Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court by Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars

Abstract

Reviewed by: Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court by Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars Gabrielle Verdier Gigault de Bellefonds, Marie, Marquise de Villars. Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court. Ed. and trans. Nathalie Hester. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 80. Iter Press, 2021. Pp [i]-xi; 100. ISBN 978-1-64959-010-7. $41.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-64959-011-4 (eBook). Bellefonds-Villars, as Nathalie Hester calls Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars to distinguish her from her husband, the Marquis Pierre de Villars, Ambassador to Savoy and Spain, was a member of the illustrious coterie of female letter writers in seventeenth-century France that included Madame de Sévigné. Unlike them and Madame de Coulanges (wife of Sévigné's first cousin) to whom she addresses thirty-seven letters from her time in Madrid (November 1679-May 1681), Bellefonds-Villars occupied a perilous position at a sensitive time in Franco-Spanish relations, one that had worldwide implications. She joined her husband at the royal court in Madrid several months after the ambassador had arrived to prepare the marriage of Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Louis XIV's niece, to the king of Spain, the disabled Carlos II. Would the French princess produce a successor to the Habsburg dynasty in Spain? Who would inherit the vast Spanish Empire, from Peru to the Philippines? As a woman, Bellefonds-Villars had special access to the young Queen's private spaces, which was denied the ambassador in the strictly gendered Spanish court. Bellefonds-Villars's writing is as delicate as her position at court, as Hester so deftly analyzes in her twenty-page introduction. Though ambassadrice (the title given to the wife of the ambassador), she should in no way be perceived as influencing the French princess in her new role as queen of Spain at a court and with a king who hated the French. Yet Louis XIV expected her to watch, guide, [End Page 194] and report on eighteen-year-old Marie-Louise who turned to her mature compatriot for company and comfort. Bellefonds-Villars's familiar letters to her friends in France thus become subtly diplomatic letters that inform while concealing by omission, indirection, and irony. The writer invites her readers to read between the lines, even to understand the opposite of what she writes. The unusual relation between Carlos and Marie-Louise—his probable impotence, her flourishing health, their paltry amusements, prescribed travels to three royal palaces, suffocating court etiquette and intrigues, worsening economic misery in Spain, and deadly boredom—all must be understood on several levels, including what is left unsaid. Hester's rich notes uncover these layers of meaning. Since letters to individual correspondents were read out loud in the salons and beyond, Bellefonds-Villars's information was bound to reach the Sun King. At stake were her own reputation and the Villars's future, as she suggests in apprehensive comments. Indeed, what she feared would come to pass. Complaints about the ambassadrice, attributed to Carlos II, reached Louis XIV; to maintain diplomatic relations at all costs, the Sun King recalled his ambassador, and Bellefonds-Villars was scapegoated. She left Madrid in May 1681; her husband followed in August of the same year. While anchoring Bellefonds-Villars's letters within seventeenth-century French women's social epistolary writing, Hester rightly highlights their unique nature, their diplomatic role. Bellefonds-Villars was the only épistolière who was also an ambassadrice. Not only does she observe—and influence—historical figures, the Villars endure the hardships of ambassadorial life with a miserable income in Spain and frequent hostile attacks on their person and household. Thanks to such revelations and their exquisite style, Bellefonds-Villars's surviving letters to Mme de Coulanges were published posthumously in 1759 by Denis-Marius Perrin, the editor of Mme de Sévigné's letters, and reprinted several times. In the nineteenth century, they were included in three collections, along with letters by Mmes de La Fayette, de Tencin, de Coulanges, and Ninon de l'Enclos. Alfred de Courtois's comprehensive scholarly...