To Catch the Moon with your Teeth: The Great Condé by A L Berridge

It’s always a mistake to fall in love with the dead. It’s even sillier when the object of your affection lived in the 17th century and would undoubtedly have been both dentally challenged and smelly. But there are a handful of historical figures whose greatness owes as much to personality as actual achievements, and when a writer seeks to understand them it’s all too easy to become sucked in.

Ladies, gentlemen, and fellow History Girls, I’m ashamed to present my first historical crush: Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, known to history simply as ‘The Great Condé’.

Undoubtedly smelly

His story is simply told. As son and heir to Condé, First Prince of the Blood, the young Duc d’Enghien was forced to abandon the woman he loved and marry a thirteen year old niece of Cardinal Richelieu.  Deeply embittered, he ignored and abused his wife, and took every opportunity to flee to the army and the one life he felt at home. 

But it paid off. In 1643 and at the age of just 21, he won a spectacular victory over Spain at the crucial Battle of Rocroi, and overnight became a popular hero. The victories of Freiburg and Nordlingen followed, and later the vital Battle of Lens which effectively ended the Thirty Years War.  

His downfall came with the two civil wars known as the Frondes. In the first he loyally fought to repress the rebellion, but he soon succumbed to hubris and began to issue demands against the Queen and her hated First Minister Mazarin. His imprisonment sparked the second Fronde, and when a frightened Mazarin was compelled to release him the new Prince of Condé led an army against Paris itself. When peace was finally negotiated, an isolated Condé defected to Spain and led its armies against his own country. Finally defeated at the Battle of the Dunes, he was pardoned on account of previous good service, and lived out the rest of his life in loyal retirement.

And there you have him. He was an arrogant, treacherous adulterer who meddled in politics and was forgiven everything because he happened to be a great soldier. He would seem, as Emily Bronte once memorably described a pile of dead rabbits, a ‘strange choice of favourites’.

But we’re writers here, and our loves are not the same as those of saner people.  It’s the flawed characters who get to us and break our hearts – and they didn’t come much more flawed than Condé. In my opinion he's possibly the greatest tragic figure Shakespeare never wrote.

He certainly has the stature, and France is full of paintings and sculptures to commemorate his deeds. There’s even a jewel named after him, the pink 9 carat Condé diamond presented to him by the young Louis XIV.

His name also carries the supernatural aura of legend, as when the dying Louis XIII told the elder Condé that he dreamed his son had won a great victory – just three days before the totally unexpected Battle of Rocroi. In some districts he might almost have been canonised, as in the église Notre-Dame de Saulges, where Christ is at the top, Saint Paul on the left – and on the right is Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.

He was certainly no saint, and his behaviour with the ladies made him what we’d call a ‘bad boy’ today, but that somehow doesn’t detract from his status. Everything about him was larger than life, right down to his savagely beaked nose – and well, we know what they say about men with big noses...  

And on the battlefield he was a giant. Napoleon considered him an inferior strategist to his contemporary rival Turenne, but few have equalled him in his inspirational ability to lead men.  Rocroi was his first battle as commander, but he disdained the traditional helmet in favour of a simple hat with a white plume – and it was that hat that turned the tide.  Here and everywhere, always where the danger was thickest, that plume was the one constant symbol in the whole seething chaos of a losing battle, and the broken French rallied to it, followed it to victory. I remember crying when I first read the eyewitness accounts of it, and again when I wrote the scene for ‘In the Name of the King'.

Condé at Rocroi

He led from the front, the middle, the flanks, anywhere he was needed, and he did it with a heroic passion that was the stuff of legend. At the battle of Freiburg he was apparently so incensed at his troops’ reluctance to advance that he threw his own marshal’s baton into the Bavarian lines – at which, of course, his whole army rushed to reclaim it. His speeches were full of honour and victory, but it was the simplest one his men remembered best: ‘Qui m’aime me suive’ – which translates roughly as ‘If you love me, follow me.’ They did both.

He was, in fact, a good old-fashioned hero, and one who could give Indiana Jones a run for his money. He had horses shot from under him and musket balls whizzing through his clothing, but always he turned up again, ragged and filthy but eager for more. During the Second Fronde he was known for certain to be a fugitive a hundred and twenty leagues away, but when a previously moribund army suddenly launched a daring attack at Bleaneau, Turenne exclaimed at once ‘Ah! The Prince of Condé must be come!’
He was a master of the impossible, and the poet Voiture was only half-joking when he wrote ‘I think if you had undertaken it, you would catch the moon with your teeth.’

Battle of Faubourg St-Antoine outside Paris

It's an appropriate image for this man. We’re rarely aware of the bodies of historical figures but Condé's physical presence dominates everything he does. The hand with which he made a ‘threatening gesture’ at the Councillor Quatre-Sous in the Parlement, the foot which Mazarin embraced in his desperate attempt to ingratiate himself, the arm that was drenched in blood up to the elbow after a day at the Siege of Mardyck. This is a man who breathed and bled and sweated – so much so that at the Battle of the Faubourg St-Antoine he stripped off his armour and rolled naked in the grass to cool himself down. 

Grande in every sense

 Women certainly felt it, among them the Grande Mademoiselle herself. She was the only daughter of the King’s brother, but there was something about Condé that reduced her to a schoolgirlish flutter. Her account of their meeting during the Battle of Faubourg St-Antoine dwells with loving detail on the dust and sweat on his face, the blood on his collar, the dishevelled state of his hair. When he burst into tears to lament the death of his friends on the field, it was that manly heaving bosom that inspired her to the act that ensured her own place in the history books – ordering the guns of the Bastille to turn inward on the city in order to allow Condé’s army to enter.

 So what went wrong?

Much the same thing that went wrong with Coriolanus and indeed Othello. Condé was a great soldier, but he was a rotten politician. Arrogantly assured of his own importance, he never suspected the intrigues that might be conducted against him, and the scene in which the wily Cardinal Mazarin induced him unwittingly to compose and sign the order for his own arrest is one Shakespeare would love to have written.

It wasn’t that he was stupid – he was fluent in both Latin and Greek – but that was part of his tragedy. He knew he was being manipulated, and he knew how it would end. When his sister and brother finally persuaded him to take up arms against his King, the Duchesse de Nemours recalled his words: ‘You have engaged me in a strange plot, but I foretell that you will weary of it sooner than I, and that in the end you will forsake me.’ He was right. Being once persuaded that the honourable path was to fight Mazarin, he refused to change sides simply because it had become politically expedient to do so.

He was in the wrong world. The enduring image I have of him is almost of a child, a grubby boy-soldier who never quite grew up. While other aristocrats vyed to be seen in the latest fashions, he was careless with his clothes and usually filthy from his latest scrap. He laughed like a child and enjoyed life like a child, even (or perhaps especially) when it was most dangerous. When he was on the run from the King’s forces he disguised himself as a humble courier, but to the despair of his companions he insisted on trying to cook his own omelette at an inn, just for the fun of it. The inevitable disaster with the hot pan and consequent loud swearing let the cat well and truly out of the bag, but as his desperate attendants dragged him back out and into the road ‘Monsieur le Prince was laughing.’

To me he's a tragic hero, and to research his story is to wish it ended differently. Maybe it could have done, and I remember falling prey to that peculiarly female weakness of believing ‘I would have understood him, I would have helped’. I couldn’t, of course, and a snob like Condé would have had nothing to say to me anyway. It’s always a mistake to give your heart to an unreliable, arrogant, womanizing aristocrat.

Especially when they’ve been dead for more than three hundred years...

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Condé appears in A.L. Berridge's novel, 'In the Name of the King'.

More about his world can be found at the Chevalier Series website.

Rude messages can be left for A.L. Berridge at her own website here.