Mademoiselle never seemed to realise the political importance of the King's favourites. That subject, like all else serious, escaped her. She writes:
"I listened to all that they told me—all that I was old enough to hear."
We need not hope to learn from her what Richelieu thought of the King's chaste affection; why, though he had encouraged it, he was angered by it; why he looked with disfavour upon Mlle. de Lafayette, and manipulated her affairs so well that he introduced her into the cell of a convent, and ordered the King to take medicine whenever he suspected that Louis aspired to contemplate her through the grating of her prison; if Mademoiselle had ever known such things "they had never presented themselves to her memory." Nor will it do us any good to search her memoirs for reasons making it clear why Louis XIII., who worked incessantly against Richelieu, and "did not love him," sacrificed, for the Cardinal's pleasure, all his friends and near relations. Throughout all the reverses of 1635 and 1636, when France was trembling under the trampling feet of the invader, when the enemy's skirmishers lay at the gates of Pontoise, the King was faithful to the dictator, whose policy had drawn ruin on the nation. Mademoiselle had never known these things. They had been far below her horizons. The ungrateful years had buffeted her as they passed. She had been pretty and sprightly in early childhood. At the age of eleven she was a buxom girl, with swollen cheeks, thick lips, and a stupid mien,—in a word: a frankly ill-favoured creature, too absorbed in the preoccupations of animal life (the need to skip and jump, to be seen and heard) to listen, to observe, or to reflect. The Queen's condition gave her one more occasion to manifest the lengths to which she had carried her innocence, though she had lived in a world where innocence was not regarded as the most important item in an outfit. She rejoiced that there was to be a Dauphin. Evidently she did not know that his advent would strip her father of his rights as heir-presumptive to the throne. In her own words, she "rejoiced without the least reflection." Anne of Austria was touched by a simpleness of heart to which her life had not accustomed her. "You shall be my daughter-in-law!" she cried repeatedly to her young niece. For she could not bear the thought that the child's later reflections might awake regret.
Mademoiselle embraced the idea only too ardently, and to it she owed one of the bitterest hours of her existence.
The child who was to be Louis XIV. was born at the Château of Saint Germain, 5th September, 1638. Mademoiselle made him her toy. She writes: "The birth of Monsieur the Dauphin gave me a new occupation. I went to see him every day and I called him my little husband. The King was diverted by this and he thought that I did well." She had counted without her godfather the Cardinal, who was more of a Croquemitaine, and more of a spoil-sport than he had ever been. He considered her childish talk very indecorous. Mademoiselle pursues:
Cardinal de Richelieu, who does not like me to accustom myself to being there, nor to have them accustomed to seeing me there, had me given orders to return to Paris. The Queen and Mme. de Hautefort did all that was possible to keep me. They could not obtain their wish,—which I regretted. It was all tears and cries when I left there. Their Majesties gave many proofs of friendship, especially the Queen, who made me aware of a particular tenderness on that occasion. After this displeasure I had still another to endure. They made me pass through Rueil to see the Cardinal, who usually lived there when the King was at Saint Germain. He took it so to heart that I had called the little Dauphin my little husband that he gave me a great reprimand: he said that I was too large to use such terms; that I had been ill-behaved to do so. He spoke so seriously—just as if I had been a person of judgment—that, without answering him, I began to weep. To pacify me he gave me collation, but I did not pass it over. I came away from there very angry at all he had said to me.
Richelieu meant that his orders should be obeyed. Mademoiselle adds: "When I was in Paris I only went to Court once in two months; and when I did go there I only dined with the Queen and then returned to Paris to sleep." It must be said that if the Cardinal had submitted to it for a night or two, she might have found it difficult to sleep at the château. At that time our kings had strange and very inconvenient arrangements for receiving guests; their household appointments had brought them to such a pass that they had suppressed their guest-chamber. When the royal family went to Saint Germain there was a regular house-moving; they carried all their furniture with them, and nothing was left in the Louvre,—not even enough for the King to sleep on when business called him to the capital. Henry IV., a monarch who did not stand on ceremony, invited himself to the house of some lord or of some rich bourgeois, where he put himself at his ease, receiving the Parliament, and also his fair friends, and bidding adieu to his hosts only when he was ready to go home. He took leave of them in his own time and at his own hour.
The timid Louis XIII. had never dared to do such things; he had never thought of having two beds: one in the city, the other in the country.
When the Court came back to Paris they brought all their furniture; not a mattress was left in the palace at Saint Germain. This singular custom had evolved another, which appears to us to have lacked hospitality. When the King of France invited distinguished guests, he never furnished their rooms. He offered them the four walls, and let them arrange themselves as best they could. From as far back as people could remember, they had seen the great arrive at the château closely followed by their beds, their curtains, and even their cooks and their stew-pans. This was the case with Monsieur and his daughter; and so it was with Mazarin, in the following reign. Mademoiselle was not ignorant of the peculiar methods of the royal housekeeping. She knew that the King's friends could not be made comfortable for the night, on the spur of the moment, and she rested very well in Versailles, and thought of nothing but her amusements.