The Character of Louis XIII

HEROARD'S JOURNAL: AN UNEXAMPLED RECORD OF A POLITICAL FIGURE This essay is ultimately about the relationship between Richelieu and Louis XIII. But the events with which it is primarily concerned begin with the king's earliest years, and are revealing of the distinctive role in shaping the monarch's character of his premier medecin, Jean Heroard. This inquiry is made possible by the diary which the physician started in I60I, the year of his patient's birth, and faithfully kept for more than a quarter of a century. Biographers of political figures have often regretted the absence of records of their subjects' early behavior. Continuous, systematic observation of any infant or child over a prolonged period-not to say more than a few years-is uncommon. Organized efforts to engage educated mothers as diarists of their own babies have typically produced scanty results. Psychoanalytic work on infantile development still relies chiefly on the symptomatology and retrospection of older children and adults, and most clinical approaches to infant behavior have sampled the activities of their subjects rather than catalogued them.2 Yet, Heroard's chronicle covers almost continuously a span of twenty-six and a half years, amounting to nine thousand days of minute observations in orderly entries of almost identical form.3 Despite its uniqueness in combination of time-span-covered and richness of intimate detail, the value of the doctor's production has not been fully appreciated. Historians have ignored it, used it tangentially, and even misused it. Its existence has been known almost since it was begun: The man who was to be the dauphin's first physician started it as a daily record of his about-to-be-born patient.4 Louis himself helped to edit it while

Art · Character (mathematics) · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Mathematics · Medical History and Innovations · Psychology

• "Comments on Lewis a. Dexter's "Court Politics

  Open Access•Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, Dan H Fenn et al.•Administration & Society•1977

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