One may be sure that the King did not lose this inquest from view. Louis XIV. was most eager for police details and this affair touched him too nearly to be forgotten.
At the beginning of the investigation, it was discovered that Mariette was first cousin to the wife of the judge. On account of this connection, the Châtelet estimated that it was for the honour of the magistracy to stifle the affair. He brought every effort to accomplish this and evidently met with practical approbation from the powerful of this world, for history permits us to see numerous irregularities.
La Voisin, returning to her senses, heartily seconded the Justice in his efforts to obtain succour from those in high positions. Mariette and Lesage, after a period of trials and difficulties, were left in peace to occupy themselves with their ambiguous trade. Both of these men figured again in the monster process of 1680, in which they were among those who spread details concerning the abominable practices with which the Mme. de Montespan had been connected during long years. It does not matter here whether these details are additions to the truth or not, for it is only Louis XIV. who interests us, not Mme. de Montespan.
The letter cited above proves all that is necessary, that the King knew, from the year 1668, that his new mistress had connection with the criminal world, and that she had intimate interviews with ignoble persons, submitted to degrading contact, and had practised in their company sacrilegious rites. This monarch who passed for being so delicately keen in matters of punishment showed himself singularly little moved.
Surrounded by free-thinkers without prejudices, himself more or less of a free-thinker, he resembles so little, either morally or physically, the bewigged figure of the end of the reign, and of the Mémoires of Saint-Simon, that he appears as another individual. How easily both proprieties and punishments are put on one side when passion reigns, but how much more alive, how much more of a natural human being, compared to the wooden figure of the portraits of Versailles, is the King as now seen; Louis XIV. is decidedly an enigmatical quantity.
It would be inexact to state that passions had become more lively than they were during the wars of the Fronde, an epoch especially ardent; but they had certainly changed their character, as had the tastes, ideas, literature, and fashions in general. This is the usual course of events, and, as we have seen, the movement was precipitated under the influence of a monarch all-powerful, determined to efface the past.
An artistic event which should not be overlooked had favoured the designs of Louis XIV., in opening unknown perspectives to the curious after new sensations, already numerous in the seventeenth century. Dramatic music made its entry into the modern world. It brought with it, according to the phrase of one of its historians, M. Romain Rolland,[187] an "unlimited power for expressing passion, and with passionate emotion all that remains incommunicable through the medium of language alone." We may or may not love music, but it must be admitted that a creation of this nature will certainly exercise a strong influence over the refined portion of a nation.
French society could not escape. The new art was in train to modify the nervous system, if I dare thus speak, of the world in which flourished, under the royal protection, those rather perilous ideas upon the rights of nature and the fatality of passion. Day by day, new chords were struck upon impressionable hearts. Dramatic music was born in Italy; as might well be. In the year 1597, upon a carnival evening, a rich Florentine entertained a choice audience with a musical tragedy called Dafné, of which the score is lost. According to one of the guests, "the pleasure and astonishment which seized the soul of the auditors before so novel a spectacle could hardly be expressed."
M. Romain Rolland confirms this testimony: "It was like a thunderbolt. All felt themselves in the presence of a new art." In ten years Italian opera reached its full growth, thanks chiefly to a composer of genius, Monteverde, whose Ariane caused an audience of more than six thousand persons to burst into sobs on its first representation.