On this day, the Duc de Luynes returns to Versailles after a few days spent in Paris on his way back from Compiègne and Chantilly. He finds that all the talk at court is of a tiff between M le Duc and the younger Mme la Duchesse, who did, he recollects, look rather subdued at Chantilly. The word in Paris is that she has moved to a different apartment in the Hôtel de Condé to be further away from her husband.
Also on this day, Luynes chats with M de Chavigny, himself just returned from Denmark, where he went as special envoy. Our diarist asks him about the King of Denmark. Here is what he learns from the diplomat:
“He says that this prince does not hate the French at all, and that his character is fairly made up of gentleness and goodness, but at the same time also weakness; that the Queen has more wit and that she is in rather the same mould as the Queen of Spain, liking to govern, but there are in that country few men capable of governing. He adds that the prince royal of Denmark, who is 15 or 16 years old, is very promising.”
Commentary:
M le Duc is the King’s cousin, the Duc de Bourbon, the head of the Condé branch of the Bourbons, who has just hosted the King and Queen at his ancestral seat of Chantilly. Our diarist refers to his wife as the younger Mme la Duchesse because her mother-in-law is still alive and therefore also Mme la Duchesse, but referred to as the elder Mme la Duchesse. M le Duc and his wife live at the Hôtel de Condé when in Paris. The Palais de Bourbon is the residence of the elder Mme la Duchesse.
The King of Denmark at this date is Christian VI. The goal of M de Chavigny’s mission seems to have been to try and win the Danes over to the idea of an alliance. Protestant Denmark has been more hostile than not to Catholic France since the Reformation.
Pictured: Christian VI (1699-1746), King of Denmark and Norway from 1730 until his death, as painted by Johann Salomon Wahl.
Christian VI’s consort is Sophie Magdalene of Brandenburg-Bayreuth-Kulmbach, Kulmbach being the most insignificant of the various Hohenzollern principalities. A dowry-less princess raised in Dresden in the household of her cousin the charitable Queen Christiane Ebarhardine of Poland, now dowager queen, Sophie Magdalene had the luck to be the right age and the right religion when the then-Crown Prince of Denmark was traveling around Germany looking for a suitable bride circa 1720. Dresden under Augustus II of Saxony and Poland was in those days the most brilliant capital in all of Central Europe.
Pictured: Sophie Magadalene of Brandenburg-Kulmbach (1700-1770), Queen of Denmark and Norway, by Brünniche.
Christian V and Queen Sophie Magdalene’s eldest son is the future Frederick V.
Pictured: Frederick V (1723-1766), King of Denmark and Norway from 1746 until his death, painted in his anointment garb by Pilo circa 1750.
The future king will not live up to his promise since he will turn out to be a debauched drunkard.
The translation from the French is my own, as it always is unless I credit someone else.
If you have questions that I have not addressed in the commentary, please ask in the comments.
Always appreciate the portraits and countryside paintings, thank you.
Why did the younger Mme la Duchesse move from her apartment, far from her husband? What happened?