DEATH OF THE SUN KING by Eleanor Updale

300 years ago today Louis XIV to took to his bed for the last time. His legs had been hurting for a while and his doctor thought he had sciatica. In fact it was senile gangrene. Louis' extremities were turning black. The disease is caused by the gradual death of peripheral blood vessels, and it is not a pretty sight.
If you want to see pictures of what it looks like you know how to Google for them. Here's a little (rather more tasteful) taster:

Discolouration and decomposition of the right foot
Watercolour by Barbara E. Nicholson, 1947. 
http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0036242EL.html

Not a good look - but it's nothing like as bad as the real thing, which I have had the misfortune to see in someone who was dying.

The doctors have longer and less apocalyptic names for senile gangrene these days - among them, is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome II (not to be confused with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome I, which is something quite different). Its short name is Pott II syndrome, which sounds quite jolly, but suffice it to say that if your legs start to rot, you know the game is up.
Nevertheless, Louis went out in the style for which he will forever be famous. His servants dressed him up, complete with a high wig, and for a week he held court from his bed, repeatedly saying his last farewells and yet failing to die until the first day of September. He was almost 77 and had reigned for 72 years.
I don't know about you, but I was never told anything about the deathbed scene when I was at school, nor have I read about it much in accounts of the Sun King's reign since then. 

Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743), ‘Louis XIV, King of France (1701),
Musee du Louvre, Paris. Image: Wikimedia commons

Louis XIV must be one of the best examples of image protection in European history. It's hard to picture him as an invalid literally decaying in his own bed. And what a miracle it seems that his dynasty managed to cling on to power almost to the end of the eighteenth century, despite the fact that, in 1715, Louis had outlived most of his legitimate descendants, and was passing on the throne to a great-grandchild who was only five years old. We have been so conditioned to see the collapse of the French monarchy as inevitable that it's easy to underestimate the achievement of the regency which followed Louis XIV's death, and of king Louis XV himself, who reigned for almost as long as his great-grandfather. 

The First Homage to Louis XV
Wikimedia images

But even more of a triumph is the way popular culture remembers Louis XIV as the Sun King: an autocrat perhaps, but somehow a 'good' one. The conventional portrayal is of a dashing monarch who employed and championed great artists, architects, gardeners, scientists and writers. No doubt one of the reasons he did those things was to forge the very image of himself which has endured. But as well as treasuring the cultural achievements of France during his reign,we should perhaps admire the brand management of those who came after him and made sure that, despite the Revolution of 1789, we still picture Louis XIV as a man with an elegant silk-clad calf, and not as an ageing despot hiding his festering legs under the sheets.


www.eleanorupdale.com

The Affair of the Poisons Part II (with a preliminary digression on the Olympics)

Linda Buckley-Archer

The Men's Time Trials in Teddington

For three days Olympic cycling has taken over Bushy Park and the surrounding roads.  Miles of barriers and bunting and Olympic flagpoles.  It’s been a festival atmosphere where we live, in Teddington, and the roar of the crowds drifted over the park this afternoon as ‘Wiggo’, Bradley Wiggins, fresh from his Tour de France triumph, won gold.  He flashed by me on Chestnut Avenue (conceived by Sir Christopher Wren) en route to Hampton Court Palace and victory.  The herds of deer that normally roam the park have been keeping a very low profile.  It was so good to see Henry VIII’s old residence as a backdrop for the crowning of a British sporting hero.

Waiting for Wiggins:  Chestnut Avenue in Bushy Park with the roof of Hampton Court Palace in the distance

And what did you all think of the 2012 Opening Ceremony and its historical agenda?  I loved the whole daring concept of the evening: the crowd-pleasing James Bond and Mr Bean sketches,  of course, but also the idiosyncratic attempt to introduce the history of Britain into the spectacle.  It was probably mad to try, but they pulled it off, and, oh, those chimneys and the smelting of the Olympic rings!  It was the dramatic equivalent of rendering the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a haiku.  Thanks, I suspect, to screenwriter and Carnegie medal-winning children’s writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, who did the storyboard, not only British history but also children’s literature (and children) were celebrated in the spectacle.  It certainly raised a cheer from me. 

Versailles and the Affair of the Poisons: Part II

The Palace of Versailles

 In June I  wrote  a post about a 17^th-century French scandal involving poisoning and focused on one individual, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was burned for her crime.  As it turned out, the Brinvilliers case was only the tip of the iceberg.  Once La Reynie, Chief of the Paris Police, started to dig about, and discovered the sheer scale of the problem, he determined to stamp it out. It was not uncommon, it seemed, for people across the social classes, including the nobles at Versailles, to procure poison from individuals masquerading as harmless ‘fortune-tellers’.   The Chambre Ardente, a special tribunal, was set up in 1679.  It was to meet in secret to investigate the affair.  One notorious purveyor of love potions and poisons to high-ranking individuals at court was Madame Voisin.  The woman was arrested, interrogated and tortured.  She talked...and talked.  Every day the names of more and more noble courtiers were dragged into the affair:  the Duchesse d’Angouleme, the Princesse de Tingry and even the maid and sister-in-law of Madame de Montespan, the King’s mistress.   The whole of France talked of nothing else. “Men’s lives,” said the horrified La Reynie, “ are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is everywhere – in Paris, in the suburbs and in the provinces.”   That persons close to the King were implicated was especially worrying – partly on account of the scandal, but more importantly on account of Louis’s safety. 

La Reynie

Despite La Reynie’s zeal, it was when witnesses started testifying that the King’s mistress herself, Madame de Montespan, had had regular dealings with Madame Voisin (an accusation which Voisin never confirmed) that things started to fall apart.  As far as the King was concerned it was unthinkable that she should be tried and imprisoned.  The tribunal consequently collapsed.  In order to avoid Madame de Montespan’s involvement, all evidence implicating her was to be suppressed by means of the lettre de cachet (detention without trial).  Nancy Mitford (in The Sun King) notes the final tally of punishments meted out by the Chambre Ardente:

[...]36 burnt to death after torture; 4 sent to the galleys; 36  banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and 30 acquitted.  The fortunate 81 who remained and who benefited by lettres de cachet [insofar as they weren’t executed], were chained up in dungeons all over France for the rest of their lies, in solitary confinement.  If they spoke to their gaolers they were whipped – Mme de Montespan’s name must not be bandied about the French prisons.  Thirty-seven years later some these people were still alive.

I first read about l’Affaire des Poisons while doing some preliminary research at Versailles.  I remember looking out on the exquisite grounds and thinking how horribly deceptive appearances can be.  But then, that’s why we invented novelists and historians...

Happy Holidays!

POISON! (Part 1)

Linda Buckley-Archer

The Sun King

When a spate of poisonings in the 1670s threatened to bring down some of the greatest in the land, the ‘Affaire des Poisons” as it became known, drew all eyes to the court of the Sun King at Versailles.   Once the scale of the problem began to emerge, it was clear that something had to be done about the macabre fashion for getting rid of an unwanted relative with a touch of arsenic or antimony. This fascinating – and disturbing – episode is too involved for a single post so I have decided to split it into two.

I was first alerted to the ‘Affair of the Poisons’ by this intriguing (and famous) description in a letter written  by the ever observant and witty Madame de Sévigné:

At length it is all over: La Brinvilliers is in the air; after her execution her poor little body was thrown into a large fire, and her ashes dispersed by the wind, so that whenever we breathe, we shall inhale some particles of her, and by the communication of the minute spirits, we may be all infected with the desire of poisoning, to our no small surprise.

La Marquise de la Brinvilliers on the day of her execution

Madame de Sévigné (whose abundant correspondence is a major source for historians of the period) had just returned from what can only be described as a society execution.  Everyone who was anyone was in attendance.  Indeed, Madame de S. was more than a little put out by the poor view her position in the great  crowd afforded her. 

The Marquise confessed everything under torture

The lady whose remaining particles were floating in the air, the Marquise de la Brinvilliers, was an unlikely murderess: the sort of nice, quiet woman who liked to do good works and visit the sick in hospital. In fact, rumour had it that it was on the sick that she had tried out her poisons before inflicting them on those closer to home.  La Brinvilliers had taken a lover and, in order to inherit, had poisoned first her father (it took him eight months to die an agonising death though she nursed him conscientiously), and then started on her two brothers.  She was finally brought to justice and, under water torture, confessed everything.

Though she quickly became a celebrity ‘poisoner’ (Alexandre Dumas Senior wrote about her, and, later, an opera told her story), la Marquise de Brinvilliers was not alone in looking to poison to sort out her home life.   The Chief of the Paris Police, Daubray, was poisoned by his wife, and some maintained that the death of ‘Madame’ (Henrietta, the King’s sister-in-law) was also no accident. When Daubray was replaced by La Reynie (who soon won respect for his policing of the city), the latter began to suspect that  poisoning was a lot more common than he had thought.    A priest from the cathedral of Notre Dame came to the chief of police to confide something troubling to him.   More and more, during confession, people were admitting to the priest that they had poisoned their relatives.  La Reynie listened, and believed him, and became  determined to tackle this unpalatable epidemic. But neither La Reynie, nor the King, suspected the true scale of the problem, nor who would be dragged into the Affair of the Poisons.

Linda Buckley-Archer’s Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster.

CHARACTER or THE LURE OF POINTY TREE GARDENS

CHARACTER or THE LURE OF POINTY TREE GARDENS

by Linda Buckley-Archer

[...] nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. David Lodge (The Art of Fiction)

We’ve had some wonderfully historical and robustly technical posts over the last few days which have been fascinating and daunting in equal measure. So I’m devoting today’s post to something I feel more comfortable with: the art of make-believe. In particular, the process of creating, and responding to, characters in fiction. I put the blame for this choice firmly at Louis XIV’s door.

The more research I do on 17^th-century Versailles (for a YA/crossover novel I’m in the midst of writing), the more I find myself getting sucked into the character of the Sun King. I have ‘made up’ the principal players and was going to avoid the distraction of bringing Louis himself to life with all that this would entail. I vowed that I would refuse him dialogue or any ‘close-ups’, and was going to restrict myself to third-hand information and an occasional ‘long-shot’ of Louis XIV wandering about what the National Theatre of Brent was pleased to call his ‘pointy tree garden’. But I’m conflicted, to say the least – and feel myself cracking.

Louis’s manners were impeccable, he would even lift his hat to a chamber maid, and he could be charming company. Contemporary accounts also reveal a man capable of acts of touching sensitivity and kindness. Love and hunting took up a lot of time. He adored witty, intelligent women and was devoted to his hunting dogs (see picture of Nonne, Ponne and Bonne) which he fed himself, in his private quarters, with biscuits specially prepared by his chef.

However, his courtiers were often reported to have literally quaked in the monarch’s presence - and for good reason. Louis had it in him to be hard and cruel. For example, when the mother of a workman who had been killed in a building accident at Versailles shouted at him from afar, the King had her taken away and flogged, despite pleas for leniency (her son had, after all, given his life for Louis XIV’s latest house extension). And then there was the notorious man in the iron mask affair: an anonymous ‘man of quality’ left to rot in solitary confinement for more than thirty years for an unnamed crime. So this Bourbon king, around whom revolved one of the most dazzling courts Europe has ever produced, is at once a character who is intriguing and psychologically complex and, for the novelist, a tempting figure to fictionalise. He also, apparently, had terribly good legs.

I have sketched out a few potential scenes and have written some halting lines of dialogue while attempting to mentally ‘inhabit’ this iconic figure. But my instincts are telling me to back off: the Sun King is too ‘big’; he may end up unbalancing my plot. Or it could be that, quite reasonably, I am intimidated at the thought of finding his ‘voice’, and of filling in factual holes with fictional putty (or, I suppose, vice versa) in order to make my narrative work. In any case, my difficulty with Louis XIV has forced me to focus, in recent days, on the function and creation of the purely fictional character.

In praising My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, in a post last week, Catherine Johnson reminded us what a bizarre and wonderful process is the peopling of a novel, and the subsequent interaction of those characters with the world outside the author’s head. Catherine commented that she had to stop reading the novel as soon as she suspected something awful was going to happen to Nadine and Riley. “How old am I?” Catherine asked. “Too old to care that much about fictional characters surely.” Those of us who have not grown out of fiction know exactly what she means.

The fictional character is a powerful creation, and a great one can enter the reader’s psyche as efficiently as a virus can breach a cell wall. I suspect that I do ‘care’ about Jane Austen’s Emma, William Boyd’s Logan Mountstuart (Any Human Heart), Jane Gardam’s Betty (The Man in the Wooden Hat) or Tolkien’s Frodo (T.L.O.T.R.) more than I do about many flesh-and-bloods. Though I’m not sure how healthy this is. If I were absolutely forced to choose between saving an anonymous mortal life and pressing a button that would destroy all traces of Philip Pullman’s Lyra and her daemon for eternity, I’d do the right thing – of course – but with a heavy heart.

These ‘made-up’ characters have been woven into the warp and weft of our lives, and it’s easy to forget that someone else’s imagination gave birth to them. Even stranger, for an author, is when readers insist that your characters wouldn’t behave in a certain way (how dare they?). Yet, given that fiction only properly ‘happens’ in the mind of the reader, who, in the end should have the last word on a character’s inner life?

Characters, even when they portray ‘real’ people are not real, and the language they use, when compared to a transcript of ‘real’ dialogue, is not real. We understand this, and yet, among the most compelling aspects of reading (and writing) are those encounters with fictional characters who truly speak to us. So, as readers we become practiced in the art of suspending our disbelief, and as writers we become practiced in the art of concocting fictional details so that the reader can be persuaded to fulfil their side of the fictional bargain.

Characters need to have the semblance, at least, of ‘completeness’. Readers don’t need to know everything about them (as ever, good writing is all about the telling detail, synecdoche, the part standing for the whole) but they do, arguably, need to feel they understand them. And it is particularly important that - like real people – they can surprise us. It is the curious ‘autonomy’ of the fictional character, this capacity for ‘freedom’, which makes the writer want to go on writing and the reader want to go on reading. If we sense, as readers, that a character is the writer’s puppet, the novel ceases to be a shared journey and starts, instead, to feel like a mechanical exercise. So, to go back to Catherine’s point, the idea that ‘fictional constructs’ have free will and a unique identity, and that when readers encounter them – as so many words on a page - they may actually begin to care about them, is simultaneously absurd and, for many, the raison d’être of the novel: that is, to know, or to imagine that you know, what it is like to be another human being.