If you scrape the rubbish-heap of servile, coeval flattery that usually smothers the personality of a monarch you will discover a few kings who have been truly great; many who have achieved greatness because they were wisely content to serve as masks for the great intellects of their time; and for the rest, some bad kings, some foolish kings, and some ridiculous kings. But in all that royal gallery of history you will hardly find a more truly absurd figure than that of the resplendent Roi Soleil…
I am not aware that he has ever been laughed at; certainly never to the extent which he deserves. The flatterers of his day, inevitable products of his reign, did their work so thoroughly that even in secret they do not appear to have dared to utter — possibly they did not even dare to think — the truth about him. Their work survives, and when you have assessed the monstrous flattery at its true worth, swept it aside and come down to the real facts of his life, you make the discovery that the proudest title their sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity accept…makes him what indeed he is: a king of opéra bouffe. There is about him at times something almost reminiscent of the Court buffoons of a century before, who puffed themselves out with mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excite laughter; with this difference, however, that in his own case it was not intended to be amusing.
A heartless voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to wrap himself in..”a terrible majesty.” He was obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity — of kingship. I cannot believe that he conceived himself human. He appears to have held that being king was very like being God, and he duped the world by ceremonials of etiquette that were very nearly sacramental.
I wandered into this grand slam of Louis XIV, the Sun King, by Rafael Sabatini from an odd 1924 volume of Sabatini’s writings entitled The Historical Nights’ Entertainment. (Because I’m well versed in at least one of the stories, I can verify the historical accuracy of them.)
The chapter from which Sabatini’s story concerning Louis XIV is called “The Night of Witchcraft: Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan” — two historical figures I recently got entangled with through Alexandre Dumas’ five-volume musketeers epic. (Dumas is somewhat gentler to Louis and his mistress than is Sabatini. Sabatini is more accurate.)
I wonder how Sabatini would describe Trump and his absurdly hideous attempt to imitate Versailles with his “golden ballroom.” I don’t think he’d call Trump “of mediocre intelligence.”
A few pages later in this chapter, Sabatini describes what happened after Madame de Montespan became official chief mistress to Louis. I read this as a warning to the Trump family — over their greed and colossal enrichment:
…Madame de Montespan was firmly established as maîtresse en titre, and in January of 1669 she gave birth to…the first of the seven children she was to bear the King. Parliament [pay careful attention, Republicans in Congress!] was to legitimize them all, declaring them royal children of France, and the country was to provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for them and their heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolution a century later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasitic anachronism of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerable burden it imposed upon them?
I don’t wonder. Let’s all agree that, given the lightening speed of our global communications, it will not take a century for us to rise against our very own pseudo-royal parasites.