Seven Ages of Paris (27 page)

Then, for Louis, the terrible sequence of reversals began. The bad omens were there the very year of the move to Versailles, with the death in labour of the Dauphine, as she gave birth to Louis’s first grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. Charmingly the quacks prescribed that a sheep be flayed alive in her room and the ailing Princess wrapped in its skin; the ladies-in-waiting were horrified; the Dauphine died in agony anyway. Then, in 1701, queer old Monsieur died of a stroke, supposedly brought on by a row with his elder brother. “And so ended this year, 1701,” wrote Saint-Simon, “and all the happiness of the King with it.” But worse was to come. The following year brought the disastrous War of the Spanish Succession—which Louis never wanted, but into which he was propelled by the diplomatic follies of his previous wars. Europe, refusing to accept a Bourbon prince on the throne of Spain (left heirless by the death of Louis’s brother-in-law), which would have given France an impossible agglomeration of power, united against Louis. Marlborough marched to Blenheim and back, destroying French armies right, left and centre as he went. In 1706, a total eclipse of the sun seemed like a portent of the new chain of catastrophes that were about to engulf the Roi Soleil. The following year, Dutch scouts—eager to revenge past injuries—pushed almost to Versailles. Living from hour to hour, the court expected at any moment to have to evacuate to Chambord. Then came Marshal de Villars’s miraculous, eleventh-hour counterstroke, liberating—by the end of 1712—all of France.

In the meantime, however, fresh disasters befell France, and Louis personally. We have seen that the winter of 1709 brought perhaps the worst cold ever recorded; in Paris on 13 January the thermometer fell to minus 21.5 degrees Centigrade, and even sunny Provence registered temperatures of minus 16 degrees. Altogether France lost half of her livestock that winter; vines everywhere were killed. In Burgundy, children were reported living off boiled grass and roots; “Some even crop the fields like sheep.” The Seine froze solid, and ice snapped the moorings of barges. The cold even killed Louis’s confessor, Père La Chaise, and a former royal mistress, the Princesse de Soubise, frozen to death in her palace. Impoverished by war, Louis was unable to pay for the “King’s bread” of past years that had sustained the poor of Paris—except by raising fresh taxes. On his way out wolf-hunting, the Dauphin found his way barred by ravenous women clamouring for food. Wolves once again roamed the provinces. Twenty-four thousand Parisians are recorded as having died that winter; and there were riots, with mobs setting off ominously for Versailles. Ugly rumours ran round that
Mme.
de Maintenon was buying up wheat for her own use. Struggling against calamity, La Reynie’s able successor, d’Argenson, declared prophetically, “I foresee that the fires will soon burn in this capital and I fear they will be difficult to extinguish.” In the context, it seems miraculous that it would take another eighty years before the flames raged out of control.

Louis was plunged into depression, which even
Mme.
de Maintenon was unable to dispel. “Sometimes,” she recorded, “he has a fit of crying that he cannot control, sometimes he is not well. He has no conversation.” But Louis’s personal afflictions had hardly begun. In 1711, Monseigneur, the Dauphin, kept in semi-seclusion at Marly, where—infuriatingly—he “stood in the corner whistling and tapping his snuffbox,” caught smallpox and died. All Louis’s hopes, and affections, now centred on his grandson, the new Dauphin, a serious young man of thirty who reflected the King’s own capacity for hard work, and his twenty-five-year-old wife, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, whom Louis adored and whose charm and gaiety had brought new life to an ageing court. But in January 1712, while Louis was still in mourning for his son, Marie-Adélaïde caught measles; on 9 February she died. Ten days later, her husband succumbed to the same disease. In March—as the Allies were beginning to threaten Versailles—their five-year-old son Louis died too. Three dauphins within the year! Suspicions of poisoning once again raised their ugly head, with fingers pointed at Philippe, the new Duc d’Orléans, a libertine known to read Rabelais during Mass, and brought by the deaths closer to the throne. Panic swept the court, though Louis kept his head, murmuring piously to Villars, “God punishes me, and I have deserved it. I shall suffer less in the next world.”

Darkness had descended on Versailles. After Marie-Adélaïde, there were no more balls or entertainments. Then, on 13 August 1715, the King felt a stabbing pain in his left leg; ten days later, despite prescriptions of massive doses of asses’ milk, it turned black. Gangrene had set in. Louis sent for his heir, his five-year-old great-grandson, yet another Louis, and told him, “Mignon, you are going to be a great king.” Then he passed him this lapidary last testament: “Try to remain at peace with your neighbours. I have loved war too much.” On 1 September the Roi Soleil was extinct, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday, and having occupied the throne for seventy-two years and a quarter. “His name cannot be uttered without respect, without linking it to an eternally memorable century,” wrote Voltaire in an excess of homage for so sceptical a critic. Yet later in his life Voltaire could remember seeing, as the great King was laid to rest, little tents set up along the road to Saint-Denis, along which the funeral cortège would pass, where “people were drinking, singing and laughing.” The old monarch had begun to seem immortal, doggedly ruling over a nation that had become increasingly weary with the burdens he had imposed on it. The grand siècle was well and truly over; the bills would shortly be presented for payment.

ANOTHER REGENCY

Discreetly,
Mme.
de Maintenon withdrew from Versailles, declaring that the King had died “like a hero and a saint.” She lived out the remaining four years of her life in seclusion at nearby Saint-Cyr. The act of dying, she declared on her deathbed, was “the least important event of my life.” At Versailles the atmosphere of gloom-bound piety she had done so much to create lingered on for a while, at least until the new child King, Louis XV, was old enough to take over. It was a melancholic place, haunted by phantoms and memories. On the accession of the Regent, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the court—and life itself—moved back to Paris, after an exile of thirty-three years. Once again, it became the true centre and soul of France, for the first time in almost a century.

The Regent took up his official residence in Richelieu’s Palais Royal (where he had in fact been living for many a year), and with him came the seat of government. Philippe was aged forty-one at the time of his uncle’s death, but he looked older. Debauchery and too many drunken evenings had taken their toll. His left arm had been smashed by a cannonball in the wars, and his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he had to peer so closely at documents that his quill pen became entangled in his wig. He was less careful about his dress than he had once been, provoking Saint-Simon to quip that no one had less work to do than his Royal Highness’s master of the wardrobe, except his confessor. Yet he remained a man of great charm and wit. He was voraciously well read, in literature as in philosophy, and was gifted with a remarkable memory. He was more compassionate and tolerant than most of his contemporaries, yet his reputation down the ages was that of a debauchee, philanderer and rake; he was rumoured to have seduced his own daughter and even to have poisoned the Dauphin—and perhaps the King too. He spent as much time as he could in the Palais Royal, wenching and debauching. Even his pious best friend, Saint-Simon, so disapproved of the raffish hangers-on at the Palais Royal that when the Roi Soleil was alive he agreed to meet Philippe only at court in Versailles, never in Paris. Politically, his principal handicap was that the Roi Soleil had not allowed him to play any part in public life, with the result that he was totally lacking in the knowledge that experience brings.

Yet the man with the daunting task of running the country in the wake of the Roi Soleil proved himself to be far more than just an ambitious, Rabelaisian profligate. He was as accomplished in the arts as he had been as a soldier in Louis XIV’s battles; he encouraged Watteau and the melancholy gaiety of the fête galante, and he saw the point of Voltaire. A skilled diplomatist, he helped bring to an end to Louis’s wars, which were ruining France; he opened the prisons of Paris and liberated the galley slaves—one of the most dreadful abuses of human rights left over from the Middle Ages, encouraged and even augmented by Louis. In his efforts to educate the silent and reserved child King, Louis XV, he did his best, employing a light touch and encouraging him with the words “But are you not the master? I am here only to explain, propose, receive your orders and execute them.” The French economy was in terrible shape, and Philippe could also claim advanced and—to say the least—venturesome ideas on how to put it right. But here he came unstuck, with disastrous consequences for Paris that were to bring the Revolution a notch or two closer.

To the city he brought in John Law, an Edinburgh financier (and one of the few Anglo-Saxons to rate a major entry in Le Petit Larousse). Law introduced paper money, setting up in 1716 a “General Bank” to discount commercial paper, which, in 1718, became the Royal Bank with the state as its principal shareholder. This was followed by an adventurous scheme to settle the wastes of Louisiana (named after Louis XIV; New Orleans, it should be noted, was named after the Regent, Philippe). Paris was hit by a febrile wave of speculation and optimism. Tourists and provincials, bent on getting rich quickly, crowded into the city. All went reasonably well, until greed—or prescience—persuaded the Prince de Conti to arrive, on 2 March, with three covered wagons, demanding gold from the bank in exchange for fourteen million shares. The following day, another eminent aristocrat, the Duc de Condé-Bourbon, a prince of the blood no less, rolled up insisting that he sell a further twenty-five million shares. The Regent was appalled: “It appears, Monsieur, that you take pleasure in destroying in a moment that which we have had so much trouble in establishing … What are you each going to do with such a great amount of money?”

Now, following after the grandees, nervous bourgeois speculators swamped the bank with their paper money, calling for gold and silver in payment. There was simply not enough to cover demand; the full vulnerability of “Law’s System” was exposed. The bubble burst, with terrible and far-reaching consequences. By May, an edict slashed the value of paper shares and notes by 50 per cent. The city was horror-struck. Commented Saint-Simon: “every rich man thought himself ruined without resource, and every poor man saw himself a beggar.” Paris seethed; social discontent multiplied, developing into civil disorder, with murders and robberies rampant In July, Law—recognized by the mob—narrowly escaped being lynched. On 9 December, excoriated by Parisians as “that miserable Englishman” (though he was of course a Scot), Law resigned, retiring to die quietly in Venice nine years later, himself totally impoverished—not a swindler, but an honest and misguided optimist.

Typically, Paris seemed to shrug off the disaster with her habitual insouciance. Life returned to the gaiety expressed in the works of Watteau in his last years (he died in 1721), and then moved on to the frothy and equally unreal world of Fragonard. Nevertheless, Law and his “System” had caused the monarchy to totter. The bourgeoisie, created and enriched by the Roi Soleil, had been ruined; worse, they had become dangerously disillusioned with a regime that had proved itself to be so flawed. It would take almost a hundred years, plus the genius of a Bonaparte, before a new and trustworthy Banque de France could be established.

Worn out by his debaucheries, and doubtless by the Law catastrophe, Philippe died in 1723—in the arms of a mistress. A grisly story circulated that, at his post-mortem, one of his Great Danes jumped up and ate his heart.

LOUIS XV

On the death of the Regent, Philippe d’Orléans, Louis XV was still an immature child of thirteen. Whereas his illustrious great-grandfather had been hardened by the Fronde, the young King was brought up to know only cringeing, flattery and licentiousness. Shortly after the Regent’s death, he came across as “a handsome young man, frail and gloomy, with the pretty face of a girl, unfeeling and cold.” He succeeded in being both timid and violent, an unfortunate combination—and secretive. Moving back to Versailles after the death of the Regent, he was to find himself more cut off from his people than any of his predecessors. He had no particular interest in literature or music or the arts—until
Mme.
de Pompadour came along. At first, following Philippe, young Louis turned over the governance of France to Cardinal Fleury, described by one historian as “an agreeable nobody.” Certainly the Cardinal was neither a Sully nor a Colbert, and—in the opinion of Saint-Simon—had “not the slightest notion of anything when he took the helm.”

When Fleury died, aged eighty-eight, in 1742, the King allowed himself—and France—to be ruled by his mistresses, first
Mme.
de Pompadour for two decades, then, after her demise, by the much hated vulgarian
Mme.
du Barry. He had begun by affronting Spain with his change of marital intent, marrying in 1725 the daughter of the Polish claimant, Maria Leszczynska. Seldom addressing a word to her, Louis gave her ten children in ten years (“Always going to bed, always being brought to bed,” sighed the unhappy Queen). Wearing no cosmetics, and supposedly spending her time embroidering altar cloths, she bored Louis, and then closed her bedroom door to him when he was only thirty. He had affairs with four (de Nesle) sisters in a row. When the last, the Duchesse de Châteauroux, died—poison was rumoured—Louis, out hunting, picked up a woman of modest bourgeois birth but of considerable character unpromisingly called
Mlle.
Poisson. Promoted to Marquise de Pompadour, she too appears to have been frigid, keeping a hold on the King by supplying him with quantities of young girls—including, allegedly, her own daughter. The Parc-aux-Cerfs at Versailles—visited nightly by Louis for assignations arranged by Pompadour—gained an infamous reputation.