Louise, Duchesse de la Valliere, Carmelite

Extract

In a long narrow gallery of Versailles seldom opened to the public hangs a picture by Nocret of Louise Duchesse de la Vallière in court dress of the late seventeenth century. There is something strangely haunting about the beautiful aristocratic face with its great sad eyes ringed by dark circles. For all her fine parure she has the air of one whose nights are spent in weeping. And now her life has been written by one who seems to have crept into her very heart and learnt its whispered secret; a work so different from the usual ones on Louis XIV’s mistresses, and justly crowned by the Académie Française.

Here is the story. In 1661, the sixteen-year-old Madame Henriette d’Angleterre married Louis XIV’s brother. Among her ladies-in-waiting was Mlle. Louise de la Baume le Blanc, of Blois, aged seventeen. She had fair hair and innocent almond-shaped blue eyes, ‘ses yeux longs,’ and though she limped slightly, she was very exquisite. Madame herself said she was ‘douce, précieuse, admirable’ . . . ‘dans ses beaux yeux une douce langueur.’ As a little girl in Tours and at Blois, she had been greatly neglected by her mother and allowed to run wild. She had seen the King for the first time on his way to marry the Spanish Infanta. It was strange that on the high chimney of her chateau was the device: Ad principem ut ad ignes amor indissolubilis which by a strained translation is interpreted as foretelling her love for Louis and then its sacrifice to the fires of a greater love.