Versailles: The Affair of the Poisons

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17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, Canal +, La Voisin, Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan, The Affair of the Poisons, Versailles

The second season of Versailles covers is sort of inspired by the Affair of the Poisons, one of the most dramatic set of events in the reign of Louis XIV. Normally I don’t cover more than one season of a show, but I’m going to break that rule because it gives me an excuse to write about the Affair.

The first episode of the second season introduces us to Madame Agathe (Suzanne Clément) a close confident of Madame de Montespan (Anna Brewster). Initially she seems to be just a fortune teller, but as the season goes on, it’s clear that she’s also a poisoner responsible for supplying poisons to a variety of people at the court, including Sophie (Maddison Jaizani), who slowly poisons her husband, and Gaston de Foix (Harry Hadden-Paton) who apparently murders several people, including one of Louis’ ministers, the man’s wife, and the queen’s favorite clergyman. Montespan, struggling to hold Louis’ affections, even turns to an associate of Agathe’s for a black mass that she hopes will rekindle the spark Louis had for her. It’s eventually revealed that Agathe is hoping to trigger Louis’ overthrow for reasons I couldn’t follow. The season ends with Sophie safely widowed, Gaston dead, Montespan in disgrace, and Agathe burning at the stake.

As we’ll see, that bears only the faintest resemblance to what actually happened.

The Prologue

In 1666, the groundwork for the Affair of the Poisons was laid by the scandalous revelations around Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d’Aubray, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a dissolute young noblewoman. Both she and her husband Antoine enjoyed gambling and they maintained an open relationship, with Antoine actively introducing her to her lover, Captain Godin de St-Croix. As a result of their extravagant lifestyle, the couple found themselves in need of money. The Marquise fell out with her family, who objected to her affair with St-Croix and arranged for him to be thrown into the Bastille. This put St-Croix in contact with a poisoner who taught him a great deal. St-Croix then got into contact with a Swiss chemist who worked with him for three years to perfect a recipe for Acqua Toffana, an arsenic-based poison that was odorless and tasteless. While they were perfecting the formula, the Marquise was regularly visiting a charity hospital and feeding the residents pastries laced with the poison to observe its effects.

The Marquise de Brinvilliers

So in 1666, having working out how to poison people, the Marquise allegedly began applying her knowledge. She placed a servant in her father’s household who spent six months poisoning her father so the Marquise could inherit part of his estate. As her father sickened, the Marquise played the dutiful daughter, tending to him and giving him the final dose. This allowed his estate to be split between the Marquise, a sister, and two brothers.

Then she decided she wanted to be rid of her husband, so that she could marry St-Croix. So she started to poison Antoine. But St-Croix had recently married and felt better having Antoine around, so he began to slip Antoine the antidote. At least, this is the rumor that was going around to explain why Antoine went through 5 or 6 health crises in the later 1660s. Eventually Marie gave up and let him live. But she allegedly tried to poison her sister, a Carmelite nun, and her own daughter, both of whom survived.

By 1668, the creditors were pressing the Marquise quite aggressively, so she decided she needed to inherit some money. She paid St-Croix (who was no longer providing her his services for free) to place a servant in her brother Antoine’s household, and by 1670 he was dead. A few months later her other brother similarly departed this world. Marie split their estates with her sister.

Unfortunately, in 1672, St-Croix died, reportedly by accidentally poisoning himself, and the Paris police came into possession of a bunch of letters and diaries detailing the Marquise’ activities. She fled the country, but in 1675 she was arrested. She produced a 16-page confession of her crimes, but then recanted and insisted vehemently that she was innocent. A confessor eventually persuaded her to recant her recantation. She made a full confession and was publicly beheaded and her body burnt.

The Affair Begins

The scandal around Marie’s confession and execution made people begin paying more attention to what in retrospect seemed like suspicious deaths. Marie had hinted broadly that she was far from the only person at court who had poisoned someone, but she refused to name names.

In 1677, the Paris police arrested Magdelaine Guénisseau and her lover on charges that they had murdered her employer and forged evidence that she had been married to him, so that they could inherit his property. Magdelaine appealed to one of Louis’ ministers, the Marquis de Louvois, who reported it to Louis, who told him and Gabriel Nicholas de La Reynie, the chief of the Paris police, to investigate. (Louvois is a regular character on Versailles, and La Reynie is the loose inspiration for Fabien Marchal).

La Reynie

La Reynie investigated and uncovered a loose network of alchemists, counterfeiters, and poisoners operating around Paris and having ties to various nobles. He found evidence of a plot to poison the king, but was unable to determine who might be behind it. Then he managed to apprehend two women, Marie Vigoureux and Marie Bosse, who seemed to be at the center of this network. La Bosse had boasted that with three more poisonings she would be able to retire comfortably. Although La Bosse insisted she only did palm readings and dabbled in love potions, a search of her apartment turned up arsenic, Spanish fly, powdered menstrual blood, and nail clippings. That evidence caused La Bosse and La Vigoureux to break down and implicate a wide range of people including midwives, abortionists (or ‘angel makers’ as they were sometimes called), sorceresses, a ‘toad vendor’, an herbalist, and several renegade priests. La Bosse admitted that she had sold soap impregnated with arsenic and ‘inheritance powders’ (as many of the poisons were euphemistically called) to a noblewoman who was trying to get rid of her husband.

Then in 1679, as La Reynie’s investigation widened, he reeled in an even bigger fish, Catherine Monvoisin, known generally as La Voisin, who is the inspiration for Madame Agathe. She was a palm reader, alchemist, and abortionist whose clients included Olympe Mancini and her sister Marie, two of Louis’ early mistresses (that link discusses Louis’ mistresses, several of whom will be mentioned below). She had become wealthy enough that she moved freely at the top levels of Parisian society and frequently threw impressive parties. She sold love potions and magical amulets and arranged black masses for her clients as well. She also dabbled in poisoning, although it was not her main stock in trade and she was reportedly much less-well versed in it than others in her circle. Most importantly, she was in contact with two of Louis’ current mistresses, Madame de Montespan and Montespan’s servant Claude de Vin des Oeillets.

La Voisin

The Black Masses

In 1667, La Voisin arranged a black mass for Montespan, the same year that Montespan became maitress en titre.Montespan paid for several more black masses a few years later in 1673, when Louis’ eye began to wander, and she also purchased an aphrodisiac that she gave to Louis.

Paris had a thriving underworld of renegade priests in this period. These were men who had clerical training and ordination, but often did not have any sort of clerical position with which to support themselves (or else they regarded their regular income as priests to be insufficient). One way that these men supported themselves was by performing illicit rituals that drew on the power of Catholic rituals for unsanctioned purposes. They administered fake Masses using unconsecrated hosts for patrons who needed to be seen taking communion but who were unwilling to make the required confession beforehand. They supplied chalices, crucifixes, holy water, holy oil, and consecrated hosts for a wide range of supernatural purposes such as love spells, rituals to protect livestock from disease and wolves, and rituals to communicate with the dead or demons. Etienne Guibourg (the inspiration for Father Etienne in the show) frequently performed a ritual in which he wrote the names of a client and an intended target on the host, then consecrated the host during a regular Mass at his church. He would afterward give the special host to the client with instructions to grind it into powder and mix it into the target’s food. This was supposed to cause the target to fall in love with the client. Another love spell at the time involved a priest blessing a pair of rings and going through a parody of a marriage Mass for the client; this was supposed to ‘marry’ the target in absentia to the client.

What it casually called a Black Mass is actually, in this case, an Amatory Mass. A Black Mass is a form of Satan-worship that parodies the Catholic liturgy for malicious purposes. What Guibourg and others performed was not intended to subvert the Mass but rather to harness its power for magical ends; in the case of an Amatory Mass, the goal was to cause someone to fall in love with the client. Thus although to the Catholic hierarchy the Amatory Mass looked profoundly disrespectful to Catholic belief, to men like Guibourg the ritual was actually expressing a strange sort of respect for the Mass; they believed in the Mass’ power to achieve magical things.

A modern artist’s drawing of Guibourg performing an Amatory Mass

Trigger Warning: the following two paragraphs get rather gruesome. If you’re easily disturbed, skip down to the paragraph that begins “In 1678”.

Guibourg’s Amatory Masses involved using the body of a naked woman as the altar for the Mass; a cloth was placed over her belly and a cross and other implements were placed on the cloth, along with a note describing the client’s desires. The women in question was ideally the client, but did not have to be. Guibourg then performed a standard Mass except that when he elevated the host he read aloud the note along with an invocation to the demons Asmodeus and Astaroth. He then slit the throat of a newborn baby, poured its blood into the chalice, and cut out its heart, which was place in a vase with the consecrated host. He completed the ritual by having sex with the woman. Needless to say, an Amatory Mass was not only deeply sacrilegious, it was also profoundly illegal.

La Voisin was said to procure the babies from prostitutes. She reportedly disposed of the corpses of the babies by burning them in an oven and then burying them in her garden. Several witnesses claimed that she had bragged about disposing of 2,500 infants that way. (One sometimes reads that authorities dug up thousands of corpses from her garden, but that seems to be untrue.)

The Scandal Explodes

In 1678, when Louis became infatuated with Marie-Angélique de Scorailles, Montespan supposedly asked La Voisin to poison both Louis and de Scorailles. La Voisin reportedly tried to pass Louis a petition impregnated with poison, but was unable to do so. Before she could formulate a second plan, La Reynie caught up with her. La Bosse and La Voisin began accusing each other of increasingly severe crimes, implicating a substantial number of France’s lesser nobility in buying inheritance powders and procuring abortions.

One of Louis’ last mistresses, Marie Angélique de Scorailles

Another of their associates, Adam Coeuret, better known as the sorcerer Lesage, got picked up and began trying to save his neck by accusing La Voisin of having orchestrated Black Masses. She accused Lesage of helping her procure poisons, and Lesage retaliated by revealing the work she had done for Montespan. Lesage also accused the duc de Luxembourg, who was the captain of the king’s guards, of trying to arrange the murders of his own wife and Louvois’ son-in-law so that he could marry Louvois’ daughter. This revelation delighted Louvois because he hated Luxembourg and wanted to ruin him. Even more remarkably, Lesage produced a letter from the duc implicating him.

By this point, the accusations Lesage was making were so inflammatory (since Montespan was not only Louis’ official mistress but the mother of several of his acknowledged children) that Louis ordered La Reynie to keep a completely separate unofficial transcript of Lesage’s claims. Fortunately for modern historians, La Reynie’s records both official and unofficial survive for us to reconstruct the events.

La Voisin’s daughter, Marie-Marguerite, testified that she had frequently witnessed her mother and Lesage performing magical rituals, including baptizing wax figurines, making amulets involving pigeon’s hearts and consecrated hosts, and burning a piece of wood as part of a love spell to secure his love for Montespan. Pressed further, she spilled the beans about the poisoned petition. She also testified that she had personally attended two Black Masses that Montespan had participated in.

La Voisin denied these charges, but it didn’t convince anyone. The scandal had become too big and too widely known for it be swept under the rug, especially when the Marquise de Brinvilliers had primed people to think there were an epidemic of poisoning going on. La Reynie identified a total of 442 suspects, 212 of whom were arrested and questioned. Several suspects, include La Vigoureux, died under torture, and 36 people were publicly executed (generally by burning), including La Voisin and La Bosse. La Voisin’s daughter, Guibourg, and Lesage were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment; two other priests were executed.

Of their known clients, a good number fled France to avoid imprisonment or were sentenced to exile for varying periods. Olympe Mancini (who was suspected of poisoning her husband) was exiled and her sister Marie was banished from court. A few were executed, and a couple were fined. Luxembourg spent a short period in the Bastille but managed to return to Louis’ good graces. Most importantly of all, Madame de Montespan was never touched. When des Scorailles died suddenly in 1681, many thought that Montespan had poisoned her. But she was never publically accused of any crime. La Reynie kept his investigation into her role completely under wraps, and it’s possible that even Montespan did not know she was being investigated.

Madame de Montespan was too prominent a figure at the court for anyone to make an open accusation against her. Although the evidence that she was procuring love potions and Amatory Masses is pretty solid, the evidence that she was trying to poison the king is shakier. There are inconsistencies in the testimony against her. La Reynie thought that des Oeillets, Montespan’s go-between with La Voisin, was the real culprit. He suspected that she wanted to poison Louis because the king had refused to acknowledge his daughter by her. He theorized that she had switched some of the love potions Montespan was buying from La Voisin for arsenic. And she was Montespan’s stand-in during the Amatory Masses. So Louis either didn’t believe the poisoning accusations or he allowed her to go unpunished out of a combination of affection for her and concern about how the scandal would look. By 1683, she was out of favor, but remained at court for almost another decade before retiring to a convent in 1691.

Claude de Vin des Oeillets

Back to Versailles

So let’s take stock of how Versailles depicts this material.

Yes, Agathe/La Voisin provided fortune-telling and love potions for Montespan. No she didn’t use tarot cards. She was a palm-reader.

No, Agathe/La Voisin did not provide poisons to Sophie or Gaston de Foix, because both of those characters are fictitious. But she or an associate certainly provided poisons to women looking to dispose of unwanted husbands. Yes, she sold love charms.

Gaston scheming with Agathe

Yes, Agathe/La Voisin may have conspired to poison the king. No, it wasn’t because she hated the king or wanted to overthrow the government. No, Louis wasn’t almost poisoned with a consecrated host and wasn’t saved at the last moment, but yes, it’s possible that he was given arsenic at some point (if so, it would have been by Montespan, thinking it was a love potion). No, this wasn’t just Agathe/La Voisin and Father Etienne/Etienne Guibourg; it was dozens and dozens of people involved in various capacities.

No, one of Louis’ ministers and his wife were not poisoned. The Affair never reached quite that high up the food chain at Versailles. And no, so far as we know, none of the poisonings were directly about politics. They were about inheritances and a desire to end unwanted marriages.

Yes, Father Etienne/Etienne Guibourg did perform sacrilegious Masses over the body of a naked woman, and yes, those Masses did involve the killing of babies. Yes, Montespan had such Masses performed for her, but no, she didn’t act as the altar and may not have even attended them. Yes, Father Etienne/Etienne Guibourg may have used prostitutes’ babies for the ritual, but no, he wasn’t the one collecting them (unless La Voisin was making things up, which isn’t impossible). No, one of the masses was not broken up by Marchal/La Reynie. No, Marchal/La Reynie did not almost die trying to stop the poisoning.

No, no one at court took fast-acting poison when they were about to be exposed, and no, a priest was not poisoned with a lily. No, the poisons didn’t cause people to vomit blood and die quickly.

Yes, Montespan was desperate to keep Louis’ affections. No, she and Agathe/La Voisin did not have regular meetings to discuss her situation. She used her lady-in-waiting Claude des Oeillets as the go-between.

Montespan meeting with Agathe

My verdict is that the second season is only VERY loosely inspired by the actual Affair of the Poisons, which was way more complex and, to me at least, interesting than what the show offers us. Still, it’s nice to see the Affair referenced so much. It’s a fascinating event.

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

My favorite book on the The Affair of the Poisons is Lynn Wood Mollenauer’s Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France. It’s an excellent look at the Affair from several different angles, including the occult underworld. Mollenauer has a lively, surprisingly humorous style, a rarity for an academic work like this.

 

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Versailles: Poison!

Tags

17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, Louis XIV, The Affair of the Poisons, The Assassin's Cabinet, Versailles

The second season of Versailles focuses heavily on the Affair of the Poisons, and a good number of people get poisoned in the show, so I thought I would spend a post discussing the show’s treatment of poisoning before I actually discuss how well the show captures the Affair.

In the show, a whole lot of people get poisoned. Henrietta (Noémie Schmidt) gets offed at the end of the first season, as does the female physician Claudine’s father partway through the season, and in the second season, there are a bunch of victims, including one of Louis’ ministers and the minister’s wife and the obnoxious Father Pascal (James Joint). Cassel (Pip Torrens) is poisoned by his wife Sophie (Maddison Jaizani). It’s all the work of Madame Agathe (Suzanne Clément), a fortune-teller and seller of love potions and poisons who hates Louis and is somehow planning to collapse his government by poisoning people.

With the exception of Cassel, the poisonings all basically present the same visually dramatic symptom; one consumes poison and sometime later one feels unwell and immediately begins to vomit blood and then die. In Henrietta’s case, there’s prolonged abdominal discomfort and time for a lengthy goodbye, but mostly death comes pretty quickly once symptoms present.

Henrietta expiring

While that makes for interesting television, it’s pretty wildly inaccurate. I’ve already discussed three common poisons used in the Early Modern period: antimony, mercury, and acqua toffana (a mixture of arsenic and lead). Another window into the Early Modern poisoner’s toolkit is the so-called Assassin’s Cabinet, a small chest of poisons designed to look like a book (although it’s been argued that it might actually be an apothecary’s chest, since all of the substances in it had legitimate medical uses at the time). The chest contained drawers for 11 substances, all of which are poisonous in the proper concentrations: henbane, opium poppy, wolfsbane (aconite, monkshood), cowbane (water hemlock), mandrake, jimson weed, valerian, spurge laurel, castor oil plant, meadow saffron, and deadly nightshade (belladonna).

The Assassin’s Cabinet

(As an aside, in the show, when Madame Agathe’s rooms are being searched one of the guards holds up something that strongly resembles the Assassin’s Cabinet. Props to them for doing some research!)

None of these substances have symptoms anything like the poison used on Versailles. For example, henbane poisoning causes hallucinations, confusion, restlessness, flushed skin, convulsions and loss of coordination, fever, and vomiting. Wolfsbane is a contact poison that causes respiratory problems, nausea, vomiting, irregular heartbeat, convulsions, paralysis, and confusion. Jimson weed causes nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, high blood pressure, rapid pulse, extreme thirst, convulsions, hallucination, headache, and coma. I could go on, but you get the point. So far as I can tell, none of these substances causes the victim to vomit blood, just regular vomit. I haven’t been able to find an historical poison that has as its primary symptom vomiting blood. (Honest, FBI, it’s all research for this blog!) So the show’s poison is basically fantasy poison.

But the show gets something much more wrong than just making up a poison. A poison with symptoms like the one Agathe sells wouldn’t have been a very popular poison for one important reason. It’s too obvious that the victim has been murdered.

To appreciate this, you have to reflect on the poor state of medical knowledge in the pre-Modern world. There were many things that could cause people to die suddenly: heart attack, stroke, aneurism, aortic dissection, appendicitis, various infections, and food poisoning could all cause an apparently healthy person to rapidly decline and die. As a result, anytime some died suddenly in apparently good health, there were always rumors that the person had been poisoned, because the true cause of death could often not be identified by physicians. As a result, I’m always very skeptical of claims that historical figures were poisoned. Sudden death always raised suspicions. If you’re a poisoner, you generally don’t want to raise suspicion. You want the death to appear natural. If you want to be blatant, you usually used other tools, like knives, because you were more certain of hitting the intended target.

So poison was mostly used by people who wanted the death to look natural or to mimic the symptoms of a disease. That’s how Sophie kills Cassel—with a poison that causes him to slowly sicken and decline. The primary symptom is coughing a lot and general weakness. That’s how poisons like antimony and acqua toffana operated. They required repeated doses administered over a period of time and they made the victim appear to slowly sicken from organ failure or other natural causes. That way the victim died and everyone thought that he or she had just died in the normal course of events.

Henbane

In fact, we know a fair amount about the poisons used during the Affair of the Poisons. Arsenic was probably the most popular, because its symptoms resembled dysentery: organ failure, inflammation of the throat and intestines, fever, diarrhea, vomiting, confusion, and coma. One poisoner, Marie Bosse, impregnated the victim’s shirt with powdered arsenic, which would get absorbed through the skin as the victim sweated. It caused sores that looked like a syphilitic chancre. Because most forms of arsenic have a strong taste, another popular way to administer it was through enemas, which were extremely popular in this era.

Poisoners also used a variety of plant-based substances, including mandrake, hemlock, aloe, buttercup, ergot, biting stonecrop, juniper, and nux vomica (strychnine). At least one type of poisonous mushroom was used as well. And it’s likely that some of the other substances in the Assassin’s Cabinet were employed as well.

The top of the line poison was secret du crapaud, or Toad’s Secret. This was manufactured in a variety of ways, all of which involved a toad in some way. The various methods all involve tormenting a toad, which causes it to release toxins in an attempt to fight off the attack. The dead toad might be dried and powdered and administered that way, it could be allowed to putrefy and then powdered, its urine could be administered, or it could be mixed with arsenic. Toad’s Secret drew on classical ideas that toads were particularly noxious creatures, so even if the drug wasn’t actually very poisonous, it could fetch a high price, especially because the methods for manufacturing it were not widely known. Marie Bosse’s son claimed to know a method to infuse a silver goblet with Toad’s Secret so that anyone who drank from the cup would die. But he eventually admitted that he had never managed to kill anyone that way.

As we’ll see next time, the Affair of the Poison didn’t become known because people started spewing blood during cabinet meetings. The real story is more tawdry than that.

If there’s a movie or tv show you’d like me to review, please make a donation to my Paypal account and if I can track down it down, I’ll review it.

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

My favorite book on the The Affair of the Poisons is Lynn Wood Mollenauer’s Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France. It’s an excellent look at the Affair from several different angles. I absolutely loved it.

Versailles: The Latréaumont Conspiracy

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17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, Canal +, Chevalier de Rohan, Early Modern Europe, George Blagden, Latréaumont Conspiracy, Louis XIV, Versailles

The first season of Versailles features a running plot involving sinister men in black robes and masks, who skulk around Versailles slipping coded messages to people, threating to kill the Chevalier de Lorraine (Evan Williams), and generally being sinister. This all climaxes in the discovery that the Chevalier de Rohan (Alexis Michalik) is plotting assassinate Louis (George Blagden) and kidnap his son. It’s fun stuff and ends with a solid cliffhanger, which unfortunately gets wrapped up in about 5 minutes at the start of season 2. Is it based on anything?

Enter a caption

 

The Latréaumont Conspiracy

Yes. It’s a rather fictionalized version of a plot known today as the Latréaumont Conspiracy (which the internet seems determined to spell as “Lautreamont”). It centered around two men, Louis de Rohan and Gilles du Hamel de Latréaumont. Rohan was a close associate of the king’s, being his Chief Huntsman (Rohan’s mother was a cousin of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, one of Louis’ mistresses). Since Louis loved hunting, this office brought Rohan into regular close contact with Louis, which was one of the most valuable forms of currency at Versailles. It paid off when Louis made him Colonel of Louis’ Guards, another important office. But then Louis soured on Rohan. (Incidentally, if you have trouble keeping track of the players, most of the women I mention are discussed in more detail in this post.)

Rohan was a close friend of the Duc de Nevers, whose sisters were the five Mancinis, two of whom, Olympe and Marie, were mistresses of Louis. A third sister, Hortense, was romanced by Charles II while he was in exile after the English Civil War. Her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, rejected Charles’ offer to marry the girl, which meant that Hortense missed out on being Queen of England (and since she, unlike Charles’ eventual wife, was quite fertile, that marriage would have changed the course of English history). Instead, Mazarin arranged for her marriage to Armand Charles de La Porte de La Meilleraye, a very wealthy nobleman. But he was a terrible match for Hortense. She was free-spirited (and only 15), while he was violently jealous (he once reportedly knocked out a female servant’s front teeth so that men would not flirt with her). He seems to have been at least a little insane; when a fire broke out in one of his residences, he declared that trying to put it out was against God’s will, and he forbade wet nurses to nurse his children on Friday and Saturdays because those were Jesus’ death-days. That’s only some of his issues. (If you want to know more about their disastrous marriage, here’s a good post about it.)

Hortense (in the middle) with her sisters Olympe and Marie

 

Anyway, soon after the birth of their fourth child in 1668, Hortense had enough of La Porte’s abuse. She fled into the streets of Paris to Nevers’ house. Rohan helped her escape the city, dressed in men’s clothing, and get to Rome where her sister Marie was living. This angered Louis, and not long afterward, Rohan was forced to resign all his offices. Because the real reason was kept secret, rumors circulated that Rohan was having an affair with Marie or that he was making moves on Madame de Montespan. (Incidentally, Hortense eventually wound up in England, where she became Charles’ mistress. She took the Countess of Sussex as a lover until the two wound up brawling in St James’ Park in their nightgowns. After her death, La Porte seized her corpse and travelled around France with it until Louis ordered him to bury it. Someone needs to make a movie about her life.)

Gilles du Hamel de Latréaumont was a military officer from Normandy. In 1657, he had briefly plotted with the Maréchal d’Hocquincourt to seize control of Normandy. That resulted in Latréaumont going into exile in Normandy, where he met Affinius van den Enden, a philosopher and teacher. By 1672, Latréaumont was van den Enden’s student, along with the Comte de Guiche. All three of them were unhappy about Louis’ invasion of the Netherlands. They relocated to Paris, where van den Enden opened a Latin school in his lodgings. They approached Rohan, who was badly in debt, with a plot to kidnap the 11-year old Louis the Grand Dauphin while he was hunting in Normandy, hold him hostage and seize control of Normandy, which they would turn into a republic. Then they would assassinate Louis and put the Grand Dauphin on the throne as their puppet. Both the Dutch and the Spanish liked the idea and their agents were soon meeting with the conspirators at van den Enden’s little school.

Unfortunately, one of the king’s musketeers was renting a room in the school and got curious about why a bunch of nobles and foreigners were meeting with a Latin teacher, so he alerted Louvois, the king’s minister for war. Louvois passed the information to the Lieutenant General of the Police of Paris, Gabriel Nicholas de la Reynie, who promptly arrested Rohan at Versailles, caught Latréaumont at the Latin school, and then rounded up the other conspirators. They found some letters about the plot that Rohan had written anonymously. Eventually they got Rohan to confess by claiming that Louis was willing to pardon him if he made a full confession. Latréaumont died from wounds received during his capture. Van den Enden was hung, and Rohan and the other nobles were beheaded in 1674.

The Latréaumont Conspiracy was the only significant conspiracy against the state during Louis’ reign, and given how hare-brained it was, it never had much chance to succeed. It had no lasting repercussions.

 

The Conspiracy in Versailles

Large elements of the actual conspiracy appear in the show. Latréaumont is completely omitted in favor of focusing on Rohan as the ring-leader. Rohan is shown as Louis’ huntsman, and he did hold that office into 1669. Since the show opens in 1667, that’s basically accurate, but the show omits his fall from grace and maintains that he held Louis’ favor down into the 1670s, which is untrue. His motive is not anger at Louis for his fall and a need to clear his debts, but rather just a vague desire to overthrow Louis because reasons. Nor was Rohan the huntsman who lured the young Dauphin out in the woods. In fact, the kidnapping never happened at all because the plot was uncovered before it could be put into motion. Louis himself was never in any personal danger.

Michalik as Rohan

 

Fabien Marchel (Tygh Runyan) is basically a fictionalized version of La Reynie. He spends a good deal of time trying to chase down the mysterious letters that Rohan is passing to people and this is how the conspiracy gets uncovered (complete with an odd subplot about a cypher hidden in a book that Louis just happens to acquire). That’s untrue. The letters weren’t discovered until after the plot was found out.

The Comte de Guiche is entirely omitted, maybe because giving Philippe have two boyfriends would confuse the viewers, so instead the Chevalier de Lorraine is substituted, but instead of being out of favor like Guiche, he’s just been browbeaten into co-operating with Rohan. The entirely fictional Montcourt (Anatole Taubman) also gets some of Guiche’s story, being a disgraced nobleman who wants to get revenge on Louis. He eventually helps Marchal uncover the plot, so he’s also sort of a stand-in for the musketeer.

The whole ‘guys in black robes and masks sneaking around Versailles’ is totally made up and reads a lot like something from a novel by Victor Hugo. However, Versailles was actually pretty easy to get into. Whereas in the show characters are constantly being barred from entering rooms by guards with pikes, in reality, anyone at all could just walk straight into the palace. Even Louis’ personal apartments were open to everyone when he wasn’t in them. And Versailles does have secret passages.

So whereas the show significantly tones down the sexual escapades at Versailles, it’s wildly exaggerated the Latréaumont Conspiracy far behind the facts.

 

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

So far as I know, there’s no book in English about the Conspiracy or about Rohan or Latréaumont, apart from something published in 1845. In fact the only Wikipedia articles about these are on the French-language version of the site. When English Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on something, that’s usually it’s a real sign of obscurity.

 

 

Versailles: All the King’s Women

Tags

17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, Canal +, Early Modern Europe, Louis XIV, Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Montespan, Maria Theresa of Spain, Versailles

Versailles devotes a good deal of its time to exploring Louis XIV’s rather complicated sex life, so I thought a post on that would be in order.

The show’s first two seasons cover the period from 1667 to 1680, although you’d be forgiven for thinking that it only covered the period from perhaps 1667 to 1670, because none of the characters appear to age significantly. Even Louis’ son Louis the Grand Dauphin, who is perhaps 10 at the end of season 1 doesn’t appear to have aged more than a year or so by the end of season 2, even though 8 years have passed between the events of those two episodes. But Louis’s various relationships are complicated (and fun to read about) so I’m going to survey all the major ones, to give you a good sense of what’s going on. (Those who appear in Versailles have the actress’ name in parentheses.)

The Early Years

When Louis was fourteen years old in 1553, his mother, Anne of Austria decided that it was time for him to lose his virginity. She arranged for one of her ladies in waiting, Catherine Bellier, to spend two years sexually educating him, and then rewarded her by making her the Baroness of Beauvais. (IMDb tells me that Bellier appears in Versailles, but it must have been a very small and passing role, because I didn’t spot her at all.)

In 1654, while he was still sleeping with Belliers, Louis began a relationship with Olympe Mancini, one of the five nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, who, along with Anne, was running the government. That affair lasted until 1657, when she got married to the Comte de Soissons, but they resumed their relationship in 1660 for about a year. Her oldest son was born just six months after her marriage, raising the possibility that he was an unacknowledged bastard of Louis’. Her feelings for Louis seem to have been quite intense, because she repeatedly displayed jealousy toward his later loves.

In 1658, Louis turned his eye toward Marie Mancini, Olympe’s younger sister. He fell deeply in love with her, and gossip began to spread that he might marry her. This upset Anne, who wanted to arrange his marriage to Maria-Theresa of Spain, and it also, somewhat surprisingly, upset Olympe and Marie’s mother. As a result, Marie was sent home to Italy, where she got married in 1661. On her wedding night, her husband remarked that he was surprised to discover she was still a virgin, so apparently Louis’ interest in her somehow never got consummated. In 1658, Louis also had a brief fling with the unnamed daughter of a gardener, who gave birth to a daughter who was never recognized. (Incidentally, Hortense, a third sister of Olympe and Marie, managed to become the mistress of Charles II of England.)

In 1660, Louis married his first wife, Maria-Theresa (Elisa Lasowski). She was his double first cousin (her father was Anne’s brother, while his father was the brother of Maria-Theresa’s mother). He appears to have been faithful to her for about a year, but after that he had both brief flings and long-term affairs for the rest of her life. That didn’t stop him from producing six children with her, although she had the enormous misfortune to outlive all but one of them. Maria-Theresa had little choice except to tolerate her husband’s numerous infidelities, and she even managed to develop friendships with two of his mistresses.

Maria-Theresa of Spain

Henrietta and Louise

A year after Louis’ marriage, his brother Philippe married Henrietta of England (Noémie Schmidt), a rather attractive woman who became good friends with Louis. Rumors began to circulate that they were sleeping together. Even by the standards of the French court, this would have been a genuine scandal, because there was a considerable difference between a married man sleeping with an unmarried woman (which was considered simply fornication) and a married man sleeping with a married woman (which was considered adultery); additionally, it would have meant cuckolding his own brother. Since Henrietta was the sister of Charles II of England, a major scandal around her might well have had diplomatic ramifications. So although Versailles shows Louis and Henrietta being deeply involved and him getting her pregnant, most scholars think that this was just a rumor and that their relationship never moved beyond friendship.

To make Louis’ visiting Henrietta more acceptable, they asked Olympe, a close friend of Henrietta’s, to introduce Louis to one of Henrietta’s ladies, Louise de La Valliere (Sarah Winter), so that Louis could visit Henrietta while pretending to court Louise. The naïve Louise, not realizing that she was a pawn in this intrigue, fell in love with Louis and Louis found her sincerity and innocence so charming that he reciprocated her feelings. This relationship was the first of Louis’ affairs to have real legs. It continued until 1667 and produced five children, the last two of whom were eventually acknowledged, the other three dying in infancy. Louis kept the relationship a secret (at least formally) until 1666, when his mother died. At that point, he made the relationship public and Louise became his first maitress en titre, loosely translated as “official mistress”. Soon after Anne’s death, Louis took communion with both Maria-Theresa and Louise alongside him, a clear statement of Louise’ position.

Louise de La Valliere

Louise was deeply religious, and while she loved Louis, she felt tremendous shame over what she was doing. She disliked their relationship being so open. At the same time, however, she wanted her position and was jealous of his attention to other women, so she wasn’t quite so unwilling to be his mistress as Versailles presents it. She repeatedly fled to convents, and in 1667, after the birth of their fifth child, Louis essentially terminated the relationship, although he kept her on as maitress en titre. Eventually, in 1674, he permitted Louise to join a Carmelite convent. By this point, she had become good friends with Maria-Theresa, who presented her with her veil during the veiling ceremony at the convent and continued to visit her off and on.

Despite having a wife and a mistress, Louis’ eye still wandered. Olympe Mancini hoped that, if he could be pried away from Louise de La Valliere, Louis might return to her. So she schemed to put one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne-Lucie de Mothe-Houdancourt, in his way, and it worked, at least briefly. Louis became quite infatuated with her. The queen employed Madame de Navailles to supervise the young ladies around them. Navailles went to extreme lengths to keep the young men of the court away from her charges, up to installing iron bars on the windows and chimneys of their rooms. Despite that, Louis climbed down a chimney to see Anne-Marie, and dismissed Madame de Navailles from court. But Anne-Lucie was interested in someone else, and apparently resisted Louis’ attentions. The Queen Mother became worried that Louis’ pursuit of Anne-Lucie would prove embarrassing to Maria-Theresa, so she ultimately dismissed Anne-Lucie from court. Louis consoled himself by briefly taking up with Anne de Conty d’Argencourt, one of his mother’s ladies in waiting. But she was also the lover of the duc de Richelieu, which irritated Louis enough that the affair didn’t last long.

Olympe Mancini

In 1665, Louis got interested in one of his wife’s ladies in waiting, Bonne de Pons. Unlike most members of the court, Bonne’s family was upset about the prospect of their daughter becoming the royal mistress, so they shipped her off to get married. Louis’ court had a very rigid formal hierarchy, based on the degree of biological relationship to the king and the age of one’s lineage. (To simplify, first cousins outranked second cousins and so on.) But there was a second hierarchy that scholars call the Shadow Hierarchy. This hierarchy was much more fluid and dependent on less tangible qualities such as appearance, wit, royal favor, and skill at intrigue. Louis’ mistresses sat very high in the Shadow Hierarchy, with the maitress en titre right at the top. Having the royal ear was a precious commodity at Versailles, because position in the Shadow Hierarchy depended to considerable extent at being able to get the king’s attention. Whichever woman Louis was sleeping with enjoyed the rare privilege of spending time completely alone with him, so women who had Louis’ attention became power-brokers at court, able to perform favors for others by mentioning their concerns to Louis. Additionally, Louis rewarded his mistresses and their families with estates, titles, and offices. So the decision of Bonne’s parents to send her away from court is quite unusual.

By this point, Henrietta of England had gotten thoroughly jealous of Louise de La Valliere, so Henriette threw one of her ladies in waiting at Louis. Charlotte-Catherine de Gramont was already married, but her husband discretely chose to go off and fight in a war. Louis broke off with her a few months later, but she continued having affairs with other members of the court until 1668, when her behavior scandalized the court enough that Louis ordered her to leave (although he let her return in 1672).

Madame de Montespan

In 1666, not long after things with Gramont ended, Françoise-Athenaïs, the Marquise de Montespan (Anna Brewster), began pursuing Louis. She was a married woman, with two children, but also strikingly beautiful, witty, well-read, intelligent, and cultured. She was also the cousin of Bonne de Pons, and the younger sister of Gabrielle de Rochechaurt, who may have briefly occupied Louis’ bed at one point. Quite a number of men were interested in her, but she wanted Louis. She wisely cultivated friendships with Louis the Grand Dauphin, Maria-Theresa, and Louise de La Valliere. When both women became pregnant at the same time, they made the mistake of asking Montespan to help them entertain Louis at private dinners, and that gave her the opening she needed. By the end of 1666, she was rapidly displacing Louise in the king’s affections, much to Louise’ frustration. What must have particularly galled Louise was that the king now used her as cover for his relationship with Montespan, a bit the way he had used her initially to cover his friendship with Henrietta. He moved Montespan into a room connected to Louise’ so that he could visit Montespan while maintaining the appearance of visiting Louise.

In 1667, Montespan became the maitress en titre, a position she held until 1681. Although Versailles shows them having only one child who dies in infancy, in fact she was the mother of seven of his children between 1669 and 1678, all but one of whom lived to adulthood and secured recognition from him. Unlike Louise, who did her best to stay out of the spotlight, Montespan openly vied with the queen as a rival. Although Montespan was legally separated from her husband in 1774, the fact that she was committing adultery led her to become the focus of opposition from the Catholic Church, and in 1774, a priest refused to give her communion at Easter. Despite Louis’ efforts to lean on the priest’s superiors, the Church hierarchy held firm and achieved a brief separation between the two. So the conflict between Bishop Bossuet and Louis in the show has a basis in fact, but Bossuet was not so foolish as to try to orchestrate a grand campaign against Louis, nor was the priest poisoned by one of Montespan’s allies.

Madame de Montespan

Despite Montespan’s considerable attractions, Louis still found time for a fling with Anne de Rohan-Chabot, the wife of the prince of Soubise. Louis met her in 1669 and had a short affair with her. They either resumed the affair in 1673 or else it continued at a low level throughout that period, finally ending in 1675. She had two sons that her husband recognized, although many at the court felt they were both Louis’. In that same period, Louis also had a fling with Lydie de Rochefort-Theobon, one of his wife’s ladies in waiting. He “amused himself“ with her (as one letter to the king of Prussia describes it) off and on from 1670 to 1673. Montespan tried to prevent this by having her transferred to the household of Philippe d’Orleans’ second wife, but Louis may have flung with her as late as 1676.

One of Montespan’s challenges was maintaining Louis’ attention during her numerous pregnancies (given that she had used exactly such an opening to get between him and La Valliere). Between 1670 and 1676, her solution to this problem was to offer him one of her ladies, Claude de Vin des Oeillets, as a substitute whenever she was pregnant. Given her jealousy, this was a surprising strategy, but she seems to have concluded that having Louis involved with a member of her household was less risky than him getting involved with someone she couldn’t supervise. Des Oeillets was low-born, the daughter of two actors, which probably reduced the risk as well. He fathered a daughter on her, whom he never acknowledged.

Montespan’s concern for holding Louis’ attention was well-warranted. In 1675, Louis had an affair with Isabelle de Ludres, yet another of his wife’s ladies in waiting. Like Montespan, she was ambitious and hoped to become the new maitress en titre. But Louis wanted their relationship to stay a secret (perhaps because he didn’t want to quarrel with Montespan). So when Ludres openly stated her intentions of displacing Montespan, Louis dumped her. He took up with Marie-Charlotte de Castelnau, a married woman who was the sister-in-law of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, as well as of the Comte de Guiche, one of Philippe d’Orleans’ paramours. He got bored with Marie-Charlotte quite quickly after Montespan gave birth to their last child. But in 1678, he had a short affair with Elizabeth Hamilton, one of Marie-Charlotte’s sisters-in-law, much to Montespan’s irritation.

By this time, Louis was beginning to tire of Montespan. Unfortunately for her, he became interested in her good friend Françoise de Scarron (Catherine Walker), a down-on-her-luck widow of a minor noble. Montespan asked Scarron to look after her bastard children, which brought Scarron to Louis’ attention, although he initially found her strict religious observances off-putting. But he paid her well for her services as a governess and in 1675 he rewarded her with the title Marquise de Maintenon, as a result of which she’s generally known as Madame de Maintenon. Montespan began to quarrel with her, ostensibly over the way the children were being raised, but quite possibly because she was beginning to get jealous of Maintenon. But Maria-Theresa liked her because she felt that Maintenon was a good influence on Louis, remarking that he was treating her far better than in the past when he was more involved with Montespan (who was deeply hostile to the queen). Nothing seems to have happened between Louis and Maintenon in this period, in part because her religious sentiments led her to oppose fornication, but Louis was clearly attracted to her.

Stiff Competition for Louis’ Attention

Apparently unable to decide between the two women, Louis suddenly took up with Marie-Angelique de Scorailles, who was described as being quite beautiful but “stupid as a basket”. She was a lady in waiting to the duchesse d’Orleans. At first the affair was kept quite secret, but then Louis appeared at court wearing ribbons that matched ones she was wearing; she was noticed wearing a cloak made from the same material as his. He became quite infatuated with her, throwing a string of parties for her and taking her to the ballet frequently. Montespan bitterly commented that Louis had three mistresses: herself in title, Scorailles in bed, and Maintenon in his heart. Montespan took her revenge by having a pair of bears let into Scorailles’ apartments, causing the young woman to flee in terror. Scorailles gave birth to a stillborn boy, and although Louis rewarded her handsomely for “being wounded in his service” by making her the duchess of Fontanges, he had already started to tire of her. She died not long after this, in 1681, at the age of 19, probably because of complications from her labor. But word quickly circulated that she had been poisoned, and Montespan clearly had the motive to do so. This was part of the infamous Affair of the Poisons, a major plotline during season 2 of Versailles, so I’ll do a whole column on it later on. However, if you’ll notice, the show does not include Scorailles as a character all. Montespan was deeply implicated in the Affair, although no solid proof of her involvement has ever surfaced. But it marked the end of her reign as maitress en titre, although Louis allowed her to stay at court until 1691. He does not seem to have believed that she was involved in the Affair. Scorailles was the last woman to be a sustained mistress for Louis. After her, his attentions shifted toward Maintenon and to brief affairs with women who soon bored him.

Marie-Angelique de Scorailles

Despite his infatuation with Scorailles, Louis also had a relationship with Montespan’s older sister Diane-Gabrielle. This doesn’t seem to have amounted to very much. He also had a sporadic relationship with Marie-Madeleine-Agnes de Gontaut Biron, who was rather plain-looking but quite good at court intrigue. She managed to get a good marriage out her relationship with the king, but not much else. He also had a short relationship with Jeanne de Rouvroy, a married woman, in 1681.

The same year, Louis turned his attention toward Marie-Anne de Wurtemberg. He bedded her briefly, but Montespan, who by this point was clutching at straws to revive Louis’ affections, persuaded Louis that Wurtemberg had once been the lover of a monk who was trying to find the philosopher’s stone. Since black magic was part of the Affair of the Poisons, even the hint that Wurtemberg was associated with the Parisian underworld scared Louis and he broke off with her.

Still trying to retain a hold on Louis, in 1681 Montespan pushed another of her ladies at him, Françoise-Therese de Voyer de Dorée. But after Louis slept with her, Montespan became jealous and Maintenon chided Louis for the affair, so he put Françoise-Therese  aside. There was also a quick fling with Marie-Antoinette de Rouvroy, but it went nowhere. The next year, there were brief affairs with Marie-Rosalie de Piennes and Madame de Saint-Martin.

In 1683, Louis became interested in Marie-Louise de Montmorency-Laval, who was a lady in waiting to his daughter-in-law. He got her pregnant, which required that she be dismissed from her post. Not wanting to legitimize the child, Louis had her quickly married off to the duc de Roquelaure, who accepted the girl as his daughter, wryly remarking at her birth “welcome, mademoiselle, I did not expect you so soon.”

Julie de Gueméné came from a family whose membership included Anne de Rohan-Chabot and the Chevalier de Rohan, whom I’ll discuss in my next post. The family had been losing its footing at Versailles (perhaps in part due to the Chevalier’s poor choices), so when she was 15, they maneuvered her into Louis’ attention, hoping that she might become his new maitress en titre. He did sleep with her, but nothing more came of the scheme.

Madame de Maintenon Triumphs

Gueméné has the distinction of being Louis’ last mistress. In the middle of 1683, Maria-Theresa fell ill and died. Louis mourned her, remarking that “this is the first chagrin which she has given me.” By this point, he was deeply involved with Madame de Maintenon, but she had probably resisted his efforts to get her into his bed. Montespan was convinced that she was holding out simply as a way to build Louis’ ardor for her, but it is more likely that it was her religious beliefs that motivated her to deny him. But Maria-Theresa’s death cleared the way. Some time between October of 1683 and January of 1684, Louis secretly married her. The marriage was never formally acknowledged, and she did not become queen. But their relationship was obvious. He gave her a lavish suite of rooms across the hallway from his own apartments, and he spent time with her every day from that point on.

Madame de Maintenon

Madame de Maintenon became enormously influential at court due to her hold on the king’s ear. He became increasingly religious because of her, and this probably contributed to his choice to cease taking mistresses, which helped consolidate her position. But it is also possible that he simply loved her enough that other women no longer interested him. After all, his marriage to Maria-Theresa was an arranged one and probably not one he found emotionally satisfying, so it is likely that his many affairs were efforts to meet his own emotional needs (as well as the more obvious physical ones). With de La Valliere, Montespan, and Maintenon, he clearly found women who struck a chord with him emotionally, and when Maria-Theresa died, he was finally in a position to build a permanent relationship with a woman he genuinely loved. At that point, he had no further need of mistresses. Or perhaps his libido simply cooled by the time he was in his forties.

By 1700, she was virtually his prime minister, even though she had no official role at court. Over the years, she persuaded him to replace several key ministers. She was very interested in women’s education, founded a girl’s school at Saint-Cyr, and authored a treatise on education that helped inspire a 1724 ordinance establishing compulsory universal primary education (although it didn’t have much effect). After his death in 1715, she retired to Saint-Cyr. She had no children, unlike so many of Louis’ other women, but she seems to have had some real attachment to Madame de Montespan’s children, encouraging Louis to promote them at court.

Versailles shows Louis’ relationship with four women: Maria-Theresa, Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Montespan, and Madame de Maintenon. It also apparently has a brief appearance by Catherine Belliers, and it makes up a mistress, Sister Hermione (Hannah Arteton) whom he runs into years after he ended the relationship and forgot her. It shows us two children, one of whom died in infancy. The actual total for the period covered by the show is more like 18 mistresses of varying durations (not counting his wife) and 21 children born alive. So, as it did with its depiction of Philippe d’Orleans’ relationships, Versailles substantially tones down the degree of Louis’ womanizing. I find it kind of refreshing to get to say “No, actually, it was much more than the show gives us.”

If you have a movie or tv series you’d like me to review, please make a donation to my Paypal account and if I can track it down, I’ll review it (as long as I think it’s appropriate for this blog).

Want to Know More?

One of the better guides to Louis’ mistresses is Partylike1660.com. It has a page on each of his known mistresses, as well as a host of other details about life at the court of the Sun King.

As with Henry VIII, Louis XIV has attracted the attention of a lot of non-professional historians who write popular history. An easy introduction to Louis’ affairs is Antonia Frazer’s Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. Frazer is one of the best popular historians, but always read her books with caution. Similarly, Lisa Hilton’s Athenaïs: The Life of Louis XIV’s Mistress, the Real Queen of France is popular rather than academic history, but it’s a good intro to this extremely important and interesting woman.

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A Little Chaos: Historical Landscaping in the Ancien Regime

Tags

17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman, Ancien Regime, Kate Winslet, Louis XIV, Marquis de Lauzun, Matthias Schoenaerts, Versailles

Alan Rickman died too soon. My first memory of him was his appearance as the criminal leader in Die Hard, but I think he really captured my heart as the manic Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves; he was pretty much the only good thing in that film. And of course, he found a legion of new fans in what is probably now his most famous role, Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films. A Little Chaos (2014) was both his last film role released while he was alive and his second and final film as a director. It’s a modest little film, but not without its charms.

The film tells the story of the construction of the Bosquet de la Salle-de-Bal at the Palace of Versailles, during the reign of Louis XIV. Louis’s landscaper was André Le Notre, one of the greatest landscapers of the 18^th century. One of the more unusual things he installed at Versailles was a small outdoor ballroom set in a grotto decorated by seashells and fountains.

The film’s central conceit is that Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) had enough work to do that he fielded out the construction of the grotto to a female landscaper named Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), who struggles to win the respect of Louis (Rickman) and deal with the jealousy of Madame Le Notre (Helen McCrory), while coming to terms with the death of her husband and daughter in a coach accident a few years earlier. Louis is himself grieving the death of his first wife, Maria Theresa, and when Sabine accidentally mistakes him for a gardener, the two strike up a cautious friendship based in their mutual sense of grief.

The Bosquet de la Salle-de-Bal

 

The film has a nice set of linked metaphors in the relationship between gardening, politics, and the realities of life. 18^th century landscaping sought to impose a strict sense of order onto nature, the same way that Louis wishes to impose his will on France and the way that Sabine needs to impose constraints to her grief. And yet, as Sabine acknowledges, life always means a little chaos, so she tries to introduce the unexpected into her landscapes (in this case, the unusual grotto), while the unexpected forces of both death and romance disrupt the lives of most of the main characters. In the most touching scene, Sabine finds herself a fish out of water in Louis’ court, and yet suddenly discovers a great deal in common with the other ladies of the court, most of whom have their own dead husbands or children to grieve. It’s a nice reminder of just how high the mortality rate of the pre-modern world was.

Rickman and Winslet as Louis and Sabine

Rather refreshingly, the film acknowledges right at the start that the whole story is fictional. It’s prologue text reads simply “There is an outdoor ballroom in the gardens of Versailles. In what follows, that much at least is true.” Sabine is a completely fictitious character. The idea that 17^th century society would have had room for a female landscaper who essentially ran her own business is a pretty fantasy, but nothing more.

The film has a good deal in common with 2000’s Vatel. Both the brilliant cook Vatel and the innovative landscape Le Notre were historical figures in service to the powerful men of the Ancien Regime, and both films dwell on the complex entertainments and artificiality of court life. Both include Louis XIV, his homosexual brother (a sadly wasted Stanley Tucci), and the Marquis de Lauzun as characters, and both address the problems of being Louis XIV’s mistress (Anne de Montausier in Vatel and Madame de Montespan in this film). So if you’re interested in the court of the Sun King, these two films make an interesting pair.

That said, A Little Chaos is not a great film. There are quite a number of characters who go nowhere. The performances are better than the script deserves, and the film’s feminist ambitions are undermined by a plot that makes men the solution to Sabine’s problems. Winslet and Schoenaets lack the chemistry to make their romance interesting. If you like historical gardening the film gets some bonus points, but it doesn’t live up to its promise to explore the philosophy of landscape design. And the soundtrack frequently becomes intrusive. But it’s worth a watch, particularly if you’re a fan of Rickman or Winslet. The final scene, in which Louis stands serenely in the center of the outdoor ballroom as his court dances around him seems a fitting way to bring down the curtain on Rickman’s career, even if that curtain came down too soon.

 

Want to Know More?

A Little Chaos is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about Louis XIV,  there are a lot of biographies, such as Richard Wilkinson’s Louis XIV (Routledge Historical Biographies). This is a little off-topic, but one of my favorite books about Loui’s court, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (Magic in History)deals with the occult demimonde of 17th century Paris; it goes into considerable detail about the complex social and sexual hierarchies at court.

Day of the Siege: What is it Trying to Say?

Tags

17th Century Europe, Day of the Siege, Early Modern Europe, Enrico Lo Verso, F. Murray Abraham, Islam, Ottoman Empire, Religious Issues, Renzo Martinelli

The full title of Day of the Siege: September Eleven, 1683 (aka September Eleven, 1683, 2012, dir. Renzo Martinelli) immediately makes one think of September 11^th, 2001. Clearly Renzo Martinelli was trying to draw some sort of parallel between the battle of Vienna and the September 11^th attacks. But what is the message?

The basis for the parallel comes from the common misconception that the battle of Vienna happened on September 11^th, 1683. It didn’t. It happened on September 12^th. But if you poke around the Internet, you’ll find a lot of websites dating the battle to the 11^th. So was Martinelli simply misinformed, or was he willfully overlooking the issue of dating to make a point?

 

Within the Film

Martinelli opens the film with a quote from the esteemed French medieval historian Marc Bloch. “Misunderstanding of the present grows fatally from the ignorance of the past.” So Martinelli is quite clearly including the quote to make the audience aware that we’re supposed to learn a lesson, and that ignoring the Battle of Vienna would be a mistake. There is no connection whatsoever between Bloch’s specific subject matter (he was a social historian who focused on medieval France) and the 17^th century or Islamic history. But Bloch was part of the French resistance during World War II. He was captured and executed shortly after D-Day in 1944. Is Martinelli trying to make a parallel between the Nazis who executed Bloch and the Turks? As we’ll see, I suspect the answer is yes.

Any casual viewer of the film will, I think, come to the conclusion that Marco d’Aviano (F. Murray Abraham) and Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) are the main characters; the film spends roughly equal time on both characters, although it digs into d’Aviano somewhat more deeply. But apparently, Martinelli did not see Mustafa as one of the main characters. Immediately after the Bloch quote, Martinelli gives us a prologue text. “On September 11^th, 1683, Islam was at the peak of it’s [sic] expansion in the West. Three hundred thousand Islamic troopers under the command of Kara Mustafa, were besieging the city they called “the Golden Apple”; Vienna. The aim of Kara Mustafa was to lead his army on to Rome, and transform the Basilica of Saint Peter into a Mosque. If all of this never came about, it’s due to an Italian monk, Marco Da Aviano and a Polish King, Jan Sobieski. This is their story.”

Mustafa, looking very Turkish

Aside from the spelling and punctuation errors, which are presumably an issue of translation from the Italian, this prologue is very odd, because it claims that the film tells Jan Sobieski’s (Jerzy Skolimowski) story, which it doesn’t Sobieski is a supporting character who appears relatively late in the film and get no character development whatsoever, apart from his struggle to get his troops up a hill, and he get much less screen time than Mustafa.

So despite Mustafa being one of the protagonists, Martinelli discourages the audience focusing on him as a main character and instead directs attention toward Sobieski. So the film is pretty much explicitly telling us to sympathize with the Western Catholic position rather than the Turkish Muslim position. Whatever Martinelli’s message is, it’s intended for the West, not Muslims.

Note the absence of Mustafa in favor of two supporting Western characters

Religion understandably plays a major role in the film. Several of the characters debate or discuss the contrast between Christianity and Islam. D’Aviano debates the issue with Abu’l, Abu’l twice makes statements to his deaf-mute wife about the issue, and d’Aviano and Mustafa debate the issue during a parley. D’Aviano asserts that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God; that’s a controversial assertion today, but in terms of 17^th century Catholic theology, it’s an accurate representation of what d’Aviano would have thought. In his debate with Mustafa, he insists that “The true god has no use for submission. He wants all men to be free, to worship him freely.” It’s nice to see a film actually define the freedom its characters are striving for (in this case the freedom to worship or not), but it’s a comparison that positions Islam as a religion of slavery. Again that might be a view that the historical d’Avaino would have agreed with, but it was Martinelli’s decision to include the line in the film.

Abu’l’s statements to his wife fit with d’Aviano’s statement. When he decides to leave Italy and his wife to support the Turkish campaign, he tells her that the difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christians put their hearts ahead of their faith, while Muslims do the opposite. Later, when he risks himself to rescue his wife from a stockade of captive women, he tells her, “At times, faith alone is not enough, even for us Muslims.” So at that point he appears to be repudiating the notion that Muslims put faith first. But then at the end of the film, for no clear reason, he disguises himself as Mustafa and charges the Hussars, who cut him down with gunfire. Since the film gives him no reason to be personally loyal to Mustafa, the viewer is left to assume that he is doing it for religious reasons. Thus, his actions deny the growth he has shown his wife and affirm that Muslims cannot change or grow on any issue involving their faith. Martinelli clearly views Islam as a sort of totalitarian religion, glossing over the way that Leopold I historically worked to suppress Protestantism in Hungary. Apparently, when Catholics are religiously intolerant, it’s not worth talking about.

The film opens with d’Aviano giving a sermon to a group of peasants about trusting God to grant them the strength to defend their homes. He also insists that he cannot work miracles, contrary to his reputation. A blind member of the audience promptly gets a miracle that cures his blindness. Later in the film, d’Aviano heals one of Leopold I’s daughters of what looks to be highly advanced breast cancer. So d’Aviano is a humble miracle-worker. In contrast, Mustafa is given a portent that the invasion will go badly, but he arrogantly misunderstands it and is rewarded with defeat and his own execution. So the film seems to be suggesting that God is on the West’s side, granting d’Aviano and those who trust him miracles. I don’t think there’s any doubt here that Martinelli is pro-Catholic.

D’Aviano, looking very friarish

Martinelli’s Statements

Martinelli has offered some guidance to his intentions in various statements made to the press. (All translations made with the help of Google Translate, since I do not read either Italian or Rumanian. Thus it is possible that I may have missed some nuance to his statements.) Well before the film was made, he said, “The origin of the deep anger which the West is forced to confront today was born September 11^th, 1683.”

When a Romanian journalist asked him if he expected the Vatican to support the film, he responded, “No…In recent speeches, [Pope Benedict] said to open our hearts to Islam and I’m not sure that would be the best thing we can do with these guys….Today [the Church] preaches tolerance, and my film is politically incorrect. There is a priest who says ‘there is a time for prayer and another for war.’ If you do not fight now, Europe will be lost.”

From these quotes, it seems that Martinelli believes that the Islamic world is angry at the West because of Mustafa’s failure to conquer Europe, and that this anger is the root for the September 11^th attacks in 2001. He seems to feel that religious tolerance of Muslims is a bad idea, because if the West trusts Muslims, they will have an easier time launching another attack.

Renzo Martinelli

When d’Aviano parleys with Mustafa, Mustafa tells him that even if the Turks are defeated, such a loss would only be “trimming the Prophet’s beard,” in other words, a momentary defeat that the Turks will recover from.

So the lesson that Martinelli wants his viewers to learn is evidently that the West has forgotten what happened at Vienna in 1683. In 1683, the West stood united against Islam and stopped an unprovoked invasion. But the West forgot to remain vigilant, and the result was the catastrophe of 9-11. He is urging us to once again be on our guard, to reject religious tolerance as too dangerous, and to remember that Muslims cannot change their ways and therefore can never be trusted.

I applaud Martinelli for seeking to use a historical film to get his audience to think about issues he is concerned with. Far too often, historical conflicts are just an excuse for another over-the-top action film. But Martinelli’s Islamophobia, which comes out in some of his interviews, is appalling, and his attempts to get attention for his film by explicitly linking it to 9-11 is downright offensive. He overlooks the fact that after the end of the Great Turkish War in 1699, Western powers embarked on a 200 year long project to dismember the Ottoman Empire, slowly taking territory from it in one trumped up war after another. The break-up of the Ottoman state and the arrogance with which Western powers, especially Britain and France, redrew the map of the Middle East after World War I plays a major role in the turbulence in the region today and certainly contributes to the hostility many Muslims feel toward the West. By omitting the three centuries between 1683 and 2001, Martinelli is offering a simplistic and historically vacuous argument about what caused the 9-11 attacks.

Given that the film is wrong-headed, offensive, not particularly good, and painfully low-budget in places, the best thing to do with Day of the Siege is let it fall into the obscurity it deserves.

Day of the Siege: Meh

Tags

17th Century Europe, Day of the Siege, Early Modern Europe, Enrico Lo Verso, F. Murray Abraham, Holy Roman Empire, Jerzy Skolomowski, Kara Mustafa, Marco d'Aviano, Military Stuff, Ottoman Empire, The Battle of Vienna, Vienna

Day of the Siege: September Eleven, 1683 (aka September Eleven, 1683, 2012, dir. Renzo Martinelli) is a joint Italian-Polish film about the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. It’s notable chiefly for not being especially good or bad, and tackling an important but poorly-known historical event. It reminded me a lot of eggplant; after I was done, I thought, “I could have had something else.” So let’s (reluctantly) dig in.

 

The Battle of Vienna

The Ottoman Empire conquered the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and by the early 16^th century the attention of the Ottoman Sultans had turned to expanding up into the Balkans. In 1529, the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna, but was unable to take the city, and heavy snowfall turned the Ottoman withdrawal into a serious disaster. This failure brought an end to Ottoman expansion into Europe for 150 years.

In the middle of the 18^th century, the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (1642-93) marked a significant turning point in Ottoman fortunes. He surrendered a great deal of his political power to his Grand Viziers, inaugurating a gradual decline in the power of the sultan. Initially, the Grand Vizier Köprülü Mehmed proved a successful military leader, defeating Venice, re-affirming Ottoman power over Transylvania after a brief war with Austria, and waging a successful campaign against Poland.

But a later Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa, proved less effective in the office. In 1681, Hungarian Protestants rebelled against the Austrian Emperor Leopold I’s efforts to impose Catholicism throughout Hungary, and Mustafa decided to support the rebellion in the hopes of being able to break Hungary away from Austria and eventually absorb it into the Ottoman state. He was able to persuade Mehmed IV’s Divan (essentially, the Ottoman Cabinet) to authorize military action, and in August of 1682, the Ottomans declared war on Austria.

Kara Mustafa

But the timing of this declaration of war was remarkably bad. It was impossible to get Ottoman troops into Austrian territory before the onset of winter, and the result was that Leopold had the entire winter to prepare for war. He concluded alliances with Venice and Poland and was able to call upon some of the major nobles of the Holy Roman Empire to provide troops.

Emperor Leopold I

In Spring of 1683, Mustafa marched about 150,000 troops into Austria, accompanied by a force of 40,000 Crimean Tatars. Leopold retreated to Passau, leaving a garrison of 15,000 in Vienna under Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. When the Ottoman forces arrived at Pechtoldsdorf south of Vienna, Mustafa persuaded the town to peacefully surrender, but then massacred the population. This action persuaded von Starhemberg that he had to hold Vienna at all costs, because any surrender would result in another massacre.

Note how close to Ottoman territory Vienna is

The siege began on July 17^th, and the Turks succeeded in completely cutting off Vienna, so that the food supply quickly became a problem. But the Austrians had nearly three times as much artillery as the Turks, making it hard for the Turks to launch an effective attack on the city. The Turks attempted to sap the walls, but the Austrians detected the Turkish mines and were able to intercept and destroy them. Von Starhemberg was severely wounded, but was able to maintain effective control of his forces, ordering that any soldier found asleep should be shot.

Then a joint German-Polish army of 80,000 troops arrived. There had been considerable quarrelling about how the troops would be paid and who would lead them, but eventually it was agreed that King Jan Sobieski of Poland would be the lead general.

Jan III Sobieski

Aware of the arriving relief army, Mustafa ordered an assault of the city very early on September 12^th (while it was still dark, actually). But the Imperial forces intervened, forcing a land battle. After half a day of fighting, Sobieski achieved a notable tactical success. Noticing that the Turks had not fortified one side of their position because of the presence of the Kahlenberg mountain, Sobieski managed to get 18,000 cavalry and a number of cannons up the opposite side of the Kahlenberg. In the mid-afternoon he led what has been called the largest cavalry charge in European history down the forested side of the Kahlenberg and into the exhausted Ottoman ranks, which promptly fled. Overall, between the siege and the battle, the Turks lost at least 30,000 men and an enormous amount of loot. Completely disgraced, the unfortunate Kara Mustafa was strangled in Belgrade on the sultan’s orders late in the same year.

The failure of the siege of Vienna was only the start of the Great Turkish War, which lasted down to 1699 and resulted in the significant loss of Turkish territory in what is now Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This marked the beginning of the contraction of the Ottoman state in Europe, a process that would slowly continue for the next century, pick up steam in the 19^th century, and culminate in the break-up of the Empire after World War I.

Polish Winged Hussars at the Battle of Vienna

 

The Day of the Siege

The film tells the story of the battle of Vienna by focusing on two main characters, Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) and the Capuchin friar Marco d’Aviano (F. Murray Abraham). Mustafa’s story revolves around a recurrent dream that his wife/concubine has that Mustafa will be killed with a hail of arrows. He consults a blind holy man who tells him that there is some truth in the dream and that while much blood will be shed, Mustafa’s blood will not. Are you noticing the subtle hint that his arrogance will get him strangled?

Lo Verso as Mustafa

But the film is more interested in d’Aviano, who is a real historical figure. He was a fairly ordinary friar until 1676, when he apparently healed a nun who had been bedridden for more than a decade. As a result of his he acquired the reputation of a miracle-worker, and people began to seek him out for his blessing. Among those who sought his help was Leopold I, whose wife had been unable to conceive a male heir. D’Aviano became Leopold’s spiritual counselor and remained in close contact with him for the rest of D’Aviano’s life. Leopold was by nature a somewhat indecisive man, and d’Aviano’s more forceful personality helped Leopold make many decisions.

The film shows d’Aviano realizing in 1682 that the Turks are planning to attack. Historically, this is probably because d’Aviano learned of the Turkish declaration of war, which was made in August of 1682. But in the film, the Turks don’t declare war until March of 1683, which has the effect of making d’Aviano a prophet. He goes to Vienna and tries unsuccessfully to persuade Leopold (Piotry Adamczyk) that the Turks are planning to invade, but Leopold refuses to believe him and then basically wets himself when he gets the declaration of war. D’aviano winds up at Vienna and helps rally resistance to the Turks.

Abraham as d’Aviano

The film also exaggerates the military imbalance to make the Turks more threatening. Mustafa commands 300,000 troops, not 150,000, and appears to have way more artillery than the Austrians do. When Mustafa sets up his camp, the Tatar commander warns him that they could be attacked from the Kahlenberg, but Mustafa scornfully refuses to seriously consider the possibility. The Turks successfully sap the walls of Vienna in at least one spot, which doesn’t seem to have happened.

Apart from these deviations, the film basically gets the story right. It focuses at some length on the political complexities of the Imperial side, with the argument turning on German reluctance to allow the Polish Sobieski (Jerzy Skolomowski) to command the troops. Sobieski resolves the dispute by threatening to leave if he is not allowed to command and by declaring his intention to lead his cavalry over the Kahlenberg. Clearly, the screenwriter really liked this whole Kahlenberg issue and wants to make sure that the viewer understands that Mustafa was arrogant and Sobieski was a brilliant commander.

The charge of the Winged Hussars down the Kahlenberg

But the film is weakened by a variety of problems. It invents the detail that when they were both young men, Mustafa met d’Aviano in Venice and saved his life, in exchange for which d’Aviano gave Mustafa a wolf’s tooth as a good luck charm. Do you get the irony of Mustafa saving d’Aviano and then d’Aviano successfully opposing Mustafa so that Mustafa is defeated and gets executed? Do you? Cuz it’s really cool and ironical and stuff, so the film is going to make sure you get it.

And then to add to this, the film invents a Turk, Abu’l (Yorgo Voyagis), whose name is gibberish Arabic, meaning ‘Father of the’. (Abu is a common element of Arab (not Turkish) names, given to a man after his first son is born.) But Abu’l has no children in the film, just a deaf-mute wife who is able to understand people when THEY TALK REALLY LOUD TO HER. No joke. Abu’l lives in Italy for some reason, and d’Aviano saves him from an Italian mob after the declaration of war. But then Abu’l decides he has to leave his wife and go join the Turkish army where Mustafa decides to trust him. As a result, there are repeated dramatic scenes when Abu’l runs into d’Aviano, and then his deaf-mute wife, then d’Aviano again, and then disguises himself as Mustafa and gets himself shot repeatedly by the Austrians, thus fulfilling Mrs. Mustafa’s dream, because foreshadowing and irony and all that.

For me, though, the biggest problem with the film comes with its production values. Normally, I don’t factor in production values when I’m deciding what I think about a movie. Cheap production values do not invalidate a good story (see lots of original Star Trek and Doctor Who episodes). But the producers here clearly decided that their sets couldn’t quite stand up to close scrutiny, so they used very cheap CGI to overlay many scenes with falling snow, billowing smoke and dust, and other atmospheric effects. Not only does this call attention to the cheapness of the production, but it actually makes many scenes hard to see and renders watching them a headache.

Another flaw with the script is that Abu’l is the only character to undergo any appreciable character development, and he’s mostly just a jerk with no clear motivation most of the time, so rescuing his wife from a Turkish rape-stockade looks like growth. D’Aviano, despite being the main character, never really learns anything, and while Mustafa gets an appropriate comeuppance for his arrogance, he never seems to reflect on his mistakes.

The death of Kara Mustafa

Overall, it’s nice that the film wanted to tell the story of what is arguably one of the great turning point battles in Western history. The film gets the job done adequately from that standpoint. But as a movie, the only real drama for the viewer is who’s going to win the battle of Vienna, and the film constantly nudges the viewer in the ribs and says “look at this! Mustafa’s gonna lose cuz he’s arrogant and misunderstands the prophecy!”, which ruins the only suspense the film can generate.

So I don’t recommend this movie because meh. But at least it’s not Dragon Knight.

 

Want to Know More?

Day of the Siegeis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about the Battle of Vienna, check out The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe.

Restoration: Love in the Time of Bubonic Plague

Tags

17th Century England, 17th Century Europe, Bubonic Plague, Caesarian Sections, Charles II, David Thewlis, Early Modern Europe, Great Fire of London, London, Medical Stuff, Meg Ryan, Restoration, Robert Downey Jr, Sam Neill

“In 1660 Charles II was restored to the English Throne ending 11 years of Oliver Cromwell’s bleak Puritan rule. Thus began the age of Restoration. It was an era of scientific discovery, artistic exploration, and luxurious sensuality. It was also a time of natural disasters and archaic medical practices. Science was pitted against superstition. This is the story of one man’s journey through the light and dark of those times.”

So begins Restoration (1995, dir. Michael Hoffman, based on Rose Tremain’s 1989 novel of the same name), a modest little film about a young doctor, Robert Merivel (Robert Downey, Jr.), who earns the attention of the new king Charles II (Sam Neill) by curing Charles’ sick spaniel. Merivel is a talented young physician but also a libertine and wastrel by nature. Once ensconced at the court as the caretaker of the royal hounds, he indulges in his penchant for wine, woman, and buffoonery. Then one day, Charles tells him that one of the king’s mistresses has become jealous of another of his mistresses, and so Charles has decided to marry her off to Merivel. The marriage is to be a sham; Merivel is forbidden to sleep with his own wife, who has no real interest in him anyway, but the reward is an estate in Suffolk and a knighthood.

Unable to say no, Merivel weds Celia (Polly Walker) and begins his life as a country gentleman, but soon finds himself falling in love with his wife. Celia views her time in Suffolk as an exile and wishes to be restored to Charles’ court, while Merivel schemes to extend his wife’s absence from court in hopes that she will come to love him. But his scheme is exposed and an angry Charles evicts him from the estate and reclaims Celia.

Destitute and homeless, he seeks out an old medical student friend, John Pearce (David Thewlis), a Puritan who has opened a sanitarium for the mentally ill, where Merivel meets Katherine (a rather out-of-place Meg Ryan), an emotionally disturbed Irish woman whom he falls in love with and gets pregnant. This gets both of them kicked out and they wind up destitute in London just in time for the Bubonic Plague to hit London, and soon after that, the Great Fire of London.

The story is basically a redemption narrative. Merivel begins his fall when he succumbs to the pleasures of the court and slowly loses his passion for medicine. He bottoms out when he is evicted from his estate and slowly begins to recover his passion at the sanitarium, where he proposes treating the deranged inmates by playing music and letting them dance (in one of those stock Hollywood scenes where the skeptical authorities reluctantly allow something unconventional and it proves so transformative that even the authorities embrace it).

Downey as Merivel

Medicine repeatedly brings out the best in Merivel, even when it leads to complications. His dance therapy leads to his relationship with Katherine, who helps him emerge from his emotional deadness. But later he realizes that their baby needs to be delivered by caesarean section, a procedure that Katherine will not survive. This turns out to be the world’s prettiest c-section, with virtually no blood. Katherine controls her pain so well she doesn’t even need to be held down and a viewer coming in partway through the scene might be forgiven for thinking that her moans and writhing were signs that someone was giving her cunnilingus. Afterward, she gets a nice soft-lighting post-operative death scene. In case anyone is missing the point of what I’m saying, this is ludicrous. Pre-modern caesarean sections were horrific affairs, done without anesthetic and therefore unendurably painful for the mother, many of whom probably died from the pain alone, let alone the blood loss and organ trauma.

The birth of his daughter and the loss of his mistress force Merivel to grow up. He decides to confront the Bubonic Plague and is horrified to discover that the Royal Hospital has been filled with sick patients who have been boarded up in a large room with no medical treatment. He literally breaks down the boards to get to his patients and tenderly eases the pains of the dying and helps the rest recover.

It’s a decent little film. Downey is well-cast in the type of role he’s best known for, the charming rake who struggles with his addictions, but Restoration was made just before he began his own infamous descent in drug addiction, and so his performance lacks the knowing edge of some of his later roles. The rest of the cast is mostly quite solid, including Hugh Grant as a high-strung artist assigned to paint a portrait of Celia and Ian McKellan as the faithful steward of Merivel’s estate. Neill seems just a bit off as Charles II, lacking the real man’s self-depricating sense of humor and charm, and as I said, Meg Ryan feels totally inappropriate, like no one realized she was actually cast in the romantic comedy filming next door.

Wait, I get cut open and die? America’s Sweetheart doesn’t do that.

The Medical Details

The film wants to be a criticism of the appalling state of medicine in the late 17^th century, a theme it has in common with The Madness of King George. The prologue text tells us that medicine is “archaic” and that “science was pitted against superstition”, but the film never really delves into that critique enough to really work. There’s a nice scene early on where Pearce and Merivel attend an anatomy lecture that’s being delivered in Latin; that’s accurate but it’s a passing detail, and the medical education of the time is barely commented on, other than that it requires expensive books and that Merivel should be grateful that his father, a glover, was able to arrange a medical education for him.

We only see Merivel actually practicing medicine a couple of times, mainly at the sanitarium, when he performs the caesarean section, and when he treats the Plague victims. He occasionally examines patients, listens to their heartbeat through a tube, and so on, but it’s mostly just incidental details. But the real problem is that the film really doesn’t have much idea of what 17^th century medicine actually involved.

Physic, as elite learned medicine was called at the time, was essentially theoretical preventative medicine, an expensive medical practice, in contrast to surgery, which was considered a lower-status form of medical practice that involved a range of practices including the extraction of teeth, the setting of broken bones, the (rather painful) removal of bladder stones, and the like. Physic and surgery were essentially opposites; few physicians were also surgeons, the way that few neurosurgeons are also massage therapists.

Down to the early 19^th century, medicine emphasized humoral theory, which held that the body had four primary fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (what you bring up when you vomit) and black bile (exactly what they thought that was is a matter of debate); all other fluids, like sweat, semen, and urine, were secondary fluids created from one of the primary fluids. Each primary fluid was either hot or cold and either wet or dry, so that blood was hot and wet, yellow bile was hot and dry, phlegm was cold and wet, and black bile was cold and dry. Observable symptoms such as sweating, fever, clamminess, vomiting, and diarrhea were all signs that one humor had gotten out of balance; so if a patient was feverish and sweaty, he had an excess of the hot, wet humor, while if the patient had a fever without sweats, he had an excess of the hot, dry humor. The appropriate remedy was to remove the excess humor from the body, so the feverish sweaty patient could be bled, while the feverish non-sweaty patient could be given an emetic to induce vomiting. Diet was also important, because certain foods stimulated the different humors; healthy patients would be told to eat or avoid certain foods based on the disposition of their body.

The Four Humors

The humors also affected personality, and provided the basis for a theory of psychology. A patient with a frenzied, excessively fussy, or angry personality was choleric, so the treatment for those afflicted by violent outbursts might be to bleed them (that’s why King George’s doctor wants to cup him). Those who suffered from depression, sleeplessness, and the like were melancholic, because they had an excess of black bile. The leading work on the subject in the 17^th century, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, felt that social factors such as poverty, isolation, sadness, and fear were as important as humoral imbalance. He began the process of separating depression from its perceived bodily causes and its evolution into a primarily mental or spiritual condition (although modern pharmacology has started reversing that development by emphasizing the biochemical component of depression). Burton prescribed a range of treatments including drugs and herbs, work and moderate exercise, diet, sex, exposure to nature, and in very extreme cases blood-letting.

Burton’s work was extremely influential, and would probably have influenced the Puritan sanitarium, especially since Burton, as a clergyman, also feels that sin can cause melancholy. But there’s little sign of serious therapeutic efforts at the sanitarium, except in the case of Katherine. Her melancholy mostly manifests as insomnia and an obsession with walking strangely. She seems much less ill than most of the patients there, but Pearce insists on bleeding her to induce sleep. She responds well to Merivel’s dance therapy, but what really seems to put her mind back in order is getting busy with Merivel. I’m not sure what’s really dictating the plot here, Burton’s Anatomy, or the misogynistic idea that difficult women just need to get laid more.

Merivel’s dance therapy is certainly novel but it’s not exactly scientific; it’s just feel-good nonsense. (And the film seems rather confused about Pearce’s beliefs. In the novel, Pearce becomes a Quaker, basically on the far liberal end of the Christian spectrum of the time. In the movie, though, he says he’s become a Puritan, who were on the far conservative end of the Christian spectrum of the day; it’s like rewriting a vegan hippie from San Francisco as a Christian fundamentalist home-schooler from Alabama and thinking that somehow the character would be the same person either way. The idea that Puritan doctors would allow dance therapy is absurd, since they considered dancing profoundly immoral.)

Thewlis as Pearce, leading his band of Puritan doctors

Merivel’s c-section was standard medical practice at the time; the general idea was if the mother is going to die anyway (because the baby was too large for the birth canal), the surgeon might as well try to save the baby. But the c-section is a surgical procedure, and Merivel is a physician; he may have watched surgery, but he’s never performed it. Additionally, physicians of his day would have received no hands-on obstetrical training whatsoever; that was left to midwives. Having him perform a caesarean section would be like asking your chiropractor to do it.

His treatment of the quarantined patients is mostly just basic nursing; giving them food and water and helping make them comfortable. Medicine at the time had few ideas about how to actually treat the Plague, although fumigation with tobacco smoke was popular at the time (and we see that at the court of Charles II; there’s an absurdly large brazier-pendulum that swings over a bed). Because they had no clear idea how to treat the Plague, London authorities ordered the establishment of suburban pest-houses where sick patients could be quarantined; their houses were to be shut up and marked with a red cross and “Lord have mercy on us”, for forty days, after which the house could be opened up again and marked with a white cross, so that no strangers would stay there for another twenty days. The film gets this wrong, since it treats the Royal Hospital as a pest-house and marks it with a white cross, rather than a red one. (For those interested in how London responded to the Plague, the National Archives in London has a nice educational page about the issue, complete with a few primary documents.)

At one point Merivel dons a physician’s plague mask, which gives the film a great visual image, but he immediately takes the mask off when he gets to his patient, which would have defeated the whole purpose of such a mask. The beak of such masks was stuffed with aromatic herbs on the theory that they would purify the air so the physician would not get sick when treating contagious patients.

A physician in a plague mask

The result of all of this is that while the film wants to offer a critique of 17^th century medicine, it can’t really muster the energy to engage with the material in any real way. Merivel is a “modern” physician only to the extent that he acts a little more like a modern doctor than Pearce does. His criticism of the medicine of his day is limited to a speech about dance therapy and his insistence on helping the Plague victims die less painfully. There’s no mention of humoral theory or Burton’s work on melancholy or anything that would give the viewer any insight into either traditional medical theories or why Merivel might think differently.

Walker as Celia, arriving at her wedding

The film works much better with its central metaphor of Restoration, which operates on multiple levels. The political restoration of the monarchy brings with it a restoration of the decadence of the English court (as Merivel quips early in the film, “rich men can go to heaven again”) after the Puritan interlude that banned pleasures such as theater and dance. Merivel loses both his true calling in life and his social position, and gradually recovers them. Celia longs for her restoration to court and the affections of the king, while Merivel restores both physical and emotional health to various patients, although in a couple of key situations he is unable to help those he loves most. He is repeatedly reunited with old friends and given a chance to fix past mistakes. While it’s not a brilliant film by any means, it’s nice to see a Hollywood film that deals so effectively with a central theme a little more sophisticated than “freedom!”

Want to Know More?

Restorationis available a couple of ways on Amazon.

Rose Tremain’s Restorationis highly regarded and worth reading if you’re a fan of historical novels.

Charles II is a very important English king, since his reign marked the re-establishment of the English monarchy. Tim Harris’ Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660-1685seeks to place Charles in the center of the political life of his reign. This is an important argument, since traditional scholarship has tended to see Charles as politically passive and at his best when he wasn’t taking action.