Seven Ages of Paris (21 page)

In February 1661, there was a serious fire at the Louvre, and Mazarin moved from his apartments in that palace to Vincennes. There, playing with his warblers and his monkey, he died the following March, aged only fifty-nine but prematurely exhausted. A grief-stricken Louis burst into tears; “he loved me and I loved him,” he later said of this discreet and sagacious “stepfather”—an admission he would make of no one else. For two hours after learning of the death of his loyal friend and guide he shut himself up alone; then he called in his first council. It is possible that he was also relieved. As he wrote in his memoirs, “I felt my mind and courage soar … I felt quite another man. I discovered in myself qualities I had never suspected.” Later he was heard to remark, “La face du théâtre change”—or, as he put it to his entourage, “In future I shall be my own prime minister.” Louis was now alone, and the sole ruler of France. With a population of eighteen million in 1660, compared with England’s five million, Spain’s six, Austria’s six and Russia’s fourteen million, his was substantially the largest country in Europe. And Paris, the largest capital, now had been getting on for half a million inhabitants.

FOUQUET

Much as Louis was addicted to théâtre and spectacle, woe betide any lesser mortal who might seem to try to upstage him, or even compete with him. Nicolas Fouquet, a vain, ostentatious and ambitious parvenu, had been Louis’s minister superintendent of finance since 1653. Now aged forty-five, he had just built himself a magnificent mansion at Vaux-le-Vicomte, some forty kilometres south-east of Paris. His crest, still visible on that great unfinished pile, was a squirrel with the challenging motto Quo non ascendet (“How far will he not climb”). He had many friends in high places; it was reckoned that some 116 people owed their wealth or position to him. He had spent lavishly—and not unwisely—on the arts; in fact, between 1655 and 1660 Fouquet had virtually replaced the King as the nation’s leading patron, employing a galaxy of the greatest French artists and writers. There had even been some talk that he would eventually succeed Mazarin as prime minister.

On the day after the Cardinal’s death, however, Louis had appointed Mazarin’s astute and incorruptible secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, as Fouquet’s assistant. Five months later, on 17 August 1661, Fouquet audaciously invited the King to a lavish gala at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The royal retinue was greeted by a tableau depicting a lion (the King) stepping on a serpent (which was Colbert’s crest), while in the lion’s paw a squirrel sat munching a nut. It was hardly diplomatic—nor was it politically adroit. Fouquet, however, had spared no expense in his attempt to flatter his monarch. The massive iron gates gleamed with freshly applied gilt; in the vast gardens laid down by André Le Nôtre 200 jets d’eau and fifty fountains spouted on either side of a main alley nearly a kilometre long. For the previous five years, some 18,000 workmen had toiled to produce this wonder of the modern age, eradicating three villages that had happened to be in the way. Certainly it trumped the modest royal hunting-lodge of the King’s father out at Versailles, which Louis was currently doing up.

Inside the imposing mansion the royal party dined off a magnificent gold service which likewise must have made its impression on the King, who had had to sell off his plate to meet military expenditure. Following this feast, in an outdoor theatre lit with torches, Molière introduced his play Les Fâcheux (“The Bores”), written especially for the occasion. The King visibly enjoyed the play, which seemed to mock one of his more tiresome courtiers; but the whole episode outraged him. At various points in the evening, Louis came close to losing his temper—whispering to his mother, “Madame, shall we make these people disgorge?” Anne had to restrain him from arresting Fouquet on the spot, prudently cautioning Louis, “No, not in his house, not at an entertainment he is giving for you.”

“Luxe, insolent et audacieux” was, however, the damning impression of Fouquet that Louis took away with him from that disastrous evening. Less than three weeks later, just as he was arriving at a meeting in Nantes, Fouquet was arrested by the legendary d’Artagnan of Three Musketeers fame. He was heard to murmur, with supreme hubris, “I thought I stood higher with the King than anyone in France.” His trial—before twenty-two judges—dragged on for the best part of three years. For France as a whole, the economy was in a terrible mess, so the prosecution of the mighty and arrogant Superintendent of Finance was extremely popular among the Paris mob. But most of the charges against Fouquet were disgracefully trumped up, at the King’s instigation, and a fair trial was hardly possible. The affair did neither the regime nor Colbert (who had plotted against his boss) nor Louis much credit. Many in high position in Paris, including one of the judges, Olivier d’Ormesson, were sympathetic to the defendant (d’Ormesson was ruined by the King as a result). La Fontaine composed some sympathetic verses, while the articulate and influential
Mme.
de Sévigné expressed open admiration for Fouquet, among other things for his calmness during the protracted trial. Had it not been for such support the death sentence would almost certainly have been pronounced. As it was, on 17 November 1664, Fouquet was imprisoned for life. His doctor and personal valet broke down in court, and insisted on following him into prison. He was never to see his beloved, unfinished house again.

What was important for Paris were the consequences that the fall of Fouquet had for Louis—and for France. In the ruthlessness he displayed towards him, the King was motivated by his obsessive fear of conspiracies—by no means irrational, given the recent Fronde wars. But, shamelessly, as if re-enacting the story of Naboth’s Vineyard, Louis grabbed the fallen man’s architect Le Vau, his garden-designer Le Nôtre, his muralist Le Brun and his skilled artisans, and set them to work on Versailles—the seeds of whose greater glory lay in Fouquet’s disastrous gala of August 1661. Moreover, as was abundantly confirmed after the trial, Louis would now rule supreme. Colbert, the bourgeois son of a draper from Rheims, would move into Fouquet’s slot—but, brilliant administrator though he turned out to be, he would always be Louis’s man. Henceforth, under the Roi Soleil, the government would be characterized by the three qualities of order, regularity and unity.

L’AFFAIRE DES POISONS

To set the seal on Louis’s lonely position at the summit of power, in 1666 his much loved mother, who had exerted so profound an influence over him in the early days, and all through the trials and tribulations of the Fronde, died. Louis wept unrestrainedly. Meanwhile, gossip in Paris had begun to focus more than ever on the King’s mistresses. Louis had swiftly become sexually disenchanted with his plain Spanish bride, once she had given him an heir, and—in the way of French monarchs—had energetically set to acquiring beautiful young women from the court. First there came Louise de La Vallière, with whom Louis fell passionately in love almost simultaneously with the beginnings of his obsession with Versailles around 1661. Then, six years later, with poor Louise eventually forced to take flight to a convent, she was supplanted by the wily Athénaïs de Montespan. For a decade Athénaïs ruled unthreatened by any rival until the appearance at court of the tall blonde beauty Marie-Adélaïde de Fontanges, described by the arch-gossip
Mme.
de Sévigné as being “belle comme une ange, sotte comme un panier,” and by the less bitchy as being “far above everything that had been seen for a long time at Versailles, in addition to her height, her poise and the air about her capable of surprising and of charming a court as galant as her.” Louis rapidly seduced this young girl, a state of affairs which Athénaïs was determined to bring to an end. Among them the mistresses bore Louis a regiment of illegitimates (Montespan alone provided eight, while most of the Queen’s children died), at the same time spawning the most intense jealousies and rivalries that were to culminate in the highly dangerous “Affaire des Poisons.”

A series of sudden deaths among the eminent had caused Paris to succumb to near-hysterical rumours of poisoning. As early as 1670 suspicions had surrounded the death of “Madame,” Princess Henrietta of England, the sad youngest daughter of Charles I and first wife of the King’s homosexual brother Philippe d’Orléans, “Monsieur.” Sudden deaths proliferated, including those of the Comte de Soissons, the Duc de Savoie and Colbert. Allegations of Black Masses and witchcraft became linked with abortions and the purveyance of love-philtres to the rich and mighty—and with the poisoning of inconvenient relatives or rivals, or simply of disobliging associates.

Rumours became fact with the trial before the Paris law courts in 1676 of a noblewoman, no less a personage than Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
Mme.
de Brinvilliers made a full confession: she had poisoned and killed her father, her two brothers and various patients in hospitals that she visited. She had also tried to poison her husband, in order to marry her lover, a Captain Sainte-Croix. But Sainte-Croix, “who did not want a wife as malicious as himself,” gave an antidote to the Marquis, “such that, having been shuttled about five or six times in this way, first poisoned and then cured from poison, he remained alive,” claimed
Mme.
de Sévigné. Despite confessing all to her judges,
Mme.
de Brinvilliers was put to “la question ordinaire et extraordinaire à l’eau.” This was a most unpleasant form of torture which involved filling the stomach full to bursting with water, while leaving no external marks.

According to
Mme.
de Sévigné, writing to her daughter in May 1676, in Paris at that time “people are talking of nothing but the speeches and doings of the Brinvilliers woman … everywhere we ask for details of what she says, what she does, what she eats, and how she sleeps.” Two months later La Brinvilliers was led to the scaffold at Notre-Dame, and the executioner cut off her head with a single blow of the axe—the merciful treatment accorded a noblewoman. Sévigné reported, almost with flippancy:

Well, it’s all over and done with, La Brinvilliers is in the air; her poor little body was thrown, after the execution, into a great big fire, and the cinders to the wind, such that we will breathe her in and, by the little spirits communicating through the air, some poisoned humour will take us all …

Indeed, the “Affaire des Poisons” was far from over. The trial and execution of
Mme.
de Brinvilliers was soon to be seen as no more than an essential prologue to the sentences passed from 1679 to 1682.

Revelations derived from the Brinvilliers case set in motion a chain of investigations under the aegis of Louis’s able chief of police in Paris, Nicolas-Gabriel de La Reynie, who established a Chambre Ardente especially to deal with the fresh poisoning charges. In March 1679, a woman called
Mme.
Voisin was arrested, and was soon disclosing that she had been approached by the Duchesse de Bouillon “for a little poison to kill off an old husband who is killing her with boredom.” The Comtesse de Soissons had asked
Mme.
Voisin if she “could bring back a lover who had left her.” Here there opened a whole new avenue of investigation—the supply of love-philtres, cantharides (also known as “Spanish fly”). One name after another surfaced during these interrogations, and thus it was that between 7 April 1679 and 8 April 1682 there were no fewer than 210 interrogations before the Chambre Ardente, which decreed the arrest of 319 people, of whom 218 were incarcerated and interrogated a total of 865 times. Eighty-eight of these were brought to justice, leaving more than a hundred still to be judged when the business was brought to an abrupt halt.

One of the defendants who gave important evidence under duress was an unsavoury-sounding priest, the Abbé Guibourg, sacristan of Saint-Marcel Church in Saint-Denis, sixty years old, physically deformed and blind in one eye, who was a friend and accomplice of
Mme.
Voisin. He admitted to having provided false certificates of marriage and to having passed books, love-powders, cards and dice “under the chalice” during Mass. He described in repugnant detail how he had performed a Black Mass on several occasions—once on the belly of a woman on the ramparts of Saint-Denis, at two o’clock in the morning, with the apparent intention of invoking the devil “in order to make a pact with him.” At her own trial the judge asked the Duchesse de Bouillon whether she had seen the devil and if so what he was like. She replied with spirit, “Small, dark and ugly—just like you!” She was acquitted, but was then banished to the provinces.

A long procession of women of lesser rank went to the stake to be burned alive as witches. Finally, there arrived the day of execution of La Voisin herself, burned alive in February 1680 at the Place de Grève. Among an enormous range of confessions under torture, she had admitted to having incinerated more than 2,500 aborted children. On being brought to the stake,
Mme.
Voisin pushed away both the crucifix and the confessor.
Mme.
de Sévigné recorded:

she was attached to the stake, seated and bound with iron, she was covered with straw. She swore a lot; she pushed back the straw five or six times; finally the fire started to take, and she was lost from sight, and her ashes are in the air at the present moment.

So much for the death of
Mme.
Voisin, notorious for her crimes and her impiety.

Sévigné went on to add, ominously: “People believe that there will be greater episodes to follow which will take us by surprise.” Later, however, she corrected herself, predicting cryptically that nothing would now come of it—because “there is a branch of the poisoning business which one can never reach.”

Indeed, with extraordinary suddenness, further prosecutions were suspended and the work of the Chambre Ardente was terminated. Evidence, intertwined with rumour, kept bringing the investigations closer and closer to the King’s most intimate entourage. First there were suggestions of a drive against sodomy, highly embarrassing to Monsieur and his circle. But most dangerous of all was the increasing mention of the name of Athénaïs de Montespan. Now thirty-eight, Montespan, to date the longest reigning of Louis’s mistresses and probably the most sexually adept of them all, had come to feel that she was losing way in the King’s affections—a feeling reinforced by the arrival of Marie-Adélaïde de Fontanges. To hold him, she had—so it appeared—liberally fed him with aphrodisiacs, or love-philtres. The chief result, however, had been to give the King terrible headaches, which had gravely worried his doctors.