Portrait of the young Louis XIV

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Susan Holloway Scott, author of a number of fine novels about kings and their mistresses, brought this portrait of the young Louis to my attention.

As stated on the Philip Mould Fine Paintings website, young Louis succeeded to the French throne in 1643, just before his fifth birthday. In this portrait, painted in that year, you can see the insignia of Kingship: the cordon bleu of the Order of Saint Esprit and the ermine -lined robe embroidered with gold fleur-de-lys.

Susan particularly liked his charmingly ribbon-tied lovelocks. Yes, so very sweet.

Louis — "the God-given" — was adored by his mother, Queen Anne of Austria (who was, in fact, Spanish). She gave birth to him after 22-years of marriage and a number of failed pregnancies. As a child he was described as gentle and docile, according to his confessor, and overly meek and submissive, according to a governess.

For a gallery of portraits of the family of Louis XIV: click here.

Above: Portrait of King Louis XIV as a child (1638-1715) c.1643. Studio of Charles and Henri Beaubrun (1604–1692). Oil on Canvas

A belated update

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My apologies to the followers of this blog! I've been consumed with details: reconstruction of my website (hence the new look of this blog), getting out a newsletter (you can see it here, on-line), preparing for the release of the paperback edition of Mistress of the Sun, a blog tour, etc.

Not that there hasn't been on-going research — I'll have quite a bit to report in a bit. But for now, a report of Louis XIV in the news. As usual, it's interesting.

•An article on the sun-burst mirror: here. We happen to have a rather old and extremely large sun-burst mirror in our home in Mexico. I find it interesting (if doubtful) that it may have originated with Louis XIV.

•An article claiming that Louis XIV only bathed himself twice in his life: here. Is this true? I doubt it very much.

•This article on the painful medical treatments of the past is quite interesting, but the claim that:

King Louis XIV had over 2,000 enemas during his reign, sometimes holding court while the ceremony progressed.

seems questionable.

And, while I'm in debunking mode, Louis XIV (as well as Napoleon) are credited with saying, "L'etat, c'est moi." Neither has ever been documented.

Bah! Humbug! More anon.

The Queen's Black baby: fact or fiction?

Much has been written about the possibility that Louis XIV's wife, the Queen, gave birth to a black daughter. Needless-to-say, this has given rise to a number of salacious rumours.

Lynn Nottage, author of the play Las Meninas, writes about the spark for the play — read an essay about the African presence in royal families. In this essay was a paragraph that mentioned a romance between an African dwarf and the Queen Marie Thérèse of France. Nottage spent close to eight years researching this and came to the conclusion that the story was true: that in 1661, the Queen had a romance with an African dwarf named Nabo, and gave birth to a child named Louise Marie, "who was whisked from the palace and sent to a convent where she spent her entire life, first as a novice and then a nun. She did not take vows until she was much older." (I would love to correspond with Lynn Nottage about her research.)

One thing is certain: the Queen would not have given birth privately. There would have been witnesses. Author Catherine Delors has written a wonderful account of Marie Antoinette having to give birth in an all-too-public manner on her blog, Versailles and more, some of which was also posted to Wonders and Marvels, a blog on the 17th century.

Gary McCollim, a historian I often quote here, weighed in on this rumour of a black daughter recently. First, he examined the sources often quoted:

1) Cardinal Dubois was not an eyewitness and he might not have written his memoirs.

2) Voltaire was definitely not an eyewitness. He was born in 1694 and the so-called black daughter was born in 1664.

3) Saint-Simon was not an eyewitness as he was born in 1675.

4) The memoires of the marquise de Montespan were not written by La Montespan but by a male writer after she had died.

5) Thus, the only eyewitness might have been the duchesse de Montpensier, Louis XIV's cousin who was called La Grande Mademoiselle. However, her memoirs only say that the queen gave birth prematurely to a child who was very dark.

We do have some other evidence about this child. Madame, Louis XIV's sister-in-law, wrote that her husband Monsieur who was an eyewitness said that the female child born in 1664 was not black but very ugly. Madame went on to say that no one could get the idea out of people's heads that the child was still alive and was living in a convent at Moret near Fontainebleau. In any case, Madame wrote, it is certain that the ugly child died. All the court had seen her di

Then, we also have copies of letters that Louis XIV wrote to tell the rest of sovereign Europe of the death of his daughter on 26 December 1664.

And finally, we have several sources that report that Louis XIV had a Maurish coachman with a pretty wife. They had a child that the king and queen acted as godparents for. When the child's parents died, Madame de Maintenon had the child put into this convent. As goddaughter to the king and queen, this child might refer to the Dauphin as her brother.

Today, Gary posted more on this mystery after reading a recent biography of Queen Marie Thérèse by Joëlle Chevé:

She discusses the so-called black baby on pages 250-253. Several important facts emerge. First, the baby was born at least one month prematurely. The queen had been sick for several weeks before the child was born. They wanted to giver her last rites which the queen refused because she could not face dying. She would take communion but eventually she agreed to accept the last rites.

In the midst of this long illness, when everyone was wondering what could be done, Madame Foucquet brought a remedy. (Her husband was on trial for his life at the time.) The queen remained ill until January 1665 or two months after the birth of the child Marie-Anne.

Then, Chevé turns to discuss the child who was born under these conditions. Everyone agreed that the child was born with a dark almost violet complexion and a weak constitution. Chevé then cites the memoirs of the Grande Mademoiselle (the duchesse de Montpensier) who was not an eyewitness to the birth but was informed by Monsieur about the child's complexion. When the Grande Mademoiselle did see the child she says that she knew right away that the child was too weak to live.

As to the black nun of Moret, she took the veil in 1695 when the child Marie-Anne, had she lived, would have been thirty years old. This is a late age for taking the veil. Chevé doubts that the black nun was thirty years old. When the rumors began circulating that the black nun was in fact the child Marie-Anne, Madame de Maintenon tried to squelch them by saying that she had put the girl in the convent as a favor for the girl's parents who were Moors who worked in the King's Menagerie.

As for me, I'm still uncertain. As with births, the death of a child was also public. Why are there no accounts?

(The image of Marie Antoinette's public birthing is taken from Catherine's blog.)

Plot and research concerns from a reader

I answered emails from readers on the week-end. One I got was a first for me: a serious response to my struggles with research (as posted on this blog) and what that means with respect to my plot. He (or she: I don't know) expressed concern that I was headed in the wrong direction for The Next Novel. With permission, I'm quoting the letter in full:

As a fan of your writing, I should probably have some faith that the Next Novel is going to be great, regardless of how you decide to organize the plot. Here are some of my thoughts on this, given in a constructive, rather than critical, tone, all in the hope of allowing you to consider a fan's perspective as you start making important decisions about the plot.

Novelists, even ones who are rigorous about the facts, have an obligation, first and foremost, to telling a good story. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that re-imagining the Affair of the Poisons as a petty frame-job executed by Louvois -- rather than a dastardly plot against the throne itself, carried out by a royal mistress KNOWN to have been a villain in many regards -- kind of lets the air out of a potentially epic story of love and betrayal. After all, what's more scintillating: Satanism within the gilded halls of Versailles or the 17th Century equivalent of watercooler politics?

Now, maybe you're resistant to someone urging you to downplay the facts for the sake of telling a good story. But that's not really what I'm doing. In fact, I question whether the facts are really pointing you in the direction you think.

Lemoine's argument about Louvois being the driving force behind the Poisons scandal seems to be contradicted by the pleas of many other historians who've concluded that Montespan really was guilty of some vile deeds. Sure, few modern scholars believe that she tried to murder the king, as that was against her interests. But why is it so difficult to believe that Montespan was psychologically incapable of poisoning Fontanges, a rival for the king's affection? Montespan's contemporaries describe her behavior as increasingly erratic -- violence, mood swings, temper tantrums, eating binges, gambling binges -- with each passing year in which she was the king's mistress. The marquise certainly acted like a guilty person after retiring from Versailles, exhibiting a terrible fear of the afterlife.

In an earlier post, you mentioned that you were having trouble with the Next Novel because it was difficult to write from Claude's point of view if one assumes she was a knowing accomplice to murder. I hope your attraction to the Louvois angle isn't rooted in the fact that it effectively absolves Claude to some degree and therefore makes her more sympathetic as a lead character. The fact is, you CAN write sympathetically from Claude's perspective, even if she was an accomplice to murder!

Here's how I see what happened in Claude's life: She was a fundamentally good, if slightly too impressionable, girl who got mixed up in something that was wrong. Many books have characters that resist the temptation to do wrong. But many great novels also feature characters who succumb to what is wrong, and live to be haunted by their deeds. I think we can all identify with that, right? It also happens to be more of a morally strong, perhaps even literary approach, than conceiving yet another female character who finds herself entirely the victim of other people's machinations.

When you think about it, there's even reason to sympathize, slightly, with La Montespan. Pampered, exalted, steeped in luxury and yet -- in a deep, subconscious place the haughty marquise wouldn't admit to anyone -- afraid of losing her treasured lifestyle to a rival, it's easy to see why she might have gone a little bonkers.

Anyway, as you find your way through the conceptual terrain of this novel, please keep these things in mind! Characters that make terrible decisions aren't necessarily unsympathetic! It just depends on how you tell their stories! Good luck, Sandra!

I love getting such a well-written letter from a knowledgeable reader, and I very much agree with this reader that story is the most important thing. As a writer, I do "massage" the historical record for the sake of story, but it's hard to write passionately about something for years and years if I don't think it's true ... or, at the least, that I think it likely true, at least from my understanding of the research.

Part of my personal motivation for writing about history is to explore that reality. But what is the reality? According to many historians, both Claude and Athénaïs are guilty. According to one significant historian (Petitfils) Athénaïs is innocent, but Claude is guilty. According to Lemoine, both Athénaïs and Claude are likely innocent. As I said on my writing blog, I may not really know what I think about all this until I'm into the bowels of the very last draft, years from now.

I do want the reader not to worry, however: the twists and turns of this story will make for extremely dramatic reading, no mater what kaleidoscope one is looking through!

A quiet week for Louis XIV

There isn't a great deal in the news this week with respect to Louis XIV (other than the usual items for auction), but an announcement of a performance by Princeton's Dryden Ensemble has me wishing I could be there.

Oboist Jane McKinley had long wanted to put together a show based on the letters of Elisabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orléans. She lined up Canadian actress Roberta Maxwell to read excerpts from the letters, and another Canadian, actor Paul Hecht to portray the Duc de Saint-Simon. All this is interwoven with music, as it was at Versailles during the Court of the Sun King.

The musical program naturally features the crème de la crème of the French school. It includes dances from Lully's opera "Armide," Louis Couperin's Suite in F Major for solo harpsichord, the Prélude and Muzettes from Marais' Suite in A Minor from "Pièces de violes" and his "Sonate à la Maresienne" for violin and continuo.

... and more. It sounds so delicious I can hardly stand it.

Sun Court weekly news

“Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture From Renaissance to Revolution” — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org, through May 24.

Review of The Man Who Outshone the Sun King, by Charles Drazin, a book about Nicolas Foucquet. "Drazin's colourful and sure-footed biography takes this intriguing figure out of the shadows and paints a court where high culture and low cunning always danced in step."

Review of The Courtier's Secret, a historical novel by Donna Russo Morin, set in the court of the Sun King. "The best thing about this book is the detailed descriptions of the Versailles, the king and his court."