The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise D'Aubigné, Madame De Maintenon by Veronica Buckley

Author:Veronica Buckley [Buckley, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Royalty, History, Europe, France, 17th Century
ISBN: 9781429934718
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-08-31T07:00:00+00:00

Athénaïs’s final defeat began with a death, the sudden and quite unexpected death of Queen Marie-Thérèse. At the age of forty-five, she had appeared to be in good health, and in fact, like Françoise three years before, had just completed a five-week tour with the King, inspecting Vauban’s impressive military fortifications in France’s eastern provinces. Louis, rarely sympathetic to those who could not enjoy the rugged, pounding travel of an unsprung coach for hours on end, had noticed for once that the journey had been tiring for the Queen. Within a week of returning to Versailles, she had come down with fever, and four days later, as Liselotte relayed to her aunt, “in the afternoon at three o’clock, she died, and all through the ignorance of the doctors, who’ve killed her as surely as if they’d plunged a dagger through her heart. She had a boil under her arm, and they pushed it through her veins back into her body. And in the end, last Friday, they gave her something to make her vomit, and the boil burst internally.”

The doctors themselves recorded that the Queen had died of “a cruel and malignant fever,” and prescribed a week of “morning drops in a few spoonfuls of wine and half an ounce of thériacquedans [an opium extract], also in a bit of wine,” to prevent the King from succumbing, too, after which ministrations, apart from a stomachache and a bitter taste in the mouth, both treated with more wine, he remained “in perfect health.” An autopsy performed on the Queen’s body revealed that “all her lungs” were gangrenous. In Paris, the Mercure Galant news-sheet reported Louis’s own rather pathetic epitaph on his unremarkable wife: “In the twenty-three years during which I lived with the Queen, she gave me not a single anxiety, nor did she once oppose my will.”

Marie-Thérèse, long-suffering in life, had at least not suffered long in death. “She died quite quickly and easily,” as Liselotte reported, inspiring more attention and more praise in a single week than she had done in the previous forty-five years. In Paris, chansonniers wandered the streets singing sentimental songs about her, to which the cultured police commissioner La Reynie, looking up from his Aristotle, listened with indulgent condescension: “Let them,” he said. “The people must have something. They seem really touched by the loss of the Queen. Of course the words are ridiculous, but the people like them; they express their kind of feelings.” At court, the response to the news was as Marie-Thérèse herself, slow as she had been in most respects, would surely have foreseen: “With too little intelligence and too much devotion,” noted the diplomat Spanheim, “she could only have made the court less gay and less lively…”

On hearing the news, a shocked Françoise had turned at once to retire to her own apartments, but the duc de la Rochefoucauld, taking her “quite violently” by the arm, had “pushed” her instead to Louis. “This is no time to leave the King,” he told her.

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