Read Online Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Leslie Carroll - Free Book Online
Authors: Leslie Carroll
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have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviations of the burdens of your subjects.”
Louis XV, apart from having a general reluctance to go to war, did not play it safe on the home front, however, taking several mistresses, official and otherwise, and squandering the goodwill of his subjects. But Louis XIV’s wars did expand France’s borders, adding ten new provinces, creating an empire overseas, and establishing French prominence in Europe. He encouraged the growth of local industry through his patronage of French businesses. And his consolidation of the nobility under Mansart’s gently sloping roofs at Versailles reduced the feudal threats of past centuries.
As king of France for seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days, Louis XIV reigned longer than any European monarch. To put it in perspective, Louis XIV remained king of France while England saw the reign of Charles I, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration and reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, and well into the reign of George I.
Louis’ sovereignty marked a golden age for literature and architecture.It was the era of Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine, Mansart, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre. And the king wasn’t just a patron of the arts; he was a participant. As a devotee of the dance, he often performed in court ballets himself during the early years of his reign.
He died on September 1, 1715, just four days before his seventy-seventh birthday, having lived so long that generations of his heirs predeceased him. A postmortem showed a monstrous abdomen; the king was a man of huge epicurean appetites as well as amorous ones. In the tradition of French monarchs, he was interred in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.
Louis’ cult of personality managed to obscure some of the deficits of his reign. While he reduced the fractious nobility to idle courtiers, they weren’t taxed, and the treasury sorely needed their money. He was such a genius at propagandizing that he made the crown appear omnipotent, but all the pomp and pageantry obscured the monarchy’s weak financial underpinnings, leaving it in a fragile state for his successors and their ministers, who were not skilled enough to govern or to control the aristocracy with as firm a hand.
Louis was indeed the state—although historians believe that the attribution of the phrase “L’État, c’est moi” is apocryphal. It is, however, held that on his deathbed, he did declare, “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours” —I depart, but the State will always remain.
L OUIS XIV AND
F RANÇOISE -A THÉNAÏS DE R OCHECHOUART DE M ORTEMART , MARQUISE DE M ONTESPAN (1641–1707)
For several years, although the Sun King was very much married to a pious and humorless Spanish-born princess with protuberant eyes and black teeth (the product of too much Hapsburg inbreeding), Athénaïs de Montespan was known as “the real queen of France.”
Lush and louche, Madame de Montespan possessed an innate sense of confidence, which contributed immensely to her sex appeal as well as her pretensions to entitlement and were (in her view) bredin her DNA; both sides of her family were grander, centuries older, and more aristocratic than the Bourbons. The Rochechouart de Mortemarts looked down their straight, highly attractive noses at the royal family, viewing them as a bunch of parvenus who, by marrying into the merchant class and taking Medici wives, had diluted their blue blood with the stigma of trade.
In 1660, Madame de Montespan made her social debut at the age of twenty. In the glittering salons of Paris’s Marais district, she dropped the pedestrian Françoise, preferring her more exotic middle name (pronounced Ah-TEN-Ay-EES), which perfectly suited her nature, for she unquestionably had the ego of a goddess.
Athénaïs’s own
Louis XV, apart from having a general reluctance to go to war, did not play it safe on the home front, however, taking several mistresses, official and otherwise, and squandering the goodwill of his subjects. But Louis XIV’s wars did expand France’s borders, adding ten new provinces, creating an empire overseas, and establishing French prominence in Europe. He encouraged the growth of local industry through his patronage of French businesses. And his consolidation of the nobility under Mansart’s gently sloping roofs at Versailles reduced the feudal threats of past centuries.
As king of France for seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days, Louis XIV reigned longer than any European monarch. To put it in perspective, Louis XIV remained king of France while England saw the reign of Charles I, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration and reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, and well into the reign of George I.
Louis’ sovereignty marked a golden age for literature and architecture.It was the era of Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine, Mansart, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre. And the king wasn’t just a patron of the arts; he was a participant. As a devotee of the dance, he often performed in court ballets himself during the early years of his reign.
He died on September 1, 1715, just four days before his seventy-seventh birthday, having lived so long that generations of his heirs predeceased him. A postmortem showed a monstrous abdomen; the king was a man of huge epicurean appetites as well as amorous ones. In the tradition of French monarchs, he was interred in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.
Louis’ cult of personality managed to obscure some of the deficits of his reign. While he reduced the fractious nobility to idle courtiers, they weren’t taxed, and the treasury sorely needed their money. He was such a genius at propagandizing that he made the crown appear omnipotent, but all the pomp and pageantry obscured the monarchy’s weak financial underpinnings, leaving it in a fragile state for his successors and their ministers, who were not skilled enough to govern or to control the aristocracy with as firm a hand.
Louis was indeed the state—although historians believe that the attribution of the phrase “L’État, c’est moi” is apocryphal. It is, however, held that on his deathbed, he did declare, “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours” —I depart, but the State will always remain.
L OUIS XIV AND
F RANÇOISE -A THÉNAÏS DE R OCHECHOUART DE M ORTEMART , MARQUISE DE M ONTESPAN (1641–1707)
For several years, although the Sun King was very much married to a pious and humorless Spanish-born princess with protuberant eyes and black teeth (the product of too much Hapsburg inbreeding), Athénaïs de Montespan was known as “the real queen of France.”
Lush and louche, Madame de Montespan possessed an innate sense of confidence, which contributed immensely to her sex appeal as well as her pretensions to entitlement and were (in her view) bredin her DNA; both sides of her family were grander, centuries older, and more aristocratic than the Bourbons. The Rochechouart de Mortemarts looked down their straight, highly attractive noses at the royal family, viewing them as a bunch of parvenus who, by marrying into the merchant class and taking Medici wives, had diluted their blue blood with the stigma of trade.
In 1660, Madame de Montespan made her social debut at the age of twenty. In the glittering salons of Paris’s Marais district, she dropped the pedestrian Françoise, preferring her more exotic middle name (pronounced Ah-TEN-Ay-EES), which perfectly suited her nature, for she unquestionably had the ego of a goddess.
Athénaïs’s own
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