Seven Ages of Paris (25 page)

As in many things, the taste for the theatre filtered down from the King, his passion for the stage—and his personal involvement in it—rivalled only by his love for building. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was reckoned that the Comédie Française could count between 10,000 and 17,000 regular patrons. Educated women like
Mme.
de Sévigné would have gone to see every new piece as it appeared on the boards, ten to twelve times a year (her Letters are peppered with repeated allusions to contemporary drama). And so would the rowdy denizens of the pit, the parterre, paying their few sous for the privilege of standing in great discomfort—and sometimes danger—to whom even the great Molière always had the adroitness to address his shafts.

The sizzling excitement of the theatre in Louis’s Paris was not confined to the stage, with the hubbub in the parterres regularly drowning out the players’ lines. The early theatres of Paris were long and narrow—like the tennis courts they moved into—and candle-lit, so that there was not much division between audience and players, with the former often leaping on to the stage. There were hilarious scenes straight out of opéra bouffe when members of the cast had to make hurried and undignified escapes from angry fans. Violence was never far off, with the police frequently called in to restore order between rival claques. On more than one occasion the King himself had to intervene to stop audiences whistling at the actors. In 1668, even at Molière’s theatre, favoured with royal protection and the title of the Troupe du Roi, a body of soldiery, who had tried to gain entry without paying, in a fury killed the unfortunate doorkeeper with repeated sword-thrusts—even after he had unbuckled and thrown them his own weapon. The cast were threatened with the same fate, until the actor Béjart—made up as an old man for the play—mounted the stage and pleaded, “Messieurs, have pity on a poor old man of seventy-five who has but a few more days to live!”

Louis was the first of France’s monarchs to offer consistent support for artists and writers. Though it was not quite sufficient to lure Poussin and Claude Lorrain back to France, patronage rested heavily in his hands, so that Racine was enticed away from the stage to be historiographer royal (as was Boileau, in the same year of 1677)—a distinguished but artistically sterile post which possibly destroyed his immense talent: after Phèdre Racine never wrote another tragedy. Molière, on the other hand, benefited greatly from Louis’s favour. His company took up residence in Richelieu’s old quarters of the Palais Royal, premises they shared with Scaramouche’s Comédie Italienne. Here Paris was able to witness the flowering of Molière’s wit: in L’Avare (about the destructive consequences of the pursuit of riches), Le Misanthrope (with its confrontation between coquetry and sincerity taken to excess), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (an attack on bourgeois pretensions), Le Malade imaginaire (which dissected hypochondria and medical quackery), and his most outrageously daring, Tartuffe (an assault on religious hypocrisy).

Probably only the King’s backing saved Molière from serious trouble over Tartuffe, which became the most financially successful of all his works; even so, it was banned for five years, until 1669, and the playwright may have been fortunate not to be around after the rise of
Mme.
de Maintenon and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (see Chapter 9). He died in 1673. It was said of him by one of his contemporaries that, rather than provoking belly-laughs, he had the unique knack of making his audience “rire dans l’âme.” That is probably why he continues to appeal down the ages.

Then there was Jean-Baptiste Lully, the ugly Italian—dirty, untidy, coarse, a heavy drinker who later became wholly debauched. But he was the father of French opera, and it was thanks to his genius that it had its first golden age. A typical Lully production, in 1672, would open with the inevitable prologue depicting the Sun (Louis, of course) defeating Envy and the Serpent (Holland, the current enemy). Lully was a dictator in his own realm, but everywhere was the guiding hand of the King. It was Louis himself who selected the dramatist Philippe Quinault to produce the libretti for Lully’s operas.

The King’s patronage could be patchy, and subject to whim. The great Corneille, for instance, was allowed to die a pauper in 1684, embittered by neglect and failure and by the success of his young rival, Racine. In 1697, the hugely successful Comédie Italienne was arbitrarily suppressed, without warning, after it had lampooned
Mme.
de Maintenon. After this, in 1701, the iron grip of censorship descended on the theatre of Paris, to be reapplied at various times in subsequent French history.

Royal patronage was supplemented by the powerful Parisian ladies who ran influential salons, not least that of
Mme.
de Scudéry. Here, in a house of the Marais, elegant women with pyramid-like headdresses and heavily powdered faces and men in their feathered hats would mount Madeleine de Scudéry’s dark staircase every Saturday, to take part in her ruelles. One of the most coveted invitations of the epoch, the Scudéry salon cultivated refined conversation to excess, making it a salient and irresistible target for lampooning by Molière (in Les Précieuses ridicules). Madeleine herself, an early forebear of today’s feminists, was a profilic writer of romantic novels, and several of her fans in the Académie (where she won a prize for eloquence) tried to have the ban on women lifted so that she could join the Immortels.*

Other than the theatre, the one great leisure function most appealing to Parisiennes of all ranks through the ages, and particularly at the time of Louis XIV, was the promenade. Lister could note with admiration how the easy turning circle of the carriages designed for the narrow streets also made for a much lower coach box than the English equivalent, thereby making it easier for the passengers to see and be seen. There being, especially compared with contemporary London, very few open green spaces—apart from Henri IV’s Place Royale and Place Dauphine—the promeneurs all headed for the Tuileries and Marie de Médicis’s Cour de la Reine, which stretched all the way from the Louvre to the present Place de l’Alma.

Even here, broad as it was—it had a rond-point 100 metres wide in which a hundred carriages could easily turn—the thoroughfare could be crowded with an extraordinary density of traffic. Once Lister counted “near 80 coaches” on the Cour de la Reine. To add to the excitement, into this elegant parade would often mingle troupeaux of cattle and sheep on their way to the markets of Les Halles. For Parisians, this great throng offered unmatched opportunities for romantic or more earthy encounters. For consummation of passing unions thus inaugurated, there was (as in later centuries) always the discreetly leafy Bois de Boulogne. Such pleasure-seeking was all very well, but an end to the revels of the ancien régime loomed.

* Popular term for members of the Académie derived from its original seal, which bore the words “A l’immortalité.”

NINE

*

Death of the Ancien Régime

Before being at court, I had never known boredom, but I have since acquainted myself with it well.

MME. DE MAINTENON

WARS AND LA GLOIRE

The trouble with Louis XIV, as indeed with some other rulers of France in succeeding centuries, lay in his addictive pursuit of la Gloire, that most elusive of viragos. If only he had stuck to the pursuit of la Gloire in the boudoir or in his building plans (both spheres in which he excelled), all might have been well. But he was obsessed by the great military exploits of the Caesars, of Charlemagne and of his own grandfather Henri IV. When he was a youth of eighteen campaigning during the Fronde, he was complimented on being even younger than Henri IV had been when he first went to war. “But he achieved more than me,” complained young Louis, adding, “in future I hope to win a great name for myself.” Twelve years later, he admitted, “My dominant passion is certainly love of glory.” By then, on the most slender of pretexts, he had already fought a campaign, the War of Devolution, against his wife’s country, Spain. This engagement (conducted in 1667 by Turenne, almost without battle) had acquired for him the key cities of Lille, Douai and Tournai in Spanish Flanders. In the age of the moderate Montaigne, glory had signified vanity and had been denounced as a vice, but to Louis it represented the height of human achievement. A cheap victory, signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668, only gave him a taste for more.

Colbert had long struggled valiantly to control Louis’s financial excesses, but from 1671 until his death in 1683 he was fighting a losing battle against the King’s evil genius, François-Michel Le Tellier, better known as the Marquis de Louvois, who between 1672 and 1689 was effectively foreign minister. To give Louvois due credit, from a disorganized mob at the time of Louis’s coronation he had turned the French army into a first-class fighting machine, the most formidable in Europe. Even in time of peace, it came to number 150,000 men under arms—men whom Colbert could readily have used in divers projects to enrich the country. Louvois augmented the number of the barbarically atavistic galleys in the French navy from six to forty, each containing 200 wretches. Originally they were manned by criminals and Turks taken in the Barbary Wars. When the Turks were worn out, they were sold into slavery in America—and substantially replaced, after the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by French Protestants caught attempting to emigrate illegally.

By 1670, as we have seen, France was the strongest power in Europe; Spain was enfeebled; Germany and Italy were parcelled out and divided; England, weakened by the years of Civil War, had on the throne a peace-loving Catholic monarch, Charles II, who was a personal friend of the King of France and indebted to him for financial support. With enduring peace seemingly at hand, France had no need of a vast army. As would have been the preference of Vauban, Europe’s greatest genius at building fortresses—exquisite works of art in themselves—she could have put up ramparts on her north-eastern frontier and consolidated it bit by bit without resort to war. Vauban hated the bombardments of open cities in which Louvois revelled. But Louvois pushed towards war a monarch already bent upon la Gloire.

In 1672 Louis launched a carefully planned war of unprovoked aggression against the tiny but prosperous United Provinces of Holland. Though he had overt reasons for disliking the staunchly Protestant Dutch, he was largely motivated by naked greed. The proud Dutch, however, flooded their dykes and the war dragged on for seven years. Holland was ruined financially, but managed to keep her frontiers intact. A stray bullet cost the life of the great Turenne (at Salzbach, in 1675); more dangerously the war awoke to Louis’s menacing ambitions the rest of Europe—and particularly England, where Holland’s hero, William of Orange, was shortly to assume the throne. All it achieved for France, through the Treaty of Nijmegen, was the (temporary) acquisition of Lorraine and the definitive cession of the Franche-Comté—plus some magnificent paintings and tapestries of the Roi Soleil, astride a prancing horse crossing the Rhine or besieging Maastricht. For Louis it was the apogee of la Gloire.

From now on, a new swagger entered into his pronouncements. Yet, within the next decade, it had brought all his neighbours (bar Switzerland) to unite against him under the alliance of the League of Augsburg. Pre-emptively, Louis marched across the Rhine, taking Cologne and with appalling brutality devastating the Palatinate. It was an excess that would be held against France by Germans for decades, if not centuries, to come—bearing with it the most poisonous of fruit. After another nine years of war, which had negated much of Colbert’s good works in domestic development, under the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) Louis was forced to renounce virtually all his gains.

The glorious reign ended, ingloriously, in yet another war—the War of the Spanish Succession. This time it was one which Louis, ageing and tired of la Gloire, had not sought but had blundered into. For the first time since the Hundred Years War, England—now thoroughly stirred up by Louis—despatched a major force deep into the heart of the continent. Under the mighty Duke of Marlborough, defeat after humiliating defeat was inflicted on France: Blenheim, where Louis lost 30,000 out of an army of 50,000, and Gibraltar (both in 1704), Ramillies and Oudenarde (in 1706 and 1708). “God seems to have forgotten all I have done for him,” grumbled Louis after Ramillies. In 1708 Lille was lost. The following year Nature entered the war on the side of the Alliance, imposing on France, and especially on Paris, the harshest winter on record; at Versailles bottles of liqueur, even in a room with a blazing fire, burst with the frost. To continue financing the war, Louis was forced to melt down his gold plate. Then came Malplaquet, where 11,000 Frenchmen died in the bloodiest battle of the age. Finally, as if there were no end to the punishments the Almighty would inflict on Louis for all his hubristic arrogance, there followed the terrible sequence of illnesses which would decimate his family and menace the succession.

At last, in 1712, when the victorious Allies were mustering to advance on Paris, and it looked as if the country was facing total defeat, possibly even the downfall of the monarchy, Marshal de Villars turned the tide with a brilliant sequence of victories at Denain and Douai. Within six weeks Villars had driven the invaders out of France, and an ailing Louis was able—just—to conclude an honourable peace at Utrecht in 1713. France and the monarchy were saved. Out of this conflict, however, came the foundations of the British Empire, and the economic ruin of all that Colbert had built up—with the value of the livre depreciated 25 per cent in the thirty years up to Utrecht.

PERSECUTING HUGUENOTS AND JANSENISTS

The rise of
Mme.
de Maintenon, around the time of the move to Versailles, represented a fundamental change in the life of the hedonistic king. From now on Louis’s prodigious sexual urges were to be kept closely in check, his Catholic conscience more rigorously activated. Born Françoise d’Aubigné,
Mme.
de Maintenon had married a (very) minor poetaster called Paul Scarron, much older than herself and a cripple allegedly shaped like the letter Z—and a platonic admirer of the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. She was very different to all the previous women in the King’s life, three years older than he, beyond the age of childbearing, and with some of the traditional qualities of the governess. Handsome, but certainly no beauty, she kept the King on the straight and narrow, with the emphasis on the narrow. Her piety was boundless, and she deplored the venality of Versailles. Late in life she would speak about her “long struggle for the King’s soul.” In return, the King referred to her as “Your Solidity.” Whether they were ever married, morganatically, remains a mystery. Nevertheless, with her ascent a sharp change of mood became apparent. In 1683, the year after the move to Versailles, the Queen—Spanish Infanta to the end, dividing her time between her Spanish confessor and Spanish maid—died, in the arms of
Mme.
de Maintenon. “Poor woman,” was the King’s immortal epitaph, “it’s the only time she has ever given me any trouble.” Though in Paris Ninon de Lenclos’s court of love (“the triumph of vice conducted with wit,” as Saint-Simon described it) continued to reign, at Versailles the Widow Scarron’s power at court was now complete.