Louis XIV, Le Roi Est Mort

The reign of France’s Louis XIV (1638-1718), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign.

As he lived, he dies in public, in spite of his immense pain, with rigor, he stops the terms of his succession, puts himself in good standing with God, addresses his farewell to his family and his faithful servants, as well as his secret wife, Madame de Maintenon.

Summer 1715, Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg.

His health started to decline on 10 August 1715 upon his return from a hunting trip in Marly, when he felt sharp pains in his leg.

Fagon, his doctor, diagnosed sciatica.

But the pain was always in the same place, and shortly afterwards black marks appeared, indicating senile gangrene.

Despite excruciating pain, the king carried on with his daily routine until two days before his death, without flinching, fully intending to do his duty to the end- a decision made easier perhaps by the fact that he’d always conducted a good part of the affairs of France from his bedroom.

The veteran monarch seemed unshakable, to the great admiration of all the courtiers.

However, on 25 August, the day of Saint Louis, he was forced to remain in bed, and thereafter never left his bedchamber.

It was no ordinary bedroom, and what went on there wasn’t ordinary either. It is in the exact center of the palace façade, so the view from his bed would have cut straight down the middle of the magnificent gilt approach to the palace he built, a line which is, not at all coincidentally bien sur, the East–West axis of the sun.

Here, each day began with the ‘lever du Roi’

Over a period of an hour and a half, the king was dressed and received visitors beginning with the most intimate — his brother, his son — and ending with more distant courtiers and lords.

By the time he had his wig on his head and his sword fixed to his belt, and was pulling on his gloves, his bedroom would be full of people.

Each day ended with the ‘coucher du Roi’, which was the same thing in reverse.

The gangrene worsened, and on the 26th it had spread to his bone.

The doctors were powerless. That same day the king received his five-year-old great-grandson, the future Louis XV, to give him advice.

He recommended him to lighten the burden on the people and avoid going to war as much as possible, declaring: “It is the ruin of the peoples.”

Aware of his own sins, the sovereign, whose foreign policy had rested entirely on waging war, asked his grandson to remain “a peaceful prince”.

The King took longer than expected to die.

Three times he bade farewell to Mme de Maintenon, and twice to the Court.

Mme de Maintenon held a great influence over Louis XIV, who visited her every day in her apartments overlooking the palace’s royal courtyard.

He worked here, held meetings with his ministers, and enjoyed moments of tranquillity in the company of his secret wife.

It is difficult to determine, nonetheless, how much of a role she played in the monarch’s political decisions.

Her “reign”, which some contemporaries decried as strict and boring, did appear to coincide with a certain change in the king’s character.

On 29 August a man who claimed to have a miracle cure, one Brun, was granted permission to approach the royal bed.

The king did feel better afterwards, but the damage had been done, and on 30 and 31 August he began to drift in and out of consciousness.

On the morning of 1 September he died.

For eight days his body was displayed in the Mercury Room, and on the 9th was transported to Saint-Denis, the burial place of the kings of France.

The practice of dividing dead French kings into three began with Philippe le Bel in 1314.

The idea was that instead of one you could have three final resting places where people could come and pay homage (or, in more troubled times, desecrate the remains and pillage the metals). Louis’s double coffin stood in Versailles for eight days.

In a departure from tradition, no funeral effigy was made.

Previously, following a Roman practice revived by the English, a wicker effigy of the dead king had been made (in England it was made of wood) and to this were fixed a wax mask and wax hands molded from the dead king’s body.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, women wore mourning white, but by the 18th century black was firmly established as the color of mourning.

With one exception — the king’s heir.

Louis XIV had spent much of his life feeling rather good about himself in respect to his succession.

Unlike those poor Spanish Bourbons who had all sorts of problems making heirs, he had had six children with his wife Marie-Thérèse, two of whom were boys.

But just before he died, things started to go wrong.

His eldest son Louis, known as the Grand Dauphin, died in 1711, and the following year his eldest son, also called Louis, died too.

But this was not before bringing into the world a son called Louis who died, a second son called Louis who died and a third son called Louis.

Back in 1715, though, on his great-grandfather’s death, the future Louis XV, aged five, was not allowed to visit his dead relative, take part in his funeral procession or go to the funeral. And he didn’t wear black; he wore purple.

This was to signify that, although kings die, the king, if you get my meaning, does not.

The other mourners, who came to sprinkle holy water on dead Louis’s coffin, wore black.

Who wore what mourning attire was strictly regimented. The higher the rank of the mourner, the longer the train he was allowed to wear.

The most important wore black trains five metres long.

Certain rooms in the Palace of Versailles were draped in black as were carriages.

Servants wore black and so did the horses. As night set in on 8 September, Louis XIV’s funeral procession left Versailles for the basilica at Saint Denis, the ancient burial place of French kings.

The basilica — which today is in the middle of a neighborhood where the population is almost entirely of African origin — contains the remains of all but three of the 70-odd kings that ruled France starting with Clovis in the 5th century.

We don’t know why they chose to slow march those 12 hours of road at night.

Perhaps it was the influence of Spain, where they’d developed a taste for night-time religious ritual. The effect, in any case, would have been dramatic.

The procession was 2,500 people strong — many of them the king’s guards, mounted and on foot, around the king’s three metre-high funeral carriage surmounted with a large silver cross.

At the front were 400 poor people, who were paid and dressed for the occasion in black cloaks with black hoods. All carried candles.

As they walked through the streets, with drummers keeping the slow, funereal beat, some in the crowds shouted insults as Louis’s funeral coach rolled by.

Many people in France were glad to see the back of France’s longest-serving monarch.

The procession arrived at dawn at St Denis for the funeral where musicians played Philidor’s Funeral March.

The five metre-long ermine-lined cloak of blue velvet and gold fleurs-de-lys, his crown and the sword that had belonged to Charlemagne were placed upon the coffin.

Inside were placed models of his shield, his spurs, his sceptre, which symbolised authority, and his ‘hand of justice’, which symbolised the overseeing of order.

The body was buried at St Denis where it was dug up at the beginning of the Terror in 1793 and scattered along with the remains of other kings.

The copper plaque identifying the coffin was pillaged and turned into a saucepan.

Louis’s heart was put in the Jesuits’ church in the rue St Antoine, where looters also came during the Revolution and took the gold that encased it.

Though this heart was destroyed, the exhibition contains three other royal hearts set in gold in the same way.

Only the Sun King’s embalmed innards remained undesecrated by the Jacobins.

The King’s Heart

A recent discovery allowed the identification of the exact location of the barrels containing the entrails of Louis XIV and his father at the foot of the steps to the sanctuary of Notre Dame Cathedral.