18 July 1768

From the Letters of Louis XV to the Infante Ferdinand of Parma

On this day, Louis XV writes to the Duke of Parma:

“My dear grandson,

I would have thought that the mail bearing the cruel news would have arrived in Parma before the 2nd of this month, but as it was stopped in Turin and in Genoa, it was delayed. Your hopes are surely realized for the Eternity in which she is surely well placed, or at least in a good position to get there. I still have no news from Spain. I hope that it will not be long in coming. The weather we are having here is not of the season; nevertheless, nothing is spoiled yet and the countryside is beautiful. I embrace you with all my heart, my dear grandson.

Louis."

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Commentary:

Queen Marie, who died in the last week of June, is the “she” to whom the King refers in the second sentence. He presumably means that her soul is either in Paradise (“well placed”) or at least in Purgatory (“in a good position to get there”). She was Louis XV’s consort and Ferdinand of Parma’s maternal grandmother.

Pictured: A portrait of Marie Leczinska (1703-1768), Queen of France and Navarre as the consort of Louis XV, by Nattier or his studio, photographed by me in the Musée Cognacq-Jay in March, 2016.

We infer from the first sentence of this letter that the news of the Queen’s death, sent by the King in his letter dated 25 June, only reached Parma on 2 July, of which Ferdinand must have informed him in his previous letter.

The summer of 1768 is wetter than usual, hence the remarks about the unseasonable weather. It is possible that flooding held the mail up in Genoa. It has happened before.

The new from Spain for which the King is waiting is the King of Spain’s formal consent for Ferdinand’s marriage, the Spanish monarch being his paternal uncle and the head of his family.

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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.

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