview between the King and his new confessor, said ‘What a bird of prey — I wouldn't care to meet him on a dark night. The public which has forgiven the King all his mistresses will never forgive him this confessor'. Dear old Père de La Chaise was regretted by everybody; this sinister figure was ever at the King's elbow. He made his influence felt pretty soon by sending the twenty-two holy women, who were all that were left at Port-Royal, to other convents. A few months later, in 1710, the convent buildings of Port-Royal were destroyed and the graveyard was desecrated. Louis XIV hesitated a good long time before taking such violent action. Tellier told him that the convent was a nest of republicanism and this dreaded word may have decided him. He had much better have left the dying sect alone. The pointless persecution — especially the violated tombs of holy and famous people — only gave it an impetus. Jansenists attributed the King's family tragedies of the next two years to this deed; but the King probably thought that the victory of Denain was his just reward for it.

On 21 February the Prince de Conti died, at forty-five, to the intense grief of nearly all Frenchmen except the King, M. le Duc and the Duc du Maine. His death was particularly poignant because the King, despairing of his generals, had at last decided to put Conti in command of an army. The news came too late, and indeed only served to make his last
days even sadder by giving him an intense desire for life. Conti had some obscure digestive trouble; he lived for a time on milk but finally could no longer swallow anything. His old friend the Dauphin having infuriated the Parisians by driving past the Hôtel de Conti to go to the Opéra while his cousin was receiving the last rites, was told of his death as he was setting out for the hunt. He made no observation and galloped off; but who knows what memories of childhood and youth may have passed through his fair head as he followed his hounds up and down the icy glades that day? (Like his grandson, Louis XV, he hunted whatever the weather, taking no account of the horses' legs.) Mme la Duchesse concealed her grief as best she could and decided to be a perfect wife to M. le Duc, possibly because she knew she could never love again or possibly from ambition, since M. le Duc was bound to become an important personage at the death of the King. But the tiny fellow himself died a year later, making horrible faces. He had become terrifyingly mad, and was found to have a tumour on the brain. A son and a daughter of Mme la Duchesse eventually married a daughter and a son of the Prince de Conti; they are among the ancestors of the present French pretender.

As the winter dragged on there was a shortage of bread in Paris; after several bad riots a mob of women set out for Versailles. Louis XIV had them stopped at Sèvres and escorted back to Paris by the army. The Venetian ambassador wrote home to say that the King had better make peace, because the French nation had no stomach for defeat and privation and soon he would not be safe in his own house. (All the same, the King's personality was such that a revolution in his lifetime would have been unthinkable.) The conversation at Versailles was of nothing but wheat, oats and barley; and Mme de Maintenon was suspected by her enemies of speculating in these commodities — without a scrap of evidence. No doubt some people really did so though on the whole there was a wave of solidarity in the land and the little that could be done, was done for the poor. Saint-Cyr, for example, was put on to reduced rations, and the surplus distributed.