The Childhood of Louis Xiii

NOT many of those who know Paris can have failed to travel over the few miles which separate the great city from the little town of St. Germain-en-Laye. It stands well above the Seine, overshadowed by its castle, the famous home of many kings. Famous, too, is the beautiful terrace overlooking the curves of the river and distant hill-encircled Paris, and not less so the deer forest, to which the straight garden alleys lead imperceptibly by green ways. The castle and the older chapel by its side have been recently restored, and the effect has been to enhance the naturally modern look of the stately pile of buildings. The moat is still there, though now dry, and the arched entrance is still strongly guarded, but the finely proportioned windows, the broad stone balconies, the red brick and white facings of the walls, all give the impression of a house built for dignity and pleasure rather than for mere defensible strength. Nowadays the spacious rooms have been converted into a museum, and naturally a sense of chill and desertion fills them. Three hundred years ago, the empty courtyard and silent house were full of life and preparation. Henri IV. was at last blessed with an heir to the throne he had so hardly won, and St. Germain-en-Laye, pleasant, healthy St. Germain, with its big gardens and fresh breezes, was selected for the Dauphin’s nursery. The boy was born at Fontainebleau on the 27th of September, 1601. Six days earlier, Henri, proudly confident in the future, had sent for one Dr. Jean Herouard, and had said to him, “ I have chosen you to take charge of the health of my son, the Dauphin. Serve him well.”

This Jean Herouard must have been a born lover of children, a kindly and sympathetic man, — better and wiser, indeed, than most of those charged by the King with his son’s upbringing. The doctor regarded his new post as a great and solemn trust; and that he might acquit himself well in it, he began a journal, in which he set down “ day by day and hour by hour such observations as might give him a solid judgment in the future, and lead the health of the prince to a happy issue, together with an account of his particular tastes and fancies, ... so that no speech or action in any way remarkable has been omitted that might serve as a guide to the education of a prince.” Such was the diary which Dr. Jean Herouard, court physician, set himself to write throughout the long years during which he served the young Louis as Dauphin and as King. For every succeeding generation it remains one of the most curious studies of child life ever made. Indeed, no other book, old or new, has quite the same interest, blending, as it does, child psychology with educational methods, vivid pictures of society with old medical lore, boyish games and lessons with side insights into history. Some of the daily entries would doubtless weary many readers by their very minuteness ; much of the extraordinary grossness of the nursery life would painfully revolt them ; but for the student, whether of children or of past social customs, the book is of deep interest, while for any real knowledge of that enigma of history, Louis XIII., it is priceless.

As Herouard describes him, the child Louis — or rather the Dauphin, for he had no name until his public christening when he was five years old — was a passionate, loving child, jealous and sensitive, morbidly fearful of ghosts, of ridicule, and of punishment, whilst at the same time warlike in his tastes, and hardy enough in all physical exercises. What his upbringing made him is a difficult problem to solve, for throughout his life Louis was overshadowed by those he lived with and crippled by constant ill health; but what that training was can be learnt in Herouard’s journal, and a very curious training it seems to have been.

The composition of the household at St. Germain-en-Laye was, to modern ideas, a fundamentally strange one. When, a month after his birth, the Dauphin was brought there by the royal gouvernante, Madame de Monglat, the nursery was already occupied by the King’s three legitimatized children, the sons and daughter of Gabrielle, Duchess of Beaufort, who had died in 1598. These three were known as the Duke, the Chevalier, and Mademoiselle de Vendôme. Later on, Madame de Verneuil’s son and daughter swelled the number of the Dauphin’s half brothers and sisters. The boy, Henri de Verneuil, was within a month of the Dauphin’s age; the girl, Gabrielle, somewhat younger. In course of time, the five younger children of Queen Marie de Medici came to complete the nursery party: Elizabeth, Christienne, the Duke of Orleans (who died when five years old, before he had received a name), Gaston, Duke of Anjou, and, last of all, Henriette Marie, the Henrietta Maria who was to play her part in English history. The children of Mesdames des Essars and Moret do not appear at any time to have been brought up with the rest; for though the King legitimatized these children, he never treated them as quite on an equality with those of Beaufort and Verneuil. Each of the children living at St. Germain had his or her own room, with special nurses, tutors, waiting women, valets, and pages ; the Dauphin had in addition his gentlemen, his bodyguard, and his enfants d’honneur. These last, sons of the nobility, brought in their turn tutors and attendants. Generally speaking, the nurses attached to the royal children had their own babies living with them, and sometimes their husbands as well. The whole of this huge motley crew, men, women, and children, living together in scant privacy, was farmed or boarded out to Madame de Monglat. When Louis was taken from her care to be placed under that of his governor, at the age of eight, his fervent hope that he should no longer be farmed would seem to confirm Herouard’s accusation that Madame de Monglat was stingy. And not only was she none too liberal in household matters, but on more than one occasion she showed an eagerness to seize on actual money in a way surprising in a great lady.

One day, when the Dauphin was five years old, the Duke of Sully came out to St. Germain well supplied from the treasury with pocket money for the prince. The news of the Surintendant’s arrival set the whole household astir, eager for a share in the expected spoils. Madame de Monglat hurried the Dauphin into the courtyard of the castle to receive Sully with as much honor as if he had been the King himself. To please the great man, the little prince put his enfants d’honneur and other attendants through a drill with their toy harquebuses and swords. At the end of the show Monsieur de Sully gave the Dauphin fifty crowns, which his mock soldiers seized out of his hands so quickly that he had scarce time even to feel them. At last but one piece remained, which he held fast in spite of the efforts of Madame de Monglat’s tailor to get it from him. “ Hé hé, he’s trying to take it from me! ” shouted the child. Madame de Monglat took it, gathered together all the rest of the coins from the reluctant hands of their possessors, and kept them all. The prince did not complain, but soon after he said, “ But I, too, was a soldier, and I did n’t get any money.”

Herouard always maintained that a certain reluctance to both spend and give, which characterized Louis in later years, was the direct result of Madame de Monglat’s teaching and example.

Theoretically, the Dauphin was the head of the household at St. Germain, and though the discipline to which he was subjected was severe enough, the theory was carried out in all seriousness. The difference made between him and his own brothers and sisters was considerable. They called him “ Monsieur ” and “ papa petit.” Between him and his legitimatized half brothers and sisters, the children of Beaufort, Verneuil, Essars, and Moret, the gap was enormous. By them the simple Monsieur was generally changed into “ mon maître,” whereas he called them “ féfé ” and “ sœu-sœu,” in distinction from the “mon frère ” and “ ma sœur ” which he used to his legitimate brothers and sisters. The Dauphin from his earliest infancy was under no illusion concerning these féfés and sœusœus. “ They are another race of dogs,” said he one day to some one who spoke of the Duke and Chevalier of Vendôme as his brothers. “ My race is the best, and then féfé Vendôme and féfé Chevalier, and then féfé Verneuil, and then that little Moret comes last.” When he heard of “ that little Moret’s ” birth, he sobbed out: “ He’s not papa’s ; he’s his mother’s. I will give you a hundred blows if you call him my brother.”

One day, Herouard records the following conversation : “Monsieur le Dauphin, Madame des Essars has a daughter. There is another sœu-sœu for you. Papa intends to have her brought here for the christening, and you are to be godfather.” “ How will they bring her ? ” he asked. “ In a litter, Monsieur.” “Ah, yes,” said he, nodding his head and smiling; “ and if it were mamma’s litter I would climb upon the mules, and I would make them run so and run so till they tumbled down.”

Once, when he was three years old, he came into the castle chapel, — St. Louis’s chapel, which no one will ever see again except in the brand-new copy which the Republic has had built, — and there found the Chevalier and Mademoiselle de Vendôme saying their prayers on hassocks. Now the use of hassocks in church was a privilege of the blood royal, and the Dauphin was enraged at the presumption of his half brother and sister. “ Get up, get off there ! ” he shouted. “ Pray to God on the floor.” And the two children obeyed. But in spite of some outbursts of jealousy, the Dauphin was fond of his half-brothers, Alexandre, Chevalier de Vendôme, and Henri de Verneuil, whilst they were all boys together. On one occasion, when the Chevalier left for a long absence, Louis, with ill-suppressed tears, gave him a watch because it was his very own to give. After any separation, he eagerly welcomed both him and Verneuil back to St. Germain. At the same time, whilst we read of the jealous ill will which occasionally the Dauphin undoubtedly showed toward his half brothers and sisters, it is interesting to remember the various fates which befell them in after years when he had ascended the throne. Alexandre, Chevalier de Vendôme, was left to die in prison ; Moret fell on the battlefield fighting the King ; the Duke of Vendôme and his sister, then Duchess of Elbœuf, lived exiled from court, and often in a foreign land ; Henri de Verneuil found safety in insignificance.

The family of children at St. Germain, however, did not always submit to the Dauphin’s whims. One quaint little scene shows his eldest sister standing up for the rest. The King had directed Madame de Monglat to give the Vendôme and Verneuil children their dinner with the Dauphin and his sisters. Louis received the order to allow Verneuil and the Chevalier to dine with him as a terrible insult. “ Valets should not dine with their masters,” he said angrily. Little Madame Elizabeth preached at him from her end of the table : “ Ha Jésus, Monsieur, you must not do like that. Nobody thinks you the King’s only son. One must n’t have fancies. One gets spanked for them, — smack, — smack. Mamanga will whip you.” The Dauphin held his peace, for whipping was no empty threat in the nursery at St. Germain.

When Louis was six years old, the King thus wrote to Madame de Monglat, the “ mamanga ” of nursery language : “ I am vexed with you because you have not sent me word that you have whipped my son, for I wish and command you to whip him every time he is willful or naughty, knowing by my own experience that nothing will do him so much good.” And yet to modern ideas Madame de Monglat does not, seem to have erred on the side of leniency. From the time the little prince was two years old “ fouetté pour être opiniâtre ” was a very frequent entry of Herouard’s.

In spite, however, of the Dauphin’s outbursts of tyranny in the nursery, the children were really fond of one another ; Louis and Elizabeth, who was afterward Queen of Spain, were especially attached. He admitted her to as much equality with himself as a girl could hope for from one born to be a king. They shared a good deal of their life together ; indeed, they were even popped into the same bath. This is Herouard’s entry, which in its way is as striking as anything in the book : “ 2 August, 1608. Bathed for the first time, put into the bath, and Madame with him. He rubbed himself with the vine leaves.” The Dauphin was seven, and “ Madame,” as Elizabeth was always called, a year younger. True, an entry in his fourth year testifies to the fact that he had his feet washed with a damp cloth ; when he was six, Herouard says : “ They washed his feet in tepid water in the Queen’s basin. It was the first time.” But such events are rarely recorded. Baths were obviously medicinal, and were strewn with vine leaves or fresh rose petals to impart healing properties. In one such bath Louis sailed a little fleet of boats laden with the wet red roses, saying they were bound for India and Goa, He stayed in the water for three quarters of an hour, and passed the day in bed to recover from the fatigue. Happily, when he was eight years old his father taught him to swim in the Seine, and afterward he was fond of the pastime. In later years he frequently indulged in a bath in his own room. Even as a child he did not like dirt nor the grossnesses of life which disfigured his nursery ; and he very early began to develop that love of privacy and decorum which made his court such a contrast to the warm, wanton rush of life in which men lived in the days of Henri le Grand.

Nothing is odder in the customs which prevailed in St. Germain-en-Laye than the access which all classes had to the castle. One day a peddler woman from Paris found her way into the Dauphin’s nursery, and amused him by her rough dancing. Another time Louis refused to eat his dinner until three gypsies had been turned out of the room ; they smelt, he declared. During another dinner “ he sat silent, carried away by the joy of hearing a flageolet played by a lame beggar. After playing some time the man said in a gruff voice, ‘ Monsieur, drink to me.’ The Dauphin turned red, and cried, ' I wish him to go.’ ' But, Monsieur,’said I [writes Dr. Jean Herouard], ' he is a poor man ; you must not send him away like that.’ ' Poor people must not come here.’ ' Not even if they play as well as he does ? ’ I asked. ' Let him play downstairs. I was amazed at him. I drink only to papa and mamma.’ ”

To drink to a person was a compliment which a Dauphin paid to very few. Gypsies Louis always especially disliked to have near him. Once when a company of them found their way into the great hall of the castle to celebrate a wedding by a dance, — as was the custom among all the poor in the neighborhood, — he commanded his gentlemen not to dance with them. “You shall not touch the hands of those horrid women ; they are so dirty,” he said. “ I shall have a great fagot of juniper lighted in the hall to purify it.”

When he was deputed by the King to take his place in the Maundy Thursday ceremony of washing the feet of the poor, Louis rebelled. “ I ’ll wash the girls’ feet,” he said, “ but not the boys’. But when he stood before the outstretched feet, basin and towel before him, and the princes of the blood and the great officers of the household on either hand, he shrank back in disgust. “ I won’t; they smell! ” he sobbed. “But the King does it,” urged Madame de Monglat. “ Ah, but I ’m not the King,” answered the Dauphin.

And yet many instances of kindness prove that this shrinking from the poor was a shrinking of taste, and not of heart. As a child he was generally sensitive to suffering, whether of men or animals. He who hated of all things to ask a favor would beg a soldier off punishment, or stop a bear fight because of his pity for the dogs, or bid an old man sit in his presence, or cry at the sight of his mother chiding an attendant. His care of the birds snow-bound in the great frost of 1608 is one among many instances of his love of animals. “ They cannot keep the Dauphin near the fire,” writes Herouard. “ He is always by the windows overlooking the meadows. Whilst writing my ink freezes. He supped at a quarter to seven. The cover froze to the glass and the glass to the ‘ tasting dish ’ [for the Dauphin had his taster as the King had]. At supper he told me all about the little birds caught in the snow, which he had had put in an aviary on his balcony.

“ ‘ I have a company of birds,’ he said. ‘ There is a chaffinch who is the captain, and another chaffinch who is the lieutenant, and another who is the ensign. There is a lark who is the drummer, and a goldfinch who is the piper. And every day I have an earthen pot of hot ashes put there, and they come round it, two by two, to warm themselves, and they sing. And then I put wine in the water they drink, and the drummer got drunk.’ ”

Louis must have got the wine from some of his attendants, for it was not served at his table until after he had, at the age of eight, left St. Germain for the Louvre. Herouard disapproved of wine, and early taught Louis those habits of temperance which he practiced throughout life. The child preached what he learnt. One day his sister Elizabeth came to sup with him at the Louvre.

“ Sister,” said he, “ you are too young to drink wine. Now I am eight years old I drink it, but I am a year older than you. Butler Giles, don’t give my sister wine. She is too young.”

Some of the most interesting entries in the journal are those which describe the children’s games and pastimes. In a land like France, where a nobleman would sooner serve in the army as a common soldier than not serve at all, and where dueling was practiced to an extent which was the despair of the government and an outrage to the feelings of other nations, it was natural that games of soldiers should be the most popular. Toy swords and harquebuses, mimic armor, drilling and sentry duties, even lead soldiers and toy cannon, were the joy of the Dauphin and his companions. When the child is four years old his doctor writes, “ He seems cramful of war and weapons.” But children always have played at soldiers, and probably always will; it is more interesting to learn what other and more peaceable amusements they had three hundred years ago. These children played with paints and brushes, they dirtied their pinafores with mud pies, they had dolls and toy carts, and above all figures and animals of every kind made in the potteries at Fontainebleau. Sometimes they made gardens, and sometimes houses with the stones and mortar which the builders of Henri’s new castle left lying about. Occasionally very elaborate toys were given them, as when Madame Elizabeth received a toy room with a decapitated Holofernes lying abed in it, while Judith stood by contemplating his head. Now and then curious glimpses into character can be got from the children’s games. The Dauphin, for instance, one day, almost before he could speak, revealed his dislike of Concini, his mother’s favorite. The child was playing at coach with four dolls who represented the Queen and her ladies. “ Where’s my wife’s place, Monsieur ? ” asked Concini. “ Ugh,” said the Dauphin, pointing to a little ledge outside the back of the toy coach. That was good enough for the Queen’s foster sister, Madame Concini. Fourteen years later Louis looked on while Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre, fell murdered on the bridge of the Louvre. A few weeks afterward his miserable wife was carried through the streets of Paris to the place of her execution.

Some of the Dauphin’s keenest pleasures were found in painting and music ; for Florence, with all her glorious traditions of art, threw her influence over this son of a Medici. Louis was always skillful in whatever was to be done by the hand, and in nothing did he show this more in early childhood than in his use of paints and brushes. As an older boy he excelled in the construction of mechanical toys, and it is interesting to remember that this dexterity and love of handicrafts reappeared in his descendant Louis XVI. a hundred and fifty years after. To illustrate the Dauphin’s love of painting Herouard tells the following anecdote of him in his sixth year: “He pretended to be asleep this morning for fear of a whipping for his naughtiness the night before.” (It was a disagreeable custom to whip the children in the early morning for their willfulness overnight, — a habit which was continued after Louis became King when he was eight years old.) “ The Dauphin begged Madame de Monglat not to punish him, and 1 all day I will be so good. I ’ll say my prayers and repeat my verses, and I will paint you a beautiful little cherubim.’

“ ‘ Oh, you don’t know how to paint fine weather,’ answered Madame de Monglat.

“ ‘ Yes, I do. I should take white, and then blue, and then flesh color, and for the sun I should take yellow and red ; and then I should take white and yellow and make a face, and that would be the moon.’ ”

Somewhere up above the nursery Herouard had a little study, which was often a refuge for the child on wet days. There was kept Gesner’s animal book, the atlas, and the book of Roman antiquities, wherein Louis saw, not Coliseums and Pantheons, but Fontainebleau, where the happy autumn months of every year were passed. There, too, Herouard told stories, — charming nonsense stories to the baby Dauphin, stories of St. Louis and Daniel and Goliath as the child grew older.

“ I shall learn all the stories in the Bible,” said Louis, after listening to the history of Goliath, and tell them to papa, because they are true. My sister will tell stories of the wasp who stung the goat’s back, which are not true, but I shall tell only true stories.”

Herouard’s Bible stories must have been better teaching for Louis than the sort of religious education which he picked up from the women who surrounded him. The following conversation with his nurse, when he was three years old, is a good example. She was endeavoring to extract something of a moral out of a furious storm of passion into which he had fallen with his father and his gouveruante.

“ Monsieur,” said she, “ you have been very naughty. You must not do so.”

“ I ’ll kill mamanga, I ’ll kill all the world, I ’ll kill God ! ” he answered with great sobs.

“ Oh no, Monsieur, you must not kill God ; you drink his blood every time you drink wine,” answered the nurse.

“ Do I drink the blood of the good God? Then I won’t kill him.” The passion was calmed, but at the cost of how strange a chaos of belief !

Besides the pleasure of the picture books and the stories which supplied a large part of Louis’s scanty education, Herouard also taught him how to write letters to his father and mother. Surely no more natural and charming letters exist than these, of which, fortunately for us, the doctor has preserved copies in his journal. Here is the first, written in the baby talk which the child used whilst the doctor guided the little fingers over the paper. The trilled r is missing, and sometimes the l, for it was long before Louis could pronounce these letters.

Juin, 1604 (not quite three years old).

Papa ie say ben equivé non pa enco lisé. Moucheu de Oni m’a annoié un home amé et un beau caoche ou é ma maitesse l’infante, é une belle poupée a theu-theu. I m’a pomi un beau gan li pou couché, ie ne sui pus peti anfan. Jay ben chan dan raon bechau, ma pume est fo pesante ie ne pui pu equivé, ie vous baise te humbleman lé main papa é à ma bone maman é sui papa vote te humbe é te obeissan fis é cheuiteu.

DAUFIN.

What with Louis’s lisp and the doctor’s spelling, a translation seems not unnecessary. The Monsieur de ’Oni is Rosny, soon afterward Duke of Sully, the famous Surintendant. The Infanta is Anne of Austria, afterward Louis’s wife, and always the subject of much nursery jesting. The sœu-sœu is probably Madame Elizabeth, for at three the Dauphin had not mastered the more formal “ ma sœur,” and Rosny is not likely to have brought Mademoiselle de Vendôme, generally known as sœu-sœu, a doll.

Papa, I know how to write, but not how to read. Monsieur de Rosny has sent me a man in armor and a fine coach with my mistress the Infanta in it, and a beautiful doll to sissy. He has promised me a fine big bed to sleep in. I am not a little child any longer. I was very hot in my cradle. My pen is very heavy, I cannot write any more. I very humbly kiss your hands, papa, and my dear mamma’s, and am, papa, your very humble and very obedient servant.

DAUPHIN.

The following letter to Queen Marie de Medici, written when he was four, is perhaps one of the prettiest of them all ; it is, moreover, the only childish letter addressed to his mother. Henri often wrote in reply, but Louis one day asked wistfully why his mother never wrote. “ Papa tells me,” he said, “ that she makes ever so many smudges ; but if she wrote to me, even if there were smudges, I should take care of the .letter.”

October 17, 1605.

Mamma, I want so much to see you and ray little brother of Orleans, and if you do not come soon, I shall get my white riding coat and my stockings and boots, and I shall get on my little horse and go patata, patata. Mamma, I shall start to-morrow, early in the morning, for fear of the flies. Mamma, they tell me you have something pretty for me, and I want so much to see it. Do come, dear mamma. It is such fine weather, and you will find me so good. Meantime I am, mamma, your very humble and very obedient son.

DAUPHIN.

As for the baby he was in such a hurry to see, when it arrived in the following February, it turned out to be a girl. The Dauphin eagerly desired to have a brother, and when not only Orleans but Anjou was born, he said proudly, “Now we are three to serve papa.”

In spite of the fact that Henri was a severe and often impatient father, it is clear that his children regarded him with great affection. He teased them and chastised them, but he also loved them with an almost feminine tenderness. Certainly no childish impression more profoundly modified Louis’s life than his love and reverence for his father; not all his mother’s adverse teaching, not all her wanton undoing of Henri’s work, could efface this impression from the mind of the boy. The uncertain driftings of the early years of his reign, after the fall of the regent, were but efforts to return to the policy which Henri had cherished, and Marie de Medici had overthrown ; and Richelieu’s limitless power in later years was possible only because Louis recognized in his minister these opinions and aspirations which he associated with the memory of his father. It is impossible to give the many anecdotes which would illustrate how ready the Dauphin was to adopt his father’s tastes and prejudices, and how lastingly they stayed by him ; but two little stories will serve to show how fond they were of each other. Henri often rode out to St. Germain to visit his children and share in their games. One day, as he was leaving, Louis followed him to the top of the staircase, silent and sad.

“ What, my son, have you not a word to say to me ? ” asked the King. “ Are you not going to kiss me when I go away ? ”

The Dauphin began to cry silently, doing his best to hide his tears before all the company. The King, changing color and nearly crying himself, took him in his arms, kissed and embraced him, saying : “ I shall say as God says in the Scriptures, ‘ My son, I am well pleased to see these tears. I will give heed to them.’ ”

“ When Monsieur le Dauphin got back to his room, I [Jean Herouard] asked him what the King had said. ‘ He told me to learn to shoot an harquebus,’ answered the Dauphin. I pressed him, but he stuck to it. I left him, and he cried long and heartily.”

The last of the Dauphin’s birthdays that the father and child ever passed together was celebrated by a little feast. The King drank to the Dauphin’s health.

“ My son,” he said, “I pray God I shall be able to give you a whipping twenty years hence.”

“ No, no, if you please, papa.”

“ What, don’t you want me to be able ? ”

“ No, no, if you please.”

Eight months later, Henri’s murdered body was brought back to the Louvre. “ Ah, if I had only been there with my sword ! ” sobbed the little eight-year-old King. A few mornings after, his nurse found him lying awake in his bed, sad and thoughtful.

“ What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“ Nurse, I am wishing so hard that my father had lived twenty years longer, and that I were not King.”

Lucy Crump.