Louis XIV, king of France and Navarra, by Lebrun (abt. 1661)
“[Queen] Anne’s production of a child within a fortnight of her thirty-seventh birthday in the twenty-third year of her marriage [with Louis XIII] and sixteen years after her last pregnancy is indeed a mystery … Louis XIV’s recent biographer, Anthony Levi [Louis XIV, 2005], is convinced that Cardinal Mazarin, Anne’s lover, future prime minister and possible husband, was the father … Levi has to do some fancy footwork with dates to get Mazarin in the right place at the right time. But his greatest challenge is to square Louis XIII’s suspicious vindictiveness with acceptance of his wife’s pregnancy. Levi has to argue that it was all Richelieu’s idea and that he sold the plot to the king as the only way to defeat Gaston’s [duke of Orléans, brother of Louis XIII]ambitions [he was Louis’s designated successor from 1610 until Louis XIV’s birth in 1638] and guarantee the dynasty’s survival. … The greatest stumbling block is how the story, if true, never progressed beyond the gutter tittle-tattle … (R. Wilkinson, Louis XIV [London 2007], p. 12)