4 - The debacle

Summary

War against Europe

[1688] France was in perfect tranquility: we knew as arms only those instruments necessary for turning over the earth and for building; we used the troops for those purposes … to change the course of the Eure so that the fountains of Versailles could play continuously.

Mme. de Lafayette, like so many observers, reveled in that sweet spring and early summer of 1688. The king's sister-in-law, Elisabeth Charlotte (Liselotte) von der Pfalz, so often upset in those years because of affairs in her native Palatinate, seems positively giddy in a letter to her half-brother Karl Ludwig:

My dearest Carllutz. It has been a few days since I received your welcome letter of 23 April, but it has been impossible for me to answer it before now. For I was at Versailles when I received it, and since we had not been there for a whole month, I received so many visits and also participated so assiduously in the hunting that I had no time myself in which I could write.

Less than three months later, her beloved Karl Ludwig would be dead, a victim of fever at the siege of Negroponte, fighting on the side of France's enemies. Her son, the future Regent of France, would soon be in nominal charge (under the actual command of marshal Boufflers) of the armies that savaged the Palatinate in her name, in one of the most famous military atrocities of the seventeenth century, one not forgotten even today in the Rhineland.