Costumes for the Polish masquerade - portraits of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière by Joseph Werner the Younger, circa 1664

 

The two portraits are painted in gouache on parchment, each fourteen by eleven inches.

Louise de La Vallière would have been not quite twenty when this was painted.

Louis XIV, king of France from the age of four had, in 1660, at the age twenty-two, made a dynastic marriage with an infanta of Spain. But it wasn't until the following year that he is said to have fallen in love for the first time. The young lady in question was the seventeen-year old Louise de La Vallière, a maid of honour to the king's sister-in-law. She was neither a great beauty nor brilliant, but she had lovely ash-blond hair, a beautiful complexion, and a sweet smile that reflected her gentle nature. And though she had one leg shorter than the other, she was a graceful and accomplished dancer and horsewoman - both activities very important to the king - and Louis was captivated by her. And unlike so many royal mistresses, before and since, she was not at all interested in the many gifts and titles the king showered on her, and she resisted all attempts to embroil her in palace intrigues; she was only ever in love with the man, not the king. But she was also very religious, greatly embarrassed by her position, and mortified by being placed more and more in the spotlight. 

Their intimate relationship would last six years and she bore her royal lover five children, though only two of whom would survive infancy. Not by nature or exalted rank inclined to be faithful, the king's passion for his retiring mistress eventually cooled. And in 1667 he took up with the beautiful and fiery Françoise-Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan, at the same time legitimizing his two surviving children with Louise and raising her to the rank of duchesse. Curiously, the king refused to let her leave court, throwing the two mistresses - one current, the other former - together, to Louise's great distress. Eventually, after years of enduring this awkward and painful situation, and becoming ever more religious, she attempted to retire to a convent. But she did so without the king's permission and was compelled to return to court. Finally, though, in 1674, a full seven years after her relationship with the king had ended, she was allowed to leave. She entered the Carmelite convent in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques and the following year she pronounced her perpetual vows as a Carmelite nun under the name of Sister Louise of Mercy. And at the age of sixty-five, after thirty-six years of religious life, she died and was buried in the cemetery of her convent.

According to a letter from the prince de Condé to the Queen of Poland, a large Polish-style masquerade was held at court on 29 February 1664.

Louis XIV turned twenty-six in September of 1664.

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Joseph Werner the Younger (22 June 1637, Bern – 21 September 1710, Bern),  Swiss painter, known for miniatures, and called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, also a painter. First taught by his father, he furthered his studies in Frankfurt before going to Rome. He then traveled to France where he painted portraits of the king and many of the court notables, as well as contributing to the decoration of Versailles. He later worked at the courts of Augsburg, Berlin, and Dresden. His two sons also became successful artists.

The marquise de Montespan at the château de Clagny, by Henri Gascar

The château de Clagny was a lavish French palace that once stood in the town of Versailles, just northeast of the royal château. It was built between 1674 and 1680 to the designs of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, premier architecte du roi, for Louis XIV's beautiful and mercurial maîtresse-en-titre, the marquise de Montespan. Its construction reportedly employed 1,200 workers and cost more than two million livres. The royal gardener André Le Nôtre created the gardens, which looked west toward the much larger palace of Versailles, of which Clagny was a sort of smaller version. In 1685, as their affair gradually ended, Louis XIV gave the magnificent estate to Madame de Montespan. At her death in 1707, Clagny was inherited by their oldest son, the duc du Maine - the King had had the children born during their affair legitimized - who, in turn, passed it on to his son, the prince de Dombes. The latter leaving no issue, the château reverted to the French crown in 1766. And although it was among the most important of the private residences designed by the great architect and an even greater landscape designer, after suffering years of neglect the château was demolished in 1769.

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Plan of Versailles - ville, château, and parc - in 1700, showing the location of Clagny at bottom right.

Detail of above.

Plan of château and gardens of Clagny in the seventeenth century.

Allegorical portrait of Montespan at Clagny; the putto holds a medallion of the King.

Plan of château and gardens of Clagny in 1730.

The château de Clagny in the eighteenth century.

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And before we bid the lady farewell, an unrelated but very characteristic image: La Toilette de Montespan, French School, circa 1670s.

Louis III de Bourbon-Condé, duc de Bourbon, duc de Montmorency, duc d'Enghien, 6th prince de Condé, comte de Sancerre, comte de Charolais, seigneur de Chantilly, Prince du sang - unknown artist, circa 1690

Louis de Bourbon (10 November 1668, Paris - 4 March 1710, Versailles), French "Prince of the Blood" and member of the reigning House of Bourbon at the court of Louis XIV. His parents were Henri Jules de Bourbon, duc d'Enghien, and Anne Henriette of Bavaria; he was thus the grandson of le Grand Condé. One of ten children, he was his parents' only surviving son and styled as the duc de Bourbon from birth. He succeeded his father as prince de Condé, only a year before his own death.

In 1685 at the age of seventeen, he was married to Louise Françoise de Bourbon - known at court as mademoiselle de Nantes - the eldest legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and the king's mistress, Madame de Montespan. Many at court were shocked by the proposed union of a full-blooded prince du sang and a royal bastard and, indeed, by the king's ongoing programme of engineering prestigious marriages for his extra-marital offspring. But the head of the House of Condé, le Grand Condé, agreed to the shockingly unequal match in the hope of gaining favor with the bride's father.

Made a chevalier du Saint-Esprit in 1686, a colonel of the Bourbon-Infanterie Regiment later that same year, a maréchal de camp in 1690, and a lieutenant general in 1692, Monsieur le Duc, as he was called at court, and his wife had nine children, all of whom lived well into adulthood. This was rather unusual for the time, and all the more so since their father was never anything like a fine specimen of health or good breeding. Macrocephalic, while not quite a dwarf, he was extremely short, and had a complexion with a markedly yellowish-orange cast to it. Of his parent's ten children, only he and four of his sisters had survived past the age of five, and his sisters were so petite that they were referred to at court as poupées du sang "dolls of the Blood" or, less kindly, as "the little black beetles" because, in addition to their lack of stature, some of them were dark of complexion and/or bent.

Their father, also quite short and considered "repulsive" in appearance had been, in addition, mentally unstable throughout most of his life. Violent, he had frequently beaten his good-natured, sympathetic wife and terrorized his children. It is said that his son and heir also suffered from mental illness toward the end of his life. He died at the age of forty-one, only eleven months after his father, following an attack of apoplexy.