Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (17 page)

The third time the couple said farewell, Louis fretted about her future. As she’d never been a gold-digging royal mistress, she’d not amassed any wealth. On top of that, she’d always been a philanthropist, and much of what she had was funneled to Saint-Cyr. “What will become of you, for you have nothing?” he reminded her.

“I
am
nothing,” Madame de Maintenon replied. “Think only of God,” she added, and departed.

The last time the marquise saw her husband, “[H]e said, seeing me still by his bedside, ‘I admire your friendship and courage to be still near me at such a time.’”

The dying Sun King gave Madame de Maintenon a rosary from his private keepsake pouch, telling her the gift was intended to be a
souvenir
—the French word for a remembrance—and not a relic. The marquise despaired of her ability to contain her grief in his presence, but she managed to wait until she returned to Saint-Cyr, apologizing to the schoolgirls for weeping in front of them.

Louis conferred with his nephew, the duc d’Orléans, the future regent of his successor, to receive his assurance that the marquise would not become destitute, remarking, “She only gave me good advice. She was useful in every way, but above all for my salvation.”

On August 30, 1715, the king and his secret wife shared a final good-bye, after her confessor informed Madame de Maintenon, “You can go, you are no longer necessary to him.” She was not at his side at the very end, for which she would later be criticized. But at that time a sovereign’s deathbed was considered the milieu of clerics, not of courtiers, or even the monarch’s family.

Louis XIV died on Sunday, September 1, 1715, and was buried at Saint-Denis on October 28. In choosing Madame de Maintenon as a companion, after his “perilous season” of passions, as Père Massillon referred to the king’s libidinous earlier years during his funeral oration, the monarch was influenced by the mature, wise sort of woman his mother, Anne of Austria, had been, even though Françoise d’Aubigné was not born into rank and privilege. Louis was always fascinated by good women, and if men in their forties marry their mothers, he had done so with the former widow Scarron.

In the pocket of the sovereign’s waistcoat when he died was a miniature of Madame de Maintenon depicted as Saint Frances of Rome. When he painted the full-length canvas, the portraitist Pierre Mignard had requested Louis’ permission to drape the marquise in ermine, by law a perquisite reserved for kings and queens. “Certainly Saint Frances deserves ermine!” the king had declared, which some took as another hint that Madame de Maintenon was in fact his wife.

The marquise was at Saint-Cyr when she learned of Louis’ death. Her former correspondence secretary, Marie-Jeanne d’Aumale, paid her a visit on September 1 to tell her that everyone had gone to the chapel to pray. The marquise immediately understood what that meant and burst into tears. As the days passed she received letters of
condolence on her “special loss” from duchesses and bishops, cardinals and courtiers, and from foreign dignitaries, including the queen of Poland. Still she staunchly refused to either confirm or deny her marriage to the Grand Monarch. As one of her biographers wrote, if “a child or simple person” asked her about it, her stock reply was, “Who told you that?”

Pressed by Mademoiselle d’Aumale to pen her memoirs, Madame de Maintenon demurred, insisting that her life was the work of God. As for her twenty-six-year relationship with Louis XIV, “It has been a miracle when I think that I was born impatient and that the King never perceived it, though often I was at the end of my force and ready to throw up everything…. Sometimes I was angry when the King would not grant me what I asked…. Sometimes I felt outraged and ready to leave the Court. God only knows what I suffered. But when the King came to my room he saw nothing of it. I was in a good humor, thought of nothing but amusing him and detaching him from women, which I could never have done if I had not been good-tempered and equable. If he had not found his pleasure with me he would have sought it with others….”

With the aid of Mademoiselle d’Aumale, the marquise burned every letter she ever received from the king. “We will leave as little as possible about myself,” she averred. “Now I can never prove that I have been in favor with the King and that he did me the honor to write to me.”

Madame de Maintenon spent the rest of her life in seclusion at Saint-Cyr, aging gracefully and dying with scarcely a gray hair on April 15, 1719, at the age of eighty-three. Her passing went largely unremarked except by her old nemesis, Liselotte, who wrote, “I just learned that…
die alte Schump ist verreckt
,” employing a rude phrase one might use to describe the horrible death of an old animal.

In 1794, during the French Revolution, as Saint-Cyr was being transformed into a military hospital, workers in the chapel came across Madame de Maintenon’s tomb. Seeing the name, they broke the coffin to bits and tied a rope around the perfectly preserved corpse, intending to drag it through the courtyard to unceremoniously set it ablaze. Mercifully, the young officer in charge had a conscience and a sense of history. He tossed the vitriolic mob a fistful of
coins and exhorted them to get drunk, suggesting they could burn the body the following day. While the workers were gone, a grave was dug in an obscure corner of Saint-Cyr’s garden and the mutilated corpse of the secret queen of France was relaid to rest.

But not for long. In 1805, the school became a military academy and the marquise’s remains were ordered to be exhumed and desecrated by General Duteuil, who referred to her as “the fanatic who caused the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” erroneously ascribing far too much influence to her regarding Louis XIV’s persecution of the Protestants. Madame de Maintenon’s remains were tossed into an old packing case and shoved in a corner of the bursary, where the students, aware of its contents, over time appropriated the marquise’s bones as relics. After thirty years, all but the largest bones had disappeared.

In 1836, the academy’s commanding officer alerted the authorities to the scandal and received permission to erect a monument to la Maintenon in what had been Saint-Cyr’s chapel. During its construction, the workers fortuitously found remnants of the marquise’s original coffin and black burial gown, as well as some of the embalming spices, the heel of one shoe, and a small ebony cross. These relics were placed in an oaken coffin with the few remaining bones and buried under a black marble cross with the simple inscription, H
ERE
LIES
M
ADAME
DE
M
AINTENON
, with the years of her birth and death.

Unfortunately, she was not to rest peacefully. The marquise’s marble sarcophagus was reduced to rubble when Saint-Cyr was damaged by German bombs in World War II during the summer of 1944. The exposed bones were removed to Versailles and reinterred there. In April 1969, 250 years after Madame de Maintenon’s death, her remains were transported once again to Saint-Cyr, where they received a sixth, and final, burial.

S
OPHIA
D
OROTHEA
OF
C
ELLE

1666–1726

H
EREDITARY
PRINCESS
OF
H
ANOVER
(1682–1694)

W
hen Sophia Dorothea of Celle learned that she would be compelled to wed her unattractive and obnoxious twenty-two-year-old first cousin George Ludwig, son of the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (a duchy in Hanover), she pitched a fit and declared, “I will not marry the pig snout!”

But the dark-haired, doe-eyed sixteen-year-old had little choice in the matter. Sophia Dorothea was the legitimized love child of the duke of the tiny neighboring duchy of Celle and his luscious mistress Eléanore Desmier d’Olbreuse. Her father, George William, had been the heir to the prestigious duchy of Hanover, but it came with strings attached: the mannish bluestocking of a bride that his father had preselected for him, Princess Sophia, daughter of the Palatine king of Bohemia.

So George William cut a deal with his younger brother, Ernst Augustus. If Ernst Augustus would agree to wed Sophia instead, George William would cede him his rights to inherit Hanover and promise never to marry anyone else. Ernst Augustus accepted this arrangement, but Sophia, who had been in love with George William, was furious at being foisted off on his brother. And her jealousy of the woman George William preferred instead never abated.

The daughter of a marquis, Eléanore Desmier d’Olbreuse hailed from a French Huguenot family that had been forced into hiding during the reign of Henri III. She endured a terrifying childhood, always one step ahead of the persecuting Catholics, and had witnessed firsthand the burning of heretical Protestants, the fires fanned by the incendiary sermons of the Jesuit Père Bourdaloue. Her family
ultimately settled in Breda in Holland, where they were taken under the wing of another refugee, the princess of Tarente. It was there that the penniless young Eléanore met George William of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the pair fell in love.

However, because George William had pledged never to wed another as part of the jettisoning of Sophia of Bohemia, he could not offer Eléanore anything more than a morganatic marriage. From her vantage, it was better than being his mistress, but it voided any rights their future offspring might have. Still, the princess of Tarente encouraged the twenty-six-year-old Eléanore to accept George William’s offer. She loved him, she had nothing to bring to the match herself, and she wasn’t getting any younger.

The morganatic marriage was celebrated in September 1665, and little Sophia Dorothea, for all intents and purposes illegitimate, was born the following year. It was not until 1676, when she was ten years old, and her uncle Ernst Augustus and her aunt Sophia had plenty of boys to inherit their duchy (meaning that her parents no longer posed a dynastic threat), that they begrudgingly permitted the marriage of George William and Eléanore to be fully legitimized. This action retroactively removed the stain of bastardy from their daughter, but some people would never let Sophia Dorothea forget her roots.

She grew up to resemble Walt Disney’s Snow White, with fair skin, luscious dark hair, and pouty red lips. And she enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Celle, living in a castle straight out of an illustrated fairy tale. Celle was full of sylvan woods and groves and charming cottages with thatched roofs. One can practically imagine her romping with spotted fawns, fluffy bunnies, and chirping bluebirds.

By the time Sophia Dorothea reached her mid-teens, her father and his brother Ernst Augustus had become determined to eventually unite their separate Hanoverian duchies by wedding Sophia Dorothea to the oldest son of Ernst Augustus and Sophia. In that way,
their
eldest son (the fathers were thinking
way
ahead) would one day inherit the entire duchy of Hanover, and become a powerful player on the Central European stage.

A good deal of baggage accompanied the match between Sophia Dorothea of Celle and George Ludwig of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
The prospective mothers-in-law still detested each other. Sophia, a Machiavellian termagant, remained jealous of the sweet-tempered Eléanore, whom she had always considered to be a nobody from nowhere, an impoverished refugee who had bewitched the man
she
should have married with her dark good looks and her grace on the dance floor.

The marriage was doomed even before the vows were taken on November 22, 1682. George Ludwig couldn’t get past the fact that his gorgeous wife had been born a bastard, and Sophia Dorothea couldn’t get past the fact that her husband was just a bastard, period. He was fond of two things, neither of which included her: war and ugly women. In fact, he took not one but two hideous mistresses. One of them, the married and morbidly obese Sophia Charlotte von Kielmannsegg, was purported to be the daughter of his
father’s
mistress, most likely making her George Ludwig’s half sister. George Ludwig’s other inamorata, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg, who was as tall, angular, and bone-thin as Sophia Charlotte was roly-poly, had been one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting.

In between George Ludwig’s martial campaigns and his extramarital affairs, he and Sophia engaged in domestic altercations of the sort that involved physical violence and flying crockery. Nonetheless, somehow they managed to produce two children: in 1683 a son, George Augustus, who would grow up to be George II of England, and in 1687 a daughter, also named Sophia Dorothea, who would become the mother of Frederick the Great.

But after six years of marriage, Sophia Dorothea, Hereditary Princess of Hanover, had had enough of her husband’s infidelities, as well as having her complaints about them shrugged off by both her parents and his. By that time she had done her duty as a royal spouse by producing an heir, and she decided to reward herself by commencing her own romance, heedless of the consequences. She was graceful and lively, with a stunning figure, even after giving birth to two children. She was quick-witted and clever, accomplished in all the womanly arts—music and singing, needlework and dance. She loved to have a grand old time. She deserved to be loved.

Unfortunately, no one else except her paramour, Philipp Christoph,
Count von Königsmark, thought so. Sophia Dorothea’s royal romance cost her absolutely everything she held dear. Although her behavior had certainly contributed to her downfall, the punishment hardly fit the crime, especially when her husband remained free to cat about with his own pair of mistresses.

The Hereditary Princess lost her freedom. In 1694, Sophia Dorothea was divorced from her husband by mutual consent. But then she was banished from Hanover. However, a simple exile wasn’t enough for her vindictive in-laws. At the age of twenty-eight, Sophia Dorothea was incarcerated within the moated castle at Ahlden, where she remained until her death, thirty-two years later.

As she grew old and lonely at Ahlden, her ex-husband went on to become king of England. Queen Anne had died without issue in 1714, and by Great Britain’s 1701 Act of Settlement, the crown had to pass to her nearest Protestant relation. That would have been George Ludwig’s mother, the duchess Sophia, who was a granddaughter of the first Stuart king, James I. But Sophia had passed away just weeks before Anne did, making George Ludwig, elector of Hanover, the next British monarch. Dropping his middle name, he became George I and thus began the dynasty of England’s House of Hanover that would rule until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.