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order to bolster her claims to be a holy ‘secret wife’. 8 So much for human plans: in the event it was not Queen Maria Leczinska but the Pompadour who died …
    Now Françoise, as the King's secret wife, was left with the problem of amusing him. The coming of little Adelaide of Savoy into the life of Louis XIV, solving the problem at a stroke with her cute childish ways, was therefore the greatest piece of luck for both Louis and Françoise. Henceforward all the King's hopes and affections were utterly focused on this small, sprightly creature; and since she was the future Queen of France, he could feel it was his absolute duty to do so.
    Louis's generosity and courtesy to women, his enjoyment of their company outside the bedroom, has been stressed throughout this book. He loved his daughters and spoiled them; he loved his granddaughters too. But there was also a ruthless side to his nature where women were concerned – royal women. Liselotte was Condémned to witness the destruction of her homeland: her own royal rights were invoked to press the claims of France, and she found it infinitely distressing. Yet Louis reacted to her grief with irritation; such feelings of chagrin were not permitted at Versailles. Marie-Louise d'Orléans was sent briskly off to Spain to marry the appalling Carlos II in spite of her tearful pleas. ‘Farewell. For ever,’ was the reaction of Louis XIV. It was a fate which subsequently caused Liselotte to exclaim that being a queen was hard anywhere, but to be the Queen in Spain is surely worse than anywhere else’. 9 Even the beloved Adelaide incurred her grandfather's resentment when she displayed something less than her usual gaiety at the denigrations of her husband. Yet these experiences, for better or for worse, were part of the lives of royalty at the time, not only for women: arguably Berry was just as badly treated in not being allowed to separate from the incontinent Marie-Élisabeth. And one should balance Louis XIV's tenderness towards the deposed Queen Mary Beatrice – not always to the advantage of France – against his ruthlessness towards Marie-Louise.
    This sense of order makes Louis's firm choice of Madame de Maintenon as his second, if secret, spouse all the more remarkable. She shone no glory on him; rather to the contrary, her early association with Scarron was considered disreputable. Not only Liselotte but the satirists lamented that she was a nobody in hierarchical terms, and older than the King. But the King chose her and kept to her. In his forties, thanks to the lucky – in these terms – death of Marie-Thérèse, he selected the kind of woman, in nature if not rank, that his mother had been, and he stuck to her. Good women – in the moral sense – were always fascinating to Louis XIV, and for all his (justified) reputation for promiscuity in youth and the establishment of his ‘harem’ as he reached thirty, one notes that he spent at least half of his seventy-seven-odd years in their company.
    ‘Greatness of birth and the advantages bestowed by wealth and by nature should provide all the elements of a happy life,’ wrote Louis's first cousin the Grande Mademoiselle in her final months. ‘But experience should have taught us that there are many people who have had all these things who are not happy.’ She added: the good moments arrive but they do not last. Louis XIV certainly had a happier life in emotional terms than the Grande Mademoiselle whose ill-conceived but valiant efforts to make a late marriage to Lauzun he had quashed (another example of his ruthless determination where dynastic matters were concerned). It would be fair to say that most of the happiest moments of his life were associated with women, whether enjoying Anne of Austria's marble bath in the Louvre, riding romantically with Marie Mancini or Louise when he was young, throwing away the sword that dared to hurt Marie's hand, lending his own hat to put on Louise's golden curls, amusing