This article examines a major figure of the court of Louis XIV who has never received a full academic study. Such an analysis demonstrates a number of things: that, contrary to much recent scholarship on homosexual identities and relationships in the early modern period, long-term partnerships did exist, although they were unorthodox; and that, like other royal favourites, the Chevalier de Lorraine maintained his position at the top of a powerful court hierarchy through both the support of his family and a prominent patronage network.
Patronage in particular is examined, citing both usages of clientage and brokerage, as the chief means for self-enrichment and survival at the court of France in this period. He left behind a widow and a son, but also a significant male favourite, with whom he had shared his life for nearly forty years: Philippe, Chevalier de Lorraine. Several contemporaries noted the gesture, and added that the Chevalier retained the rooms, but refused the pension.
But he was the younger son of a younger son and arrived at the French court with little but his birth and his good looks to support him. At the end of his life, the Chevalier de Lorraine could consider himself secure, with a large income and a powerful patronage network.
Terminology used usually refers to the Chevalier as nefarious, greedy and corrupt. Was there love? One contemporary memoirist details how the Chevalier de Lorraine continued to use his sexual prowess to seduce women in order to press them for secrets much to the annoyance of the first Madame, whose secrets they were. We know from a reliable source, his own wife, that she herself burned many of his papers kept in a chest shortly after his death.
In a way such a study offers a parallel to examinations of royal mistresses as favourites and patrons. This wider impact highlights the important fact that all members of an early modern court society, male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, were members of a dynastic or kin group first, and individuals second. This forms a significant component in our understanding of the functioning of elite society in early modern Europe. It also highlights research being done on other court spaces aside from that of the king: the queen, his brother, his cousins.
