Louis The Grand

( Originally Published 1922 )

Yes, I like to dream of the rare old time
When Louis the Grand was King;
And here I am moved to say in rhyme
What his poets might not sing:
The mask of powder and scent and lace,
The court with its splendors gay,
The sly intrigues, with their wicked grace,
And the King's own part in the play.

[My Favorite Poet]

AMONG kings the star performer was easily Louis Fourteenth of France. He knew his rôle better than any crowned mime that has ever lived. He was perfect in every detail of its business, and of all men who have worn a crown he left the largest and most flattering memory of himself.

The story of Louis Fourteenth has been variously told, and most people agree that it is one of the most interesting in the world. In truth, Clio has. lavished upon it much of her art and not a little of her irony. There have been many attempts to depreciate Louis, or at least to measure him by merely human standards—without exaggeration, he was God to his own world as much as Caesar Augustus was to his. The Jacobins during the Revolution dragged him from his royal tomb and, applying a tailor's tape to the cadaver, found that he was a few inches shorter than his Court believed. But it seems to me that they should have allowed for shrinkage. Voltaire the mocker who, though a courtier, was no great lover of kings, writes of Louis with as much respect as he could command. The terrible rictus—the grin—flickers out here and there, to be sure, but for the most part Monsieur Arouet keeps his countenance well. An excellent judge of ability in kings and commoners, there is no doubt that he regarded Louis as an able man. As a mere man he was never thought of by his own world during the long years of his grandeur. People could not look at him without a sun-dazzle in their eyes—that glory which shut out so much waste of blood and treasure, such ruinous devastation of peaceful lands, such misery among the serfs of the soil, such terror of conscription stalking abroad everywhere like a universal Death!

Daudet tells a pretty story of a young dauphin of France who, with charming naïveté, alluded to God as "Our Cousin". Louis had too much taste to make such a solecism, but had he done so we may be sure the Court would not have minded it, and the Archbishop of Paris would have offered no objection. Heaven was never so near any place on this earth as it was to Versailles in those days. When Madame de Maintenon complained to her brother that she could not endure the burden of her relations with the King, he remarked, "Perhaps you have an idea of marrying. Almighty God!"

There were some great men in the time of Louis the Grand, but nobody thought of insulting the King by a comparison with his sovereign Majesty. Truly the world never saw a more finished actor. Great generals trembled when ushered into the Presence and scarcely dared look above the King's knee. Racine, the greatest poet of the age, having written something which gave his Majesty of-fence, actually went home and died of grief because Louis would not speak to him. This is the saddest of his tragedies. There was also a caterer who killed himself in the most heroic manner because a supply of fresh fish had failed to reach Versailles in time for the King's dinner. In short, all persons, high or low, shared in the illusion produced by the power and grandeur, and above all, the personality of Louis. For him all poets sang, all sculptors carved, all painters painted. Comedy gave him her brightest smiles and Tragedy her rarest tears; while in his august cause on a hundred bloody fields the crested chivalry of France rode smiling to death!

But nowhere was the dominion of Louis so absolute as in the hearts of the women. For women love a King—God bless them !—and worship, especially of a man, is second nature to them. Therein is the secret of their passion-ate attachment to royalty in every age and country, and doubtless also of their devotion to the Church, in which the same idea is symbolized. Madame de Sévigné was as clever a woman as ever lived, with a most penetrating look into human nature and much experience of life. Yet her letters betray that she was under the universal illusion as to Louis, and if there be scandal in the Court of Heaven, it could not be whispered more delicately than Madame de Sévigné does it.

Perhaps as an artist the King makes the most favorable showing in his affairs with women, and to many readers this is the most attractive part of his wonderful history. How he contrived to carry on his amours, in view of the whole Court, without loss of dignity and even with perfect decorum, is as choice a bit as Clio has in her wallet. He never bungled, or hurried, or made a mess of matters, or for-got an instant that he was King. In this, as in all other things, he was truly magnificent, and the lady upon whom his choice happened to fall, though she were among the proudest and loftiest in the realm, was consumingly en-vied for and scarcely deemed herself worthy of the intended honor.

The King's choice of a new favorite was usually announced by a gorgeous fête designed to express the royal desire. Very soon every-body was in the secret, including the Queen, who no doubt had the earliest intimation of it, and whose admirably resigned conduct, under such trying circumstances, was perhaps as creditable to Louis as any exploit sculptured on his monuments. There were several successive favorites, but Louis was not a voluptuary, in the worst sense, and he never kept a half-dozen mistresses in commission at once, like the Merry Monarch across the Channel. Versailles under Louis never ceased to be a palace. Whitehall under Charles the Second became and long remained a brothel. A delicate odor of romance still hovers about the adulteries of Louis; the amours of the Stuart belong to the pornography of history.

Another point of difference : the women whom Louis had honored with his august affections never betrayed and disgraced him, like the concubines of Charles, and upon his leaving them, never turned to other men for consolation. Jut Caesar, aut nullus! Like the lovely La Vallière, they went into convents, or like the superb Montespan, withdrew from the Court. It was doubtless of the La Vallière that Voltaire was thinking when he said that women give themselves to God when they are no longer acceptable to men.

The King was very liberal to his lady friends, as well he might be, since it was al-lowed that he owned all the wealth of the country, and it cannot be denied that he spent it accordingly. He showered titles and estates upon his mistresses, and made no distinction between his bastards and the legitimate royal issue. In this he proved that a strong man can overrule every convention. Louis's mistresses were in turn the true queens of France, and alliance with his bastards was eagerly sought by the noblest houses in the kingdom.

Strange to say, although Louis was one of the best Catholics in the world, the Church seems to have winked at these little irregularities. Bossuet the eloquent never made them the subject of a sermon delivered in the presence of the great Monarch. In his old age, however, Louis did penance for his good times by revoking the Edict of Nantes and causing a great persecution of his Protestant subjects. Some writers ascribe this foolish and cruel act, so contrary to Louis's natural kindness, to the influence of Madame de Maintenon, who was first the mistress and then the privately wedded but unacknowledged wife of the King. This lady was far from being the most beautiful of his mistresses, but she outpointed them all in sense and tact. She was of a deep religious cast of mind, which in that age was not deemed inconsistent with the acceptance of such pleasures as fell to ladies of high station. The reconciling of piety and pleasure was, in truth, the consummate comedy of the reign of Louis the Grand.

I have taken the somewhat original view that Louis was an artist, since he shaped his life in such superb fashion, and came tardy off neither in his least nor greatest efforts.

I add a proof: Does not the coquetry of the artist speak in his leaving to the world the unsolved mystery * of the Man in the Iron Mask?