.In an earlier post, I mentioned the false allegations that 1) Louis XIV only bathed twice in his life, and 2) that he had 2000 enemas. Louis XIV did bathe, and although he had a monthly enema and bleeding (believed to expel bad humours), he certainly could not possibly have had 2000.
Gary McCollim, who I often quote here, has this to say:
Your blog had a note on 30 March about an article claiming that Louis XIV only bathed twice in his life. Stanis Perez who has written a book entitled La Santé de Louis XIV (Champ Vallon, 2007) says that this story is often repeated and is not true (p. 241). The king often bathed on orders from his doctors whenever he was sick. As a youth he often went swimming in the rivers. An bath was installed at Versailles in 1672. I could go on, but the story never dies. His grandfather Henri IV, however, was known to smell like a goat because he rarely bathed but this too might be a false story.
As to the number of enemas the king had, once a month he pris médecin. This meant a bleeding and an enema, what was called a lavement. Lavements were regularly prescribed for various illnesses. As to the number 2000, he would have to have lived 166 years to have one once a month or to have been ill many, many times. Whether he held court or received people or not, he continued his regular activities on these days. Everyone at court knew that the king was taking his medicine on these days.
Saint-Simon tells a story that the duchesse de Bourgogne, the favorite of the king and Maintenon, actually had an enema inserted while she was in the presence of the king and Maintenon. Maintenon was shocked, according to Saint-Simon, but the story left me with the impression that this was some sort of thrill for the youth of that day to see how long they could……. Kind of like kids today and glue sniffing or whatever.
I’ve read the story of the duchesse de Bourgogne before, and the logistics of the act perplex me. I’ve also read an account of a woman who liked her lover to give her enemas rather too often. Clearly, there is more to this than we know!
Much has been written about the possibility that Louis XIV‘s wife, the Queen, gave birth to a black baby, a daughter. Needless-to-say, this has given rise to a number of salacious rumours.
The play Las Meninas
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 black baby, 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.”
What we know …
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.
According to sources …
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.
La Grande Mademoiselle
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.
Marie Therese
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?
Shauna Singh Baldwin and I have known each other for a long time, through email and our writing, but have only met two times. She gave a moving and elegant introduction to my talk in her hometown, Milwaukee (a beautiful city).
This is her introduction:
“Many of us are familiar with Sandra Gulland’s historical fiction from her highly acclaimed, and beautifully-written Josephine Trilogy. In The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine published in 1995, Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe, published in 1998, and the Last Great Dance on Earth published in 2000—Sandra brought Josephine Bonaparte back to life. And instead of a greedy schemer who two-timed Napoleon, we come to know an intelligent woman making the kind of choices and compromises women make every day, even today. The Josephine B. trilogy, has sold over a million worldwide, is now published in thirteen languages and in fifteen countries.
Eight years after the last book in the Josephine trilogy, Sandra brings to life another French woman obscured and reviled by historians, Louise de la Valliere, mistress of the Sun King. Along the way, we meet Molière and Racine as they perform their dramas for the king, and listen to LaFontaine as he wrote his fables. With Louise, we watch Finance Minister Fouquet’s arrogance laid low, and the building of Versailles. Again the court of Louis XIV dazzles us, with the intensity of its joiedevivre and sheer excess. Louise is a superb horsewoman besides being a woman of verve and grace, and her riding and hunting endears her to the king.
To no one’s surprise, within a week of its publication in Canada, Mistress of the Sun was on Maclean’s national best-selling fiction list and remained there for more than two months, rising to #2.
Sandra Gulland, born in Florida and raised in Berkeley California doesn’t live in seventeenth century France. Instead she lives just over the border in Killaloe, about 50 miles west of Ottawa, Canada and spends half her year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She also lives on the web at www.SandraGulland.com—a wonderful web site—has a very active Facebook page, and writes a very interesting blog called Notes on the Writing Life. I don’t know if she can stand on a cantering horse like Louise de la Valliere, but she’s been riding enough years that I wouldn’t put it past her.
Sandra and I have been cyber friends since 1999, and this is only the second time we have met, yet her support and inspiration have often opened new paths for me. Back in 1998 when I was debating taking US citizenship, she took the time to write to me, explaining dual citizenship. When I was researching my second novel, The Tiger Claw, the story of a Muslim woman set in WWII France, she gave me wonderful advice on conducting meticulous historical research—yes, she should know! We keep meeting on online discussion groups like historicalnovelsociety.org and Readerville and I think we have been engaged on a similar project: illuminating and bringing alive herstory as opposed to history.
So I am delighted and honored to introduce a dear friend and spectacular writer.
It’s Saturday, I’m in Philadelphia, and I’m one week into my tour. I have more energy now than when I started. In fact, I could get used to this. I’ve seen lots of Connecticut by car, flown from New York to Boston, and gone by train from Boston to Philadelphia.
I’ve signed a zillion books at bookstores—called “signing stock”—and my hand hasn’t given out. I’m a Sharpie fan! All through Connecticut, store clerks would ask, “Do you have a Sharpie?” (Not, “Do you have a pen?”) Kelly Bowen, my publicist would laugh: “She’s got one.”
One clerk didn’t understand that we were there to sign books. He handed me a copy of Mistress of the Sun. “Have you been waiting long for the new Sandra Gulland?”
“I’m Sandra Gulland, and yes, I’ve been waiting long.” It made my day.
Trish Todd, my publisher, warned me that book sales were down throughout the country and that turn-outs might be sparce. There seems always to be enough, though, and invariably there are a few present who are huge fans, who make it all worthwhile.
My husband can go in and out of an office supply store in 5 minutes. Not me. Yesterday I had the luxury of time, and I walked all the aisles, lingering. I did have a list: printer inkers, storage boxes (for packing away Mistress of the Sun notes), stick-on dots (for coding the research books on my shelves), but most importantly, a signing pen to use when signing my books.
When my first book was published, my husband gave me a beautiful Waterman fountain pen, which I treasure. But it proved challenging to use as a signing pen: it sometimes blotched, stained my fingers, and it could leak in-flight. Also, and most importantly, I had to carefully blot the signed title page before closing the book. In the beginning, when I had only few books to sign, I welcomed a time-consuming process. Now, when I’m signing as many as 40 books, I need to be more efficient.
What to look for in a signing pen
Recently, I stopped into a Chapters/Indigo store in Toronto, and offered to sign my books. I did not have a pen with me, and I was quickly offered a Sharpie. Well. Not that elegant, but— “They don’t blot,” the clerk told me. “Which is why we use them.” The other nice thing about a felt-tip marker, I later thought, is that you are given notice when it’s drying up—not like a fountain or ball-point pen that can quit mid-signature. Making a mess in a $30 book is not a good thing.
So I lingered long at the felt-tip marker section. It wasn’t an independent office supply store—the wonderful type of store where you can test the pens on a scrap of paper provided—so I purchased a selection, and headed north, to Petawawa Stables, where I had my horse to visit … and a book to sign.
I’ve known Dawn and her mother Yvonne since before I began writing Mistress of the Sun. I used to take riding lessons there, and my horse, Finnegan, is wonderfully looked after there during the winter.
I was delighted to sign Yvonne’s book, a gift to her from Dawn. I had tested the markers in the car: the Sharpies, a medium tip, were too fat—a fine-point would be a better choice—but the blue Staedtler (1.0 Medium) worked quite nicely … if only I didn’t have to buy a set of eight in assorted colors to get that one blue.
I’ll be in New York soon, with time, I hope, for one of my favorite past-times: lingering in the aisles of an office supply store.
Afternote: I will have more to report on picking out a signing pen soon. Stay posted.
Photo: Finnegan and me, taken by Dawn Townshend at Petawawa Stables.
