PART TWO
CHAPTER 6
In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.
– La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
There is a rumour going round the court that the King is dreaming a little of Madame de Montespan': this was the Duc d'Enghien writing to the French-born Queen of Poland on 2 November 1666 with the gossip about her native country. Nine months later, the Comte de Saint-Maurice, the Ambassador of Savoy, reported that Louis could think of little else except the scintillating Marquise. By September 1667, Saint-Maurice was convinced that wherever the King happened to be, he made three (long) visits to the Marquise every day.1 Thus far had Athénaïs, born into the Mortemart family, travelled in the affections of the King, regardless of the fact that she was now very much a married woman, and the mother of two young children by her husband, the Marquis de Montespan.
Louise de La Vallière's third child, Marie-Anne, had been born on 2 October at the royal château of Vincennes (was it tenderness, tactlessness or sheer indifference that gave the baby the same name as the Queen's daughter who had died at Christmas the previous year?). The circumstances of the birth still had to be discreet, so far as was possible in the ritual intimacy of court arrangements. Henriette-Anne happened to be passing through her maid-of-honour's chamber on her way to the chapel just as Louise was experiencing the first pangs of childbirth.
‘Colic, Madame, an attack of colic,' Louise managed to gasp out. Keeping up the required fiction, Louise urged Dr Boucher, the accoucheur, to make sure the birth was successfully accomplished before Madame's return. Her room was filled with tuberoses so that their delicious, dominating perfume would cover up anything else in what had now become a delivery room. The doctor, who was by now after all a veteran of these natural–unnatural crises, succeeded. Louise, pale and exhausted, even managed to make that midnight court supper known under the Italian name of medianoche.2
Nevertheless, Marie-Anne's life was to be very different from that of the brothers who had been spirited away. Cared for at first by Madame Colbert, she grew up to be petted and adored; gifted with exceptionally pretty looks from childhood, graceful like her mother, she bade fair to be her father's favourite child. The little girl's status as the child of the King by his acknowledged mistress was made possible by the death of Queen Anne. Her mother's fortunes on the other hand were improving only in theory, not in practice. No semi-official rank could atone for the pain Louise felt and continued to feel at the King's ‘infidelities', which mocked the holy love she had believed they enjoyed (and paradoxically kept her in a state of sin). At least fatherhood was a claim that the King honoured: thus Louise rapidly conceived her fourth child after the birth of Marie-Anne. Unfortunately this also meant that Louise spent the vital year during which Athénaïs developed her ascendancy, yet again in a physically burdened state.
Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart was born on 5 October 1640.* She was thus about twenty-six when the King's eye first lit upon her in any context except that of an attendant on his wife. This was not the first flush of youth in a society where looks were supposed to decline after twenty. Athénaïs however was made to be different. She was astonishingly beautiful. She had long, thick, corn-coloured hair which curled artlessly about her shoulders when she was in a state of deshabille. Her eyes were huge, blue and very slightly exophthalmic; she had a pouting mouth. There was something at once sexy and imperious about her appearance that ravished the eye while her lusciously curved figure appealed to contemporary taste in contrast to that of slender Louise. This voluptuousness makes plausible at least one story by which Louis plotted to spy on her at her bath disguised as a servant; awestruck, he gave away his presence, at which Athénaïs laughingly dropped her towel.4
But Athénaïs was far, far more than a mere beauty, of whom there were, after all, large numbers at Versailles. She was high-spirited and amusing, with a special kind of drollery known as ‘the wit of the Mortemarts' which her family made famous. There were catchwords which baffled the uninitiated: Bourguignon for example stood for everything dull and dreary, Duc to one sister's dislike of her husband's Burgundian estates. A judgement would be delivered by a Mortemart with seeming innocence, even naïvety, what Saint-Simon called a ‘witty languishing manner', and yet in its own way it would be quite devastating.5 And certainly where Athénaïs was concerned, this lovely rose had thorns: later courtiers would dread passing under her windows at Versailles for fear of the comments she might make. Madeleine de Scudéry had commended elegant mockery as the consummate social weapon in an essay ‘Of Raillery'. ‘To mock well,' she wrote in 1653, ‘you must have a fiery intelligence, delicate judgement and a memory full of a thousand different things to use on different occasions.' All this was possessed by Athénaïs.6
The Rochechouart-Mortemarts of Lussac in Poitou were of ancient lineage and proud of it, the two grand families having been joined together by marriage in the thirteenth century.7 Gabrielle Marquise de Thianges, Athénaïs's clever elder sister, was known to tease the King on the subject: the Bourbons, with their Médicis merchant blood, were really a great deal less distinguished … In the meantime her love of opera and the theatre made Gabrielle intelligent company for the King, someone with whom he could enjoy readings by Racine and Boileau. Perhaps the cleverest sister of all was the third, Marie-Madeleine, who was obliged to discover she had a religious vocation by their father (he was having a problem paying dowries for so many daughters). She subsequently ran the convent of Fontevrault, where with her strong character and her remarkable learning – Latin, Greek and Hebrew were among her accomplishments – Marie-Madeleine was considered ‘the pearl of abbesses'. Louis liked her company too. A fourth daughter Marie-Christine really did discover her vocation; she spent her life as a nun at Chaillot, in a state of greater contentment no doubt, if less excitement, than her elder sisters.8
Then there was the single brother Louis-Victor Marquis de Vivonne before he inherited his father's title of Duc de Mortemart. Vivonne, two years older than the King, had been one of his Children of Honour, just as the Duc had been a boyhood companion of Louis XIII. Vivonne was so fat so young that he became the butt of the royal sense of humour. ‘Vivonne' – to use his surname alone was an extremely familiar form of address – ‘you get fatter every time I look at you,' said the King. ‘Ah, Sire,' replied Vivonne, ‘what a slander. There's no day when I don't walk four times round my cousin Aumale' (notoriously the fattest man at court). But Vivonne, bulky as he might be, was an intelligent man and a good soldier: one of his annoyances about his sister's rise to favour was that his career advancement might be attributed to it instead of to the talents on which he prided himself.9
The close royal connections of the Rochechouart-Mortemarts concealed the fact that their parents' marriage was not only unhappy – like so many arranged marriages of the time – but also upsettingly scandalous. One can see in the character of the father of Athénaïs all the unashamed sensuality which she would later make her own. The Duc de Mortemart was a hedonist to whom all pleasures were welcome: music and literature, food and drink, hunting – and of course sex. Diane de Grandseigne, the Duchesse de Mortemart, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne; a wise woman who loved music and the arts, she was also renowned for her piety and virtue. Instead of staying yoked in a marriage of convenience (which had bred five children), the Duc lived quite openly with his mistress, Marie Tambonneau, the wife of the head of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, in a way that flouted the conventions, loose as they were. Eventually the Duchesse retired to Poitou.
It is easy to look on Athénaïs as echoing the career of her father as a sensualist. But the profound embedded influence of her mother should not be forgotten, a woman who made an exceptionally holy death in 1664, surrounded by monks and priests. A pious mother was something she had in common with Louis XIV, and in fact the two women, the late Queen and the Duchesse de Mortemart, had been close friends. As a girl Athénaïs showed remarkable religious devotion, and as a young adult was noted for taking Communion once a week – that badge of virtue.
Yet for all her beauty, her intelligence and her vitality, which surely entitled her to a high position, there was something disappointed about Athénaïs at the moment she caught the King's eye – or perhaps, as we shall see, deliberately rolled her own magnetically large blue eyes in his direction. She was already twenty-two when a betrothal was arranged with Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoïlle. For Athénaïs and her sisters were not heiresses whose fortune made them objects of desire, despite their vaunted noble blood, and, as has been noted, the cheaper solution of religion had to be chosen for two of them.
Then the betrothal went wrong in a startling fashion. Her fiancé got involved as the second in a duel in which the Marquis d'Antin was killed, and he had to flee France.* The man left to pick up the pieces of this broken romance was Louis-Henri de Gondrin de Pardaillan, Marquis de Montespan, brother of the dead d'Antin, who paid Athénaïs a visit of condolence. As a result of his visit, this rearranged bridal couple were married at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on the eve of Lent 1663. Athénaïs said later in her amusing way that she had forgotten to bring the proper cushions for them to kneel on, and on sending in a hurry to the family home received some dog cushions from the porter …
Certainly the dog cushions brought no luck to a marriage which was clearly difficult from the first for two reasons. The first of these was debt: the young couple did not really have the wherewithal to meet the considerable expenses in terms of dress and entertainment of an aspiring court lady. The second, probably not unconnected to this comparative poverty, was the prickly character of the new husband. Good-looking in a saturnine way, Montespan was a Gascon, a traditionally proud and touchy race, the poorerthe prouder.* Where religion was concerned, he had Jansenist connections: his uncle Henri de Pardaillan, Archbishop of Sens, was a man of rigid piety with suspected Jansenist sympathies. This explained the fact that there were no royal signatures to the marriage contract, a favour which would normally have been bestowed on the daughter of the Duc and Duchesse de Mortemart.
Under these circumstances, there was not much for Montespan at court: his own character if not Jansenist was certainly unbending. For Athénaïs, from the first, the court had a great deal to offer. And as time would show, she was far from being the kind of woman derided by Madeleine de Scudéry in Sapho: someone who believed she was put on earth only to sleep, get pregnant, look beautiful and talk ‘foolishness'. Nor for that matter was she the type described by a Father Garasse in La Doctrine Curieuse for whom the choice was the distaff, the mirror or the needle (for men, it was book, sword or plough). Athénaïs had an irrepressible life force.10
Her first child Christine was born on 17 November 1663 and a son, Louis-Antoine, Marquis d'Antin (his dead uncle's title), the following September when the marriage was scarcely eighteen months old. Already Athénaïs was showing herself a goddess of fertility, yet child-bearing did not deter her. Two weeks after the birth of Christine, Athénaïs was dancing in a Court Ballet, just as she had danced immediately after her wedding. Then she enjoyed the sophisticated circles of the Hotel d'Albret, where clever women such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette discoursed with clever men at their feet – here was galanterie in its purest sense.11 Athénaïs formed friendships there: one of her friends was a young widow in struggling circumstances, Françoise Scarron, whose propriety, intelligence and moderation made her an agreeable member of any circle, if never the centre of it.
It was debt which caused the Marquis de Montespan to break away from the unsatisfactory court life and, along with his brother-in-law Vivonne, set off for a military career in the south.12 The measure of the Montespan poverty can be seen in the fact that thecouple found it very difficult to raise the money for the equipment needed (officers paid for their own uniforms, horses and so forth) and in 1667 Montespan sold his wife's diamond earrings. In the end Montespan was able to depart, leaving Athénaïs the reigning beauty of the court, alone with two small children. It was at this point that she may have looked round at her limited opportunities as the aristocratic wife of a poor man, and seen that there was one magnificent opening: to become the mistress of the King.
Louise de La Vallière was clearly falling from favour, and in any case was once more pregnant. In disappointment at what piety and virtue had brought her, it seems that Athénaïs decided to take her destiny in her own hands. Why not? She was old enough to know her own mind. She was not a royal parcel like Marie-Thérèse or a timid virgin like Louise. It was a brilliant solution to a life that Athénaïs did not feel was quite brilliant enough (she may not have anticipated exactly how brilliant – or how notorious – her new life was going to be).
The evidence is a story of the King being overheard saying to Monsieur: ‘She does what she can but I myself am not interested.' Possibly he instinctively ducked away from a woman who however beautiful was clearly not submissive. By November 1666 the report from the Duc d'Enghien quoted earlier showed that he had changed his mind. Somewhere between November 1666 and July 1667 Louis XIV seduced the Marquise de Montespan. Or was it the other way round? Either way, the great sexual adventure of his life was about to begin.
One of the maxims of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld which was peculiarly appropriate to Louis XIV in 1667 was his reflection on the human heart where ‘new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.13 But it was not only the passion for Athénaïs which was beginning to consume Louis. There was also the question of his personal glory: something to be established in the suitably glorious sphere of war. Gloire was an important word of the time, not only for the King, although he might seem to incarnate the general glory of France. Sometimes it could be equated with ambition, as Madame de Castries, daughter-in-law of Vivonne, was described as glorieuse for her husband. Generally it meant personal honour. Young girls at Saint-Cyr would be told to treasure their ‘bonne gloire', which meant never doing base things. In a king however, and above all for Louis XIV, glory meant military glory. Years later he would declare that ‘the passion for glory was definitely the leading passion of my soul'; he was talking the language of Corneille's military leader Le Cid, which had been impressed on him in youth.14 At the same time there was the glamour of possessing the most blatantly beautiful mistress: this was another kind of glory in the eyes of the world, including foreign ambassadors. The new Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, started in 1662 (following a fire), was centred by the artist Charles Le Brun on the device of the sun, symbolising the reputation of the young King;15 in the same way the gorgeous Athénaïs symbolised the richness of his private life. Both contributed to the gloire of Louis XIV.
When Louis XIV set out in the direction of Flanders on a military campaign in May 1667, he could fairly be said to be combining two new passions: he was commanding (if not leading) his troops and he was also accompanied by Madame de Montespan. The declaration of war on England the previous year in support of the Dutch had not, to the great relief of Charles II's government, been followed by the use of French troops in this cause. Henriette-Anne, sister of one King, sister-in-law of the other, was coming into her own as a discreet intermediary. Both men saw that under the guise of affectionate familial correspondence, messages could be given and received. Both men trusted her and indeed, in the years which followed as Henriette-Anne developed her role, her loyalties were probably about evenly divided. She adored her brother Charles and at the same time she loved and honoured Louis, her King.
Louis now came clean about his real intentions. With the aid of useful legal advice about the Law of Brabant which favoured Marie-Thérèse's succession to certain properties in the Spanish Netherlands (as the child of the first marriage), he established a war-centre at Compiègne. From here Turenne was to push with the French army against Spanish-ruled Flemish fortresses that were ill-prepared to defend themselves in the so-called War of Devolution. This was realpolitik in the seventeenth-century world: Louis and his ministers equated both branches of the Habsburg family, Spain and Austria, as one, and convinced themselves of the danger of encirclement. Only a really satisfactory defensive border would do. The scenes on the way to Compiègne, and at the court established there, had however something of the pageant about them.
There were tents of silk and damask – Louis had one tent of Chinese silk – hung with rich embroideries. A tent would contain three rooms and a sleeping-room: ‘the most handsome and pretentious suites that anyone could ever see’. And there were the ladies. Of course women always went to war: cooks and prostitutes and on this occasion courtiers. This was not just the whim of Louis XIV. Turenne was generally followed by a great train of ladies, including their vast wardrobes and mules to carry them all. It has been seen that Anne of Austria had taken her son on campaigns when he was quite small. But where the Sun King ruled things tended to be carried out on a larger-than-life scale – including the presence of women. Marie-Thérèse was there, playing an important symbolic role when she was introduced to her future subjects as the Spanish heiress. Athénaïs was there, her pretext the fact that she was lady-in-waiting to Marie-Thérèse. Henriette-Anne was also there. One observer compared the style of it all to ‘the magnificence of Solomon and the grandeur of the King of Persia.16
When the King advanced to the front, he returned after a short while to Compiegne, ostensibly to see his wife, actually, as everyone perfectly well knew, to see the woman with whom he was now besotted. It is sometimes suggested that the pair first slept together in Flanders. The logistics of this seem dubious compared with the endless possibilities of the royal palaces beforehand. Life at Compiegne was in essence camping, although magnificent camping.
Two actions now focused universal attention on the rivalry of the ladies in Louis XIV's life. The first of these was the King's step, unprecedented in this reign, of creating Louise a duchess and bestowing upon her land in the Touraine and Anjou. Furthermore he legitimised six-month-old Marie-Anne – ‘our natural daughter' – and designated her Mademoiselle de Blois, a semi-royal title. The letters patent which were duly registered by the Parlement were lavish in their praise for ‘our dear and well beloved and most trusty’ Louise, Duchesse de La Vallière; her ‘infinity of rare perfections’ were stressed, which had long aroused ‘a most singular affection’ in the King's heart and were now to be publicly expressed by a title and an income derived from properties. There was mention of Louise's descent from ‘a noble and ancient house’, conspicuous for its zeal in the service of the state, while emphasis was placed on the modesty which had made her oppose such material endowments. Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Blois as she had become, was declared to be the future heiress of Louise's lands, together with any other descendants ‘whom we have declared legitimate’ (Louise was of course expecting her fourth child at this point).17
Legitimisation was a fully acknowledged process at this point: the term used – légitimer– indicated that such persons, despite their irregular status at birth, had subsequently been made legitimate. Furetière in his Dictionnaire devoted five long entries to the subject, of which the main thrust was that legitimisation was to be used for children, born out of wedlock, whose parents subsequently married. This was hardly the case here. The King was a married man, even if Louise was not a married woman, and he had undoubtedly been married to another woman at the time of Marie-Anne's birth. However, Furetière, writing towards the end of Louis's reign, had to recognise the reality of what had taken place over the last thirty years: therefore he pronounced that the King was even able to legitimise adulterine children, and thus ‘efface the turpitude of adultery’, since he was master of the civil state.18 Yet no action taken by Louis would arouse more criticism from the devout on one hand, the snobs of the French court on the other. This was because the legitimés also became princes and princesses – who might outrank honest courtiers born in holy wedlock.
Louis, in his memoirs written for the Dauphin, justified this advancement of his mistress and her child as being a decision taken on the eve of war: since he had no intention of avoiding danger, ‘I thought it was only just to assure this child of the honour of her birth,’ while giving the mother an establishment which matched ‘the affection I had had for her for six years’. The court, on the other hand, saw the whole thing as a golden farewell: Louise was now expected to accept gracefully that her reign, such as it was, was over. Advantage was taken of her pregnancy to dispatch her to Versailles while the court went to war. In the course of a long reflective letter to a confidante Louise wrote sadly that of all the King's great qualities it was ‘his crown’ which had attracted her the least.19It was the old song, her passion for the man not the monarch. But it no longer resonated as it had once done, in view of ‘the rise of another’, in La Rochefoucauld's phrase.
But Louise was not finished yet. The second even more dramatic action which focused the attention of the court on the current rivalry was taken by herself. Louise's nickname in the witty Sévigné circle might be ‘The Dew' – Athénaïs was ‘The Torrent’ – but The Dew was certainly capable of impetuous gestures, as her precipitate flight to Chaillot had demonstrated three years earlier. Now Queen Marie-Thérèse was spending the night at La Fére, on her way from Compiégne to join the King at Avesnes according to his orders, when a piece of startling news was brought to her. The equipage of the new Duchesse de La Vallière was on its way. There was general consternation. There was also disgust, some of which had a hypocritical ring as the Queen's ladies, including Athénaïs, denounced Louise for reducing Marie-Thérèse to violent bouts of weeping.
The next morning the Duchesse swept a low curtsy to the Queen, according to protocol. Marie-Thérèse did not even acknowledge her presence. Nor was any food provided for her, until the maître d'hôtel took pity on the starving Louise and served her privately. When all the ladies gathered round the Queen resumed their places in the carriage and travelled on to their rendezvous with the King, the conversation never left the subject. What effrontery to present herself to Her Majesty without being sent for! Thus Athénaïs. She was echoed by the others. Athénaïs even went further, with her own brand of effrontery: ‘God save me from being the mistress of the King! But if I was, I should feel thoroughly ashamed in front of the Queen.’
It was the encounter with the King himself which was however the high point of the drama, at once pitiful and embarrassing. Louise flung herself trembling on the ground before him. Only then did his glacial reception – she had defied his explicit orders to stay at Versailles – convince her of her terrible mistake. ‘How much inquietude you might have spared me, had you been as tepid in the first days of our acquaintance as you have seemed for some time past! You gave me evidence of a great passion: I was enchanted and I abandoned myself to loving you to distraction.’ The poignant words were those of a young woman in a convent, seduced and abandoned by a French officer, in the celebrated best-seller of the time, Letters of a Portuguese Nun.20* They might have been spoken word for word by Louise.
Louis XIV was a philanderer, but he was not a monster. He disliked disobedience but he did not like cruelty and humiliation either.† The next day it was he, not the recriminatory and in many cases hypocritical ladies, who invited Louise to join the Queen and her ladies in her carriage. His gesture was so imperious that Marie-Thérèse dared not say a word. That night Louise was invited to take supper at the royal table. None of this stopped Louis's assiduous attentions to Athénaïs, so that the Queen observed out loud that he sometimes only came to bed at four o'clock in the morning. ‘Working on dispatches,’ replied the King smoothly, but the Grande Mademoiselle noted that he had to turn away to hide a smile.22
The King returned to his armies, which took the major Flemish fortress of Lille after a nine-day siege; the Spanish troops fell back on Brussels and Mons. The Queen and her strange entourage returned via Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, where Marie-Thérèse wished to pray. Nothing demonstrated the extraordinary interweaving of Queen, paramours – two of them – religion and intrigue more than the fact that Athénaïs and Louise now both went to confession at the same place to the same priest. Presumably they confessed the same sin, of sleeping with the King, though of course it was still true that Athénaïs had committed adultery and Louise had not.
Louise gave birth to her fourth child, a boy, at Saint-Germain on 17 November 1667. He was legitimised in February 1669 and the title of Comte de Vermandois was to be his. Later that year he was created Admiral of France under the conveniently bland name of ‘Louis, Comte de Vermandois’, the King having rejected anything more explicit such as ‘Bastard of France’, ‘Louis, natural son of the King' or even ‘Louis, Légitimé of France’.23 Honours could not conceal the fact that emotionally the King had moved on. Even poor Marie-Thérèse was found in floods of tears after receiving an anonymous letter informing her of the shift in her husband's affections; perhaps she had entertained a wistful hope that the demotion of Louise would have meant the return of Louis permanently to her side.
By the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle between France and Spain in May 1668, Louis acquired various towns in Flanders which he had recently conquered, including Oudenarde and Lille. But Franche-Comté, lying further south on the borders of Switzerland, which had been overrun by French troops under Condé, was for the time being handed back. The Peace also brought King and court back to Saint-Germain. Louis renewed his frenzied enthusiasm for the elaborate rebuilding of a new Versailles. There in July he staged another vast celebration known as the Grand Royal Entertainment, ostensibly to celebrate the Peace, but in court opinion actually to honour the new favourite. Over three thousand people were present, including the Papal Nuncio and numerous ambassadors. One of these, the Savoyard Comte de Saint-Maurice, described the chaos: even the Queen was forced to wait for half an hour for her entry, while some ambassadors never got in at all. The lucky entrants marvelled happily at the enormous artificial ‘rooms’ made of foliage and hung with tapestries; thirty-two crystal chandeliers illuminated them.24 Many trees were hung with fruits including oranges from Portugal; a huge palace of marzipan and sugar looked so tasty that the crowd subsequently tore it to bits and ate it.
Molière's offering on this occasion was a merry tale of a cuckolding: George Dandin or the Astonished Husband. Generally pronounced ‘the height of comedy’, it told the story of a peasant who married above himself and found it a strange experience, including the fact that his ‘lady’ wife betrayed him. At first the peasant wanted to drown himself in one of the numerous handy fountains at Versailles; in the end however he was persuaded to drown his sorrows instead of himself – in drink. The line ‘You asked for it, George Dandin’ became a catchphrase.25
Peacetime also brought an unwelcome visitor to court in the person of another, if nobler, ‘astonished husband’, the Marquis de Montespan, who came from the lesser war on the borders of Spain itself. It was now that Louise, Duchesse de La Vallière, tasted the full measure of her invidious position, something that her religious nature began to construe as a fit punishment for her sinfulness. Where once Louis had courted her to conceal his feelings for his sister-in-law, he now used her continued visible presence to distract public attention from his relationship with Athénaïs. Thus Louise was once again cast in the role of decoy, a penance to be weighed in the balance against six years of sinning.
The trouble was the matter of Double Adultery, and the arrival of the disagreeable Montespan only emphasised the fact. Double Adultery was odious to the Church. Adultery was after all specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments, unlike fornication, which was not mentioned; quite apart from the fact that adultery itself was a criminal offence for which a woman could be locked into a convent for life. Montespan's uncle, the Archbishop of Sens, for example, had preached an angry sermon on the subject and made a woman in the same circumstances as Athénaïs do penance. What could just be pardoned in a King with a pretty young girlfriend – with suitable recourse to a Jesuit confessor tolerant of man's failings along the road to salvation – could not be pardoned in a married woman involved with a married man, even if he was a King. (This was one of the reasons Louise had rejected the offer of a smokescreen marriage.) The practical if not doctrinal solution was a complaisant husband.
Unfortunately nothing about Montespan was in the slightest bit complaisant. Not for him the sophisticated attitude suggested by some highly topical lines of Molière in an entertainment of January 1668. This featured the story of Jupiter and Amphitryon, husband of the beautiful Alcimène. While Amphitryon was away at the war, Jupiter had assumed the husband's shape in order to sleep with Alcimene. He then proceeded to console Amphitryon as follows: ‘Sharing with Jupiter / Has nothing dishonourable about it. /
Certainly it can be nothing but glorious / To find oneself the rival of the king of the gods.' To Montespan, sharing with Jupiter was anything but glorious.26
Charles II, who had his own troubles with Barbara Villiers' husband, wrote teasingly on the subject to Henriette-Anne: ‘I am so sorry to find that cuckolds in France grow so troublesome. They have been very inconvenient in all countries this last year.27 And troublesome was a light word for Montespan's behaviour once he realised what had been going on, and was still going on with his Alcimène. Where members of both the Montespan and Rochechouart families shrugged their shoulders, ready to enjoy the good fortune which Jupiter's attentions would surely bring them, Montespan raged loudly and publicly.
The comparison of Louis XIV to King David in the Bible was one which had already been covertly made by Bossuet, on the grounds of David's pursuing another man's wife, Bathsheba. It was now openly proclaimed from Montespan's lips. Well-wishers such as the Grande Mademoiselle tried to calm and divert him. But Montespan was not to be calmed or diverted. Denouncing Jupiter in Jupiter's own kingdom was so evidently self-destructive that there would even have been something quite magnificent about his behaviour; except for the fact that Montespan in his own private life showed an unpleasant contempt for the female sex, mixed with bouts of physical violence.
Montespan now announced in a two-part plan that he was regularly using whores in the filthiest brothels in order to become infected and thus pass on the disease to the King via his wife. Part one of this plan was easy enough; part two involved forcing himself upon Athénaïs (although a husband was entitled by law to compel his wife to have sex, the violation of Athénaïs would by any decent standards have been nothing less than rape). Athénaïs managed to elude this fate but could not avoid various scenes when the grossest insults were hurled at her. In the meantime Montespan's wrath also fell upon the Duc de Montausier, recently appointed governor to the young Dauphin because of his wife's friendship with Athénaïs. The Duchesse de Montausier – long ago ‘la belle Julie’,protected daughter of the celebrated PrÉcieuse the Marquise de Rambouillet – also found herself involved in Montespan's outrageous denunciations. Nor had the Marquis lost his propensity for physical threat: at one point this sensitive, sixty-year-old woman thought she was going to be thrown out of her own window. Her nerves never really recovered from the ordeal.
But at this point the angry Amphitryon had gone too far. Embarrassing as the whole situation certainly was for Jupiter, no subject could criticise the sovereign's decrees and get away with it. The abuse loaded on Montausier's appointment to the Dauphin gave Louis his opportunity. He sent Montespan to prison to cool his heels (or stop his mouth) by a lettre de cachet – that is to say, the simple order of the King, no duration of stay indicated and no judicial process involved. After a week Montespan was let out (a longer stay would have become increasingly awkward) on condition that he went into effective exile on his estates in the south. So Montespan departed, taking his son Louis-Alexandre to join his daughter Marie-Christine at Bonnefont, where his own mother cared for them.
There were rumours, not proved, that he was helped on his way by a sum of money to pay his prodigious debts. If so, Montespan still did not quieten down even in his own home. He had the gates to the château taken down on the grounds that his cuckold's horns were too high to let him pass through. And Marie-Christine, Louis-Antoine, the old Marquise and all the servants were treated to the spectacle of a full funeral with black-draped carriages where Montespan declared that his wife was henceforward dead to him.
Back at court, Athénaïs was very far from being dead or even – unlike poor Julie de Montausier – permanently shattered. But she was extremely anxious. The real reason for her anxiety, visible in a momentary dimming of her generally triumphant beauty, was the fact that she was pregnant. Athénaïs must have conceived the child at the end of June, and been aware of her pregnancy during the ghastly period of Montespan's imprecations. Obviously her state had to be kept a complete secret, since Montespan was and remained her lawful husband. This meant that there was an ugly possibility that, to spite the lovers, he would claim the baby as legally his. Fashion and her own enterprise came to her aid. Athénaïs developed a method of concealment as her figure bloomed: wearing looserand looser dresses known, not altogether appropriately, as ‘the Innocent Déshabille’. The baby was born at the end of March: probably but not certainly a girl.28 Arrangements were made for the birth to take place in the same obscure fashion as had been used for Louise. Athénaïs was installed in a little house in the rue de l'Échelle, near the Tuileries. Three months later the mistress was pregnant again. As Saint-Maurice drily observed: ‘The lady is extremely fertile and her powder lights very quickly.’29
This routine – as it became – of pregnancy did not prevent the development of a magnificent lifestyle for the Marquise. She also took her chances of providing for her own Rochechouart family. Athénaïs, unlike Louise, was greedy for everything that life or rather the King could grant her. She owed it to herself and the King owed it to her. Like Versailles, she was expensive – and glorious. It was characteristic of Athénaïs's exuberance that her apartments were full of animals, not only birds but more surprising pets for indoors such as goats, lambs, pigs and even mice, which she allowed to run about all round her and displayed on her navel. Flowers she adored, and found a perfect outlet for her natural extravagance. She employed twelve hundred gardeners at Clagny and in one season had eight thousand daffodils planted, not a cheap enterprise. Part of her greed also, or at least her extravagance, was an enjoyment of food and drink, perhaps unwisely so for a member of a family which included such an overweight phenomenon as the Marquis de Vivonne.
Another area of pleasure for Athénaïs was sex or commerce (literally ‘having dealings’), which was the contemporary phrase for intercourse. This was not how women were supposed to feel. For once it was not the Catholic Church which was responsible. It was true that in theory laid down by St Paul, conjugal sex was intended purely for the procreation of children, and the fathers of the Church had further denounced over-amorous conjugal exertions. Between them St Jerome and St Thomas Aquinas managed to designate roughly a hundred days in any given year, including the whole of Lent, when sex between married people was not allowed. But by the fifteenth century, sex for pleasure between husband and wife was tolerated so long as there was no question of birth control. And there was a theory at least that the female orgasm helped on conception, being expressed in the language of male desire: ‘Je coule, je coule’ (‘I flow, I flow’).
It was the women of the tribe, those who endured it or who were enduring it, who spoke of having commerce as a burden. It was generally thought of as the ‘conjugal debt’, or in the words of Madame de Sévigné (constantly advocating separate rooms to her daughter) a duty that her daughter owed her husband, not something from which she could expect pleasure. Of course not all women disliked having commerce. An anonymous seventeenth-century verse in English, ‘Sylvia's Complaint’, drew attention to the fact that females did feel sexual desire but ‘Custom and modesty / Strictly forbid our passion to declare.’ A future Duchesse d'Orléans would write in some surprise of her daughter's recent marriage: ‘She is already quite used to the thing and does not dislike it as much as I did …'31 Athénaïs went further and was an enthusiast.
There was a danger in all this, the height of sexual enterprise which Louis and Athénaïs indulged in together, sometimes three times a day for long sessions. Louis was now verging on his thirtieth birthday (5 September 1668). He certainly showed no sign of that reform promised four years earlier, rather the contrary. There might come a time when such excess, by normal standards, was not so easy. The temptation might arise to provide or indulge in artificial stimulants.
That lay ahead. The public face of Athénaïs was now as the dazzling creature, the brightest star in the galaxy which surrounded the Sun King, the one for whom, without knowing it, he had always craved to complete his image in the world at large (if not the world of the Catholic Church). Her second child by the King, a boy named Louis-Auguste, was born at the end of March 1670. He turned out to be clever, sharp, and amusing like his mother; unlike Athénaïs he was not physically perfect, being born with one deformed leg which made it very difficult for him to learn to walk.
Obviously proper attention had to be paid to these secretly housed children even if they could not for the time being figure at court – Montespan's behaviour was still raw in everyone's mind and the legal situation unchanged. The solution was surely a governess, someone of good but not grand birth, someone known for her virtue rather than her glamour, intelligent and attractive nevertheless, someone who would be able to inspire children; and someone discreet. In this casual way Athénaïs's choice fell upon her friend Françoise d'Aubigné, the Widow Scarron. She could have no idea – nobody could, least of all Françoise herself – where the new path of this modest thirty-five-year-old widow would lead her.
The little crippled boy, Louis-Auguste, was handed to Madame Scarron shortly after birth. She stood in a waiting coach and received in her arms a sacred trust.
* She was baptised Françoise but became known as Athénaïs, from Athena the Goddess of Wisdom, while moving in the sophisticated Parisian circle of the Précieuses, and never looked back.3
* Duelling, the curse of a noble society, was strictly illegal in France at this point, successive kings making their disapproval felt in terms of strong punishment. Nevertheless it took place.
* D'Artagnan, a real-life character immortalised in Dumas's Three Musketeers, exemplified this kind of Gascon arrogance and awkwardness.
* Allegedly written in Portuguese in 1667–8 by Mariana Alcoforado, and translated into French, Letters of a Portuguese Nun was actually composed in French by Gabriel-Joseph de Guilleragues.21
† It is for this reason that one should reject the apocryphal story of Louis rushing through Louise's room to reach Athénaïs, hurling the latter's spaniel, called Malice, for Louise to tend as he went. The manners of the Sun King were something on which he prided himself; the story is only important for calling attention to the physical intimacy in which they all lived.