Reigning Cats and Dogs Pt 3

However much Louis loved his father, Henri IV was dead before the Prince's tenth birthday and his mother, Marie de Medici, never once kissed him, a view corroborated by the Grande Mademoiselle (daughter of Gaston d'Orléans and cousin of Louis XIV), who wrote: `My grandmother loved me deeply and showed me, so I have been told, much more tenderness than ever she had shown her own children:

Although Louis was brought up with Henri's ten bastard children, and thus was far from deprived of playmates of his own age, he early grew to dislike them and already by the age of four refused to eat with them. His first friends were the dogs of the gardes du corps. When he started to acquire his own pets at the age of four he organised them into a household, appointing his favourite, Cavalon, `premier chien'.

He was given a miniature black greyhound in 1605 by his cousin, the Duc de Longueville, which he named Charbon, but also had a chien d'Ostreland called Isabelle which slept on his bed at night. This was the dog he had with him while sitting for his portrait by Martin in 1606 and which `he caressed, kissed, called his sweetheart, for he adored dogs. The femme de chambre Mademoiselle Mercier said to him "Monsieur, those bearing arms should not have dogs with them [a reference to the Prince's martial attire for the portrait]", at which he quipped, "but they are good at nipping enemies' legs"' In all he had ten pet dogs as a child.

Not only were dogs uncritical of physical failings, but they exhibited a gentleness and tenderness often lacking in the human species. At Renaissance courts authority had been preferred to force, but the use of corporal punishment gradually spread from Protestant Germany across Europe and by the mid-sixteenth century had become common practice. Lady Jane Grey bewailed the fact that


When I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly as God made the world, else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and some ways I will not name for the honour I bear them, so without measure misordered that I think myself in Hell.


Louis was regularly whipped from the age of three with the approval of both his parents — though not of his physician Héroard, who warned that it was undermining the boy's health. Henri IV wrote to his son's nurse, Madame de Montglat, in 1607 insisting `it is my wish and my command that he be whipped every time he is stubborn or misbehaves, knowing full well from personal experience that nothing in the world is as efficacious'. On his birthday that same year Louis was taken to vespers at the Cordeliers to hear a Te Deum sung in his honour but, seeing one of the Franciscans holding a large whip to keep the dogs out, he took fright and went outside to hide in the elm grove from which nobody could persuade him to emerge. Lest it be thought that children of this period were psychologically inured to corporal punishment, it is interesting to note that when Louis became a father he never applied the whip to his own children, the future Louis XIV and Philippe, Duc d'Orléans.

On the frequent occasions when Louis was bitten, his parents normally took the side of the dog: once in 1608 the Prince went into the garden at Fontainebleau to await his father and in order to `raise his hat to Soldat, one of the King's dogs, which jumped up at him, taking him by surprise and reducing him to tears. The King upbraided him for being scared, and told him he must be afraid of nothing.'