16 July 1740
From the Memoirs of the Duc de Luynes
On this day, a Saturday, our diarist is in Compiègne, where the court has come to spend the summer:
“The King arrived here on Tuesday. The ladies were not with him, not on the river, nor in Paris, nor in his carriages from Paris. On arriving, His Majesty supped in his cabinets with gentlemen only. The 4 sisters arrived on the same day, a little before the King.
The Queen arrived on Thursday, and the Dauphin just now. It was thought that there would be some change in this arrangement where he was concerned because of the smallpox, which there has been a lot of here, and there is still some. The Faculty decided to send a courier to the Cardinal, who arrived yesterday morning, and the first arrangement was maintained.
The King supped yesterday at the grand couvert with the Queen. Although nothing has yet been absolutely decided with regard to the buildings, it seems that there is a project, which should be finished in 1745, by which the Queen’s present apartment should be demolished and another one built for her that will extend beyond the moat.”
Commentary:
Louis XV had briefly been in Paris before setting off for Compiègne. It seems that part of the journey was accomplished by river.
The 4 ladies in question are the now notorious Mailly-Nesle sisters. There are 5 of them altogether, but one of them is not yet at court. The eldest, Madame de Mailly, so named because she married her paternal cousin, the Comte de Mailly, was until last summer the King’s lover and the first maîtresse-en-titre (see glossary) in more than 50 years. She was supplanted by her next younger sister, Mme de Vintimille, with whom the King is now in love. Nonetheless, Mme de Mailly is hanging on to her place in the King’s inner circle with grim determination. The next 2 sisters, Mmes de Flavacourt and de Lauraguais, have also been admitted to the inner circle. The fact that this sorority did not travel with the King probably indicates that he is still trying to keep his private life out of public view. His subjects are not yet accustomed to the idea that there is a royal mistress. Hardly anyone at this date would remember the the last one, Mme de Fontanges, dead nearly 60 years.
The elderly Cardinal de Fleury, once the King’s tutor, is the de facto prime minister. The King leaves most decisions to him, even, as we see here, decisions about his son’s welfare.
Pictured: The entrance court of the château at Compiègne, my own photo taken in July, 2023. Louis XV would recognize this facade, which he commissioned and lived long enough to see completed, but not the interiors, which were greatly altered after his death.
The whole court comes to Compiègne every summer, ostensibly for the annual army manoeuvres on the nearby plains, but also because the King likes to hunt in the surrounding forest. Moving the royal family, their households, and the ministers with their staffs, is an enormous and costly undertaking that takes, as we see here, the better part of a week to accomplish.
The château of Compiègne is much smaller in 1740 than today. The construction project that our diarist mentions here is mere tinkering. In the early 1750s, the King will order a major reconstruction that will completely alter the appearance and the footprint of this centuries-old hunting lodge and turn it into a splendid palace capable of accommodating the court properly. The work will go on for the rest of his life. As an indication of how much the château has changed, it is worth pointing out that the moat mentioned in today’s extract no longer exists.
The translation from the French is my own. Images that are not my own are in the public domain; I only explicitly credit them when the uploader has made it a condition of sharing his/her work via Wikimedia Commons. Words in italics in the body of the post or bold italics in verbatim translations and image captions are in the Glossary; the royal family and other Bourbons are in the Who’s Who; information about the sources is in the Bibliography; all of these are in the Resources section and freely available to paid subscribers and Grandes Entrées. If you have questions, please ask in the comments.
The picture that emerges of Louis here is hardly a flattering one.
Did you visit the forest when you went to Compiègne? It's lovely.