The firstborn son of Great Hetman Jan Sobieski and Maria Kazimiera de la Grange d’ Requiem was born in Paris on 2 November 1667. The healthy and chubby baby received the names Jakub (after his grandfather, the castellan of Cracow) and Ludwik (in honour of Louis XIV, who held the crying six months-old infant at a christening). Little Jakub evoked strong paternal feelings in Sobieski, but Maria Kazimiera too remained greatly concerned, recalling her own difficult experiences of motherhood. Despite such extremely promising beginnings and subsequent successes, it became apparent that fate treated the oldest offspring of the Sobieski family unkindly.
Everything that Jakub Ludwik managed to achieve (the duchy of Oława and affiliation, via marriage, with Emperor Leopold I Habsburg) never compensated for his ”hetman” or ”marshal” birth, carefully pointed out by his political opponents. The opposition generously spread libellous rumours about suspicious friendships with young boys and the fact that ladies in waiting had spoiled the prince, and accused him of becoming Frenchified. No one took pity on the prince’s appearance and character, although admittedly those suspiciously concurrent negative assessments seem to be much exaggerated. On the other hand, Jakub Ludwik unquestionably had a difficult character (he was apodictic, distrustful, suspicious, jealous, curt and bitter), moulded in an atmosphere of disillusionment and disappointment. His contemporaries perceived him as a ridiculous partner (”Dudek – Jakubek”) in a failed marriage to Ludwika Karolina Radziwiłł, and then as an unworthy son, who behaved scandalously after the death of his father and became embroiled in shocking controversies with his own mother, as a defeated candidate to the throne and soon after as an exile, dishonourably banished from Oława. Let us add abduction and imprisonment in the Königstein fortress upon the order of Augustus II, attempts at poisoning the prince and the death of his hopelessly ill wife. Jakub Ludwik spent the last bitter years of his life alone, in his ancestors’ cattle in Żółkiew, involved in alchemy and the cabala. Paralysed, he died there on 19 December 1737 as the last member of the Sobieski family.
Portraits of Jakub Ludwik Sobieski, confirming a physical similarity to his mother, a celebrated beauty, decidedly negate all accounts about his unsightly facial features and supposedly repulsive figure. Take the example of an oil painting by an unidentified Silesian artist from the end of the seventeenth century (in the Wilanów collections), reproduced as a woodcut by Julian Scheele in Jan Sobieski, jego rodzina, towarzysze broni i wspołczesne zabytki, an album by Józef Łoski, published in Warsaw in 1883.
