CHAPTER 8

A Singular Position

I have already got a singular position, envied by the whole world.

– Françoise Scarron

On 18 December 1673 a baby girl of six months was baptised at the church of Saint-Sulpice on the Left Bank in Paris. This was the important parish church for those living in this ‘countrified' area, as Madame de Sévigné called it.¹¹* These included Madame Scarron and her mysterious charges. The child was given the names Louise-Françoise by her godmother – who was none other than Louise-Françoise Duchesse de La Vallière. No one mentioned the fact that these two names also linked those of the King and Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan. The parish priest stood proxy for the three-year-old godfather, the baby's elder brother.

Two days later something more unusual than a mere parish baptism took place. The King issued an edict, duly registered by the Parlement, legitimising Louise-Françoise and her brothers Louis-Auguste and Louis-César. They received titles: Mademoiselle de Nantes, Duc du Maine and Comte de Vexin respectively. The edict referred to ‘the tenderness which Nature leads us to have for our children', an echo of the edict which had legitimised Marie-Anne and the Comte de Vermandois four years earlier, as well as ‘the many other reasons which increased such feelings.² There was however no repeat here of the profound tribute which the King had paid on the previous occasion to the ‘virtues and modesty' of the children's mother. In fact there was no mention of the mother at all: unless she was to be counted among those ‘many other reasons'. These, it seemed, were miraculous children born to a father only, and that father the King.

The reason was not far to seek. Athénaïs was still officially married to the Marquis de Montespan although a judicial separation was being sought to tidy up the situation as far as was possible, given that divorce in the modern sense did not exist. Annulment was recognised by the Catholic Church, meaning that no valid marriage had ever taken place; but this was embarrassing to put forward when Athénaïs had born two children to her husband. Judicial separation, which had to be ratified by Parlement, was the best possible solution. That separation would not, as it turned out, be granted until the following July.

In the meantime Athénaïs reigned triumphant. ‘She must have whatever she wants,' was the King's constant assertion to his minister Colbert. No wonder that the nickname ‘Quanto' (‘How much?') was added to that of ‘The Torrent' by Madame de Sévigné. Jewels were showered upon her, pearls, diamonds, earrings ‘which must be fine', settings of different-coloured gems which could be interchanged: ‘It will be necessary to go to some expense over this but I am quite prepared for it’.³ In an instruction about the terraces of Saint-Germain, a birdcage for her birds and a fountain from which the birds could drink were commanded on one terrace, while another would have earth, and would be made into a little garden. From 1671 onwards, Athénaïs had one of the finest suites of apartments in the palace, of positively regal splendour. At Versailles they were situated at the top of the Grand Staircase with five windows onto the Royal Court (those windows under which courtiers feared to tread for fear of her tongue) and had, naturally, direct access to the King's own apartments. She had a special gallery with her own collection of pictures.

As Versailles took shape in a perpetual flurry of building works, so did Athénaïs's own arrangements, which included a little pleasure-house decorated with blue-and-white Delft tiles on the walls by Le Vau and a new residence of her own at Clagny, close by Versailles, reconstructed by Mansart. (The first changes at Clagny had been rejected by the superb Athénaïs as only fit for a chorus girl…)⁴ Once again the watchword in its construction was the will of the mistress. ‘I have no answer at present as I wish to ascertain what Madame de Montespan thinks about it,' replied Louis when his minister Colbert tried to consult him about Mansart's plans. Athénaïs filled Clagny with her favourite rococo furniture. The result was certainly a paradise and a fertile paradise at that, compared by Madame de Sévigné to the palace of the enchantress Armide and by Primi Visconti to the House of Venus. Here tuberoses,* jasmine, roses and carnations bestowed their perfume, to say nothing of the King's trademark orange trees, expensive gifts which he showered upon the favourite in large quantities. The home farm, suitably enough, contained ‘the most amorous turtle doves' and ‘cows that yielded an abundance of milk …’⁵

Athénaïs's irrepressible mocking wit continued to be a feature of her relationship with Louis. One typical exchange occurred when the Queen's carriage fell into a stream on one of the campaigning journeys. ‘Ah, the Queen drinks!’ cried Athénaïs. ‘Madame, she is your Queen,' said the King reprovingly. Athénaïs was quick to retort: ‘No, Sire, she is your Queen.' Similarly, her taste for literary and theatrical patronage – something Marie-Thérèse had never displayed – made not only her company but the company around her a source of stimulation. Athénaïs was the patron of La Fontaine, to whom the second edition of his Fables was dedicated with the favourite apostrophised as Venus: ‘Words and looks, everything is charm with you.'⁶ Molière's rehearsals for Le Misanthropewere held in her apartments in November 1673 and it was hardly surprising that the wickedly amusing Tartuffe, which had shocked Anne of Austria, was much to her taste. Personally she loved to play the harpsichord, but she also acted as the generous centre of the elaborate musical entertainments that the King appreciated.

Despite this artistic atmosphere, which pleased the King and impressed ambassadors, Athénaïs's real power consisted in the sexual thrall or ‘empire – the word generally used – which she exerted over the King. There were tales that his passion was so great that he could not even wait for his mistress to be properly undressed by her ladies, before starting to make love to her. To her mocking wit, Athénaïs added a further tempestuous element whenever she did not have exactly what she wanted: perhaps this added yet further spice to the relationship.

In any case, the characteristic image of Athénaïs the mistress was surely an intimate one: lounging, voluptuously dressed, wearing her favourite high-heeled mules in her fabulous Appartement des Bains. There was nothing Spartan about this scene. Paintings by Le Brun, sculptures by Le Hongre, bronzes, were set off by brocades showing shepherds and shepherdesses having pastoral fun. Here the couple could have their own fun: they could disport themselves on couches, surrounded by orange trees in silver pots, and enjoy the huge octagonal bath cut from a single block of marble, in the Cabinet des Bains, lined with linen and lace.⁷*

In this supremacy of the senses and the intellect on the part of Athénaïs, it remained notable that the Duchesse de La Vallière was still at court. Her needs were considered with elaborate courtesy: where public display was concerned, there were even demonstrations of equality between the two ladies in order to preserve the fiction of the unmarried Louise as maîtresse en titre. In 1669 specific orders were given to the architect Jean Marot for the two ladies to have identical grottoes, two each, decorated in the rococo style.

None of this made any difference to Louise's private feelings of humiliation and despair, prompting another comparison to the confession of the rejected Portuguese nun: ‘I was not fully acquainted with the excess of my love until I resolved to use all my strength to be cured of it.' On Ash Wednesday she made another bolt for the convent dedicated to her favourite saint Mary Magdalen at Chaillot and asked for shelter. This time the King did not seize a grey cloak, mantle his face, ask for his fastest horse and gallop after her. He simply ordered her to return, sending Lauzun (still in favour) to the convent. A feeble defence for this cynical gesture can be put up: Louise had not sought permission to leave the court. In reality Louis was reacting as impatiently as Orgon in Tartuffewhen his daughter Marianne pleaded on her knees to retire to a convent: ‘Everyone / When once her love is crossed must be a nun. / Get up!’⁸ The truth was that the need for her as a cover was still paramount. It was not the King's finest hour; the measure of the cynicism of the situation is that Louise eventually pleaded with Athénaïs to persuade the King to release her …

It was about this time that Louise began her practice of wearing a hair shirt beneath her court robes as a penance. She had lost a lot of weight and looked quite haggard to unsympathetic observers. The hair shirt was less onerous than the daily strain of living in the greatest intimacy with her former lover and his current mistress. It is not clear exactly when sexual relations between Louis and Louise ceased: he certainly wept with emotion when Louise returned to court on his orders in 1671, but then Louis wept easily, and no one had ever doubted his affection for Louise, if it was not on the same scale as hers for him. Athénaïs wept too. The whole scene was highly sentimental if diverting to worldly observers.

While Louise attempted to leave the galaxy, a former star attempted to rejoin it, equally in vain. Marie Mancini had not been happy in her marriage of convenience to Prince Colonna; he turned out to be a brute for all his noble ancestry. In 1672, deprived of her children, she tried to return to the French court, perhaps with some nostalgic notion of fascinating the sovereign yet again with a glance of those mesmerising black eyes. She lurked at Grenoble, awaiting a positive message.

It was not to be. For once both Queen and mistress, Marie-Thérèse and Athénaïs, were in accord. There was a disastrous expedition to Fontainebleau – there where Louis and Marie had loved and hunted fifteen years before – in which Marie gambled on the drawing-power of memory. Instead, a cool message came from the King: Marie should return to Grenoble. Louis did send her a large gift of money: 10,000 pistoles (over three hundred thousand pounds in today's money). But he declined to receive her.⁹

Marie Mancini had not lost all her spirit. She had heard of ladies being given money to gain access to them, she remarked, but never to keep them away. Eventually she was allowed to withdraw to the abbey of Lys, near Lyon. Alas, poor Marie, who had always detested convents, was once more Condémned to reside in one. No wonder she observed in her memoirs that ‘fortune always seemed to be interested in persecuting me’.¹⁰

It was the summer of 1674 which saw the formalisation of the new order at court, as it was intended to be for the foreseeable future (although few would have predicted the consequences of this new order). There were two steps. First, at the age of nearly thirty, Louise was at last allowed to have the wish she had harboured on and off for over ten years and take the veil. Bossuet played his part in persuading her but as he wrote, if the words were his, the deeds were hers. She made her departure in a style which was generally admired: she insisted on a last interview with Marie-Thérèse in which she begged the Queen's pardon for all the wrongs she had done her. Although the Queen's lofty attendants tried to prevent this scene taking place as being unsuitable, Louise retorted: ‘Since my crimes were public, so should my penance be.’ With her gentle manners, Marie-Thérèse raised Louise from the floor where she had abased herself, kissed her on the forehead and told her that she had been forgiven long ago.

The interview with the King was tearful: his eyes were still red with weeping at Mass the next day. He wept, no doubt, for his youth as well as from the fidelity Louise had shown him over thirteen years in which she placed her King above her God, an order which was now to be reversed for ever. In future she was to be counted among those ladies for whom, in the words of Saint-Évremond, God was ‘a new lover, that comforts them’ for what they had lost.¹¹ Louis then set off immediately with the court towards Franche-Comte, which had been handed back to Spain in 1668. Once more, with its capital Besancon, Franche-Comté was easily overrun. It all represented the push towards further European conquest, since that unexpected check by the Dutch.

Louise for her part left behind a picture specially commissioned from Pierre Mignard which showed her with her two children, Marie-Anne and the Comte de Vermandois. It featured the discarded vanities of the world, including a casket of jewels and a large gambler's purse, at her feet. The words SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI – THUS passes the glory of the world – were inscribed in large letters on a pillar behind her: the rose in her hand, like Louise herself, looked rather battered. That night at the Carmelite convent in the rue d'Enfer in Paris, Louise cut her famous blonde locks to indicate the end of her old life.

Louise was officially ‘clothed' in her postulant's garments at the beginning of June. Present were the Queen, Monsieur and Madame, Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Monsieur's daughter by his first marriage, the Grande Mademoiselle and many other dignitaries. In a brilliant move, Louise had transformed herself from humiliated duchess to respected nun. The new Sister Louise de La Miséricorde was a penitent, and there was nothing the seventeenth century liked more than a penitent, be it the remote but venerated Mary Magdalen or the King's former mistress.

It was of course relevant to Louise's adoption of her new life that her children, the product of her shame as she saw them, were well established. Marie-Anne in particular had created a sensation by her dancing at the carnival celebrations earlier in the year, a delightful vision in black velvet and diamonds. Madame de Sévigné described how the King was enchanted with her and everyone else eagerly followed his lead.¹²

At seven and a half Marie-Anne was already wise to the priorities of the court. In the middle of the ball, she went up to the Duchesse de Richelieu and enquired anxiously: ‘Madame, can you let me know if the King is pleased with me?’ She also understood the need to be amusing. ‘All sorts of things come out of her pretty mouth,’ Madame de Sévigné went on; ‘she fascinates people with her wit of which no one could have more.' The little girl's partner in the dance was a young Prince of the Blood, the thirteen-year-old Louis-Armand, son of the Prince de Conti. ‘Ah, the little fiancés!' murmured the courtiers, for such an elevated match was not out of the question for Louise's daughter. Symptomatic of the hierarchy of the King's natural children and their mothers now emerging was the fact that Louise called Marie-Anne (who had legitimised royal blood) ‘Mademoiselle' but was herself addressed as ‘belle Maman'.

A few weeks after Louise's departure, and shortly after the formal registration of Athénaïs's separation, the next batch of natural children was presented at court. It must have been obvious to that observant world that Athénaïs would fairly soon be adding to their number: her fifth child by the King, Louise-Marie, created Mademoiselle de Tours and nicknamed ‘Tou-Tou’, was born in November. (Tou-Tou was fortunate to be born after the official separation and was therefore, unlike her brothers and sister, not the fruit of that tricky Double Adultery.) Louise-Françoise, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Vexin were in the charge of their governess Françoise Scarron. The baby girl had to be carried and so did Maine, who with his lame leg could not yet walk at the age of four and a half. It was an anxious moment for Françoise, this thirty-eight-year-old woman of modest birth, with a marriage to a mere playwright behind her. But apart from the friendship with Athénaïs which had secured her position, Françoise already had another ally at the court. That was the King.

Françoise d'Aubigné was born on 27 November 1635: she was thus three years older than the King, five years older than Athénaïs and nearly ten years older than Louise de La Vallière. From the first the circumstances of her life were unusual; indeed, one might go further and say that, by the standards of the time, they were adverse. Although she was not exactly born in a prison, as her enemies would later suggest, her father Constant was in prison at the time at Niort near Poitiers. Françoise was probably born close by his place of confinement.* Constant's crime was conspiracy against Richelieu, but this was not in fact his first spell in prison; earlier he had been accused of abduction and rape.

Françoise's ancestry was not undistinguished: her grandfather Agrippa d'Aubigné, who died before she was born, had been a celebrated poet – but a Huguenot (Protestant) poet. Although Huguenots were still legally tolerated in the France of the 1630s following the Edict of Nantes forty years earlier, Richelieu had already annulled some of the political clauses to their advantage; Huguenot descent once again, like her father's disgrace, made Françoise an outsider. There was certainly a contrast with the conventionally Catholic upbringing of Louise, daughter of soldiers who served the King bravely, or the grandeur of Athénaïs's birth, a duke's daughter with her much-vaunted Mortemart blood.

Françoise's mother, Jeanne de Cardhillac, a girl of sixteen when she got married, was the daughter of Constant's jailer. She was a Catholic, and Françoise had a Catholic baptism a few days after her birth at which her godmother was Suzanne de Baudean, daughter of the governor of the town, the Baron de Neuillant.¹⁴ The event itself and the connection were to stand Françoise in good stead. Although raised in the first instance as a Protestant, the essential Catholic baptism meant that she could always recover the official religion of the state without a ceremony of abjuration; while Suzanne, only nine at the time, would grow up to honour her commitment as godmother in proper style.

Jeanne had already given birth to two sons, Constant and Charles, when the little girl who would be known in childhood as Bignette arrived; Constant died under mysterious circumstances at the age of eighteen but Charles d'Aubigné, only a year older than his sister, would grow up to constitute the kind of affliction no family needs and many families have. In any case, Bignette's true family life was not lived in the insalubrious atmosphere in and around the prison (although she visited her father on Sundays, watching him in silence as he played cards with his jailers). The magic place she loved, not only then but in recollection all her life, was the château of Mursay, where rivers met in a forested valley at Parthenay, not far from Niort.

Beloved Mursay was the home of Constant's sister, the Marquise de Villette, who, in view of Constant's distressing circumstances and Jeanne's poverty, took Bignette in. Apart from her aunt and kindly uncle – ‘you acted as my Father in my childhood', as she wrote to the Marquis de Villette later – there were the three pretty fair-haired daughters, all older than herself, and the only son Philippe de Villette, born in 1632, who became an important brother figure.

To the Marquise de Villette, little Bignette was in effect a fifth child. But she was a fifth child who was also a poor relation.* It was a state of affairs hardly likely to lessen Bignette's natural feelings of insecurity. Brought up in touch with luxury, she knew that it would not necessarily last into adulthood given that she was unlikely to have the dowry which even life in a convent necessitated. To accustom her to this, Bignette had no fire in her room, cast-off bonnets which had belonged to her glamorous cousins, and wooden shoes which began by being too big, so that she could grow into them – till then she must stuff them with straw. Nevertheless Bignette loved the Villettes, felt grateful to them and in general remembered these days at Mursay as the happiest times of her childhood.

In time Constant was released. Relaxation and domesticity did not follow: rather, adventure and hazardous travel. When Bignette was eight and a half, in the spring of 1644, she rejoined her family in order to travel to the French West Indies.¹⁵ The two months of sea crossing were ghastly for all parties. Much later the former Bignette would tell the Bishop of Metz of how a fever on board apparently left her for dead; her corpse was about to be thrown overboard when her mother, giving her a last kiss, saw signs of life. ‘Ah, Madame,' commented the Bishop portentously, ‘one does not come back from such a distance for nothing.'

They landed first at Guadeloupe. There however life did not radically improve. Jeanne was a strict mother. Bignette was given little liberty to taste the delights of a wild island and a different culture. Her education was conventional, pious (still Protestant) and took place indoors. Meanwhile the post of governor of the Isle of Marie-Galante turned out to be vacant. But after a brief sojourn there, the family settled in Martinique.* The unsatisfactory Constant returned to France, leaving Jeanne to be ‘both father and mother' to her children, as she put it herself. Forever combating poverty, Jeanne was a strong role model of female endurance under difficult circumstances for her daughter. Nor would it be surprising if Bignette, both from observation of her father and in conversation with her mother, derived a less than perfect image of the male sex.

Another frightful journey followed when Jeanne took the family back to Europe in 1647 to join their father. But Constant was dead by the end of August. For Bignette at least it was back to the delights of Mursay and the mingled intimacy and hard work: for it was at this period that she was set to work in the farmyard and elsewhere, herding turkeys, going barefoot on occasion, although taking care to preserve her precious lady's complexion with a nose-mask.¹⁷

It was what happened next which created, even if briefly, a real trauma in her life. It will be remembered that Bignette had been baptised a Catholic, although educated according to the Protestant mode with instruction on the Psalms and the Bible. Nevertheless Madame de Feuillant, mother of her godmother Suzanne, seized the opportunity to petition Anne of Austria about the fate of this little lost soul, and succeeded in taking her into a Catholic convent with a view to restoring her to the true faith. Bignette did not like the convent and there was a considerable struggle for her soul until, significantly, her true affection for one of the nuns there, Sister Celeste, persuaded her to (re)join the Catholic Church.

Bignette made her Catholic First Communion for the sake of Sister Céleste, she said, not out of any religious principle. ‘I loved her more than I could possibly say. I wanted to sacrifice myself for her service,’ she wrote later.¹⁸ Once again it was a different trajectory from the innate piety of Louise and the devout family background of Athénaïs, at any rate where her mother was concerned.

It was Madame de Feuillant who now brought Françoise, as Bignette had become, on a visit to Paris at the age of sixteen. There she was introduced to the intelligent, sophisticated ladies and gentlemen of the Marais whose patronage and friendship were to have a significant effect on her fortunes. It was not difficult to be friendly towards Françoise because she was by any standards an attractive young woman. The society of the Hotel Rambouillet, and elsewhere at the homes of the Précieuses, liked what it saw: a serious, modest young person whose best feature was a pair of large, wide-set dark eyes. Madeleine de Scudéry waxed eloquent about them in a character sketch of Françoise under the name of Lyriane: ‘the most beautiful eyes in the world', she called them, ‘brilliant, soft,passionate and full of intelligence'. Furthermore ‘a soft melancholy’ pervaded the charms of Lyriane: her gaze was gentle and it was slightly sad.¹⁹

Françoise's complexion – ‘pleasing if a little dark', Madeleine de Scudéry called it – must somehow have become in a measure tanned, despite all her precautions, for she was awarded the sobriquet of ‘ la belle Indienne'. Her mass of lustrous dark hair was however unqualifiedly admired. Françoise's face was a delightful heart-shape and if her nose was a little long, her mouth a little small and her chin a little plump, yet the general effect, as contemporaries agreed, was most appealing.

It helped that Françoise when young was discreetly feminine in her tastes. Perfume, for example, played an important part in her life, and so did clothes, when she could afford them: a skirt of pink satin, black velvet corselets worn over white blouses, handkerchiefs of Genoese lace. Her confessor once pointed to her taste for fine petticoats (invisible but not inaudible): ‘You say you only wear very ordinary stuffs but when you fall to your knees at my feet [in the confessional] I hear the rustle of something rather out of the ordinary.²⁰

Her docile and apparently pliant character also made Françoise agreeable to the society in which she found herself. The years of dependency had filled her with a profound desire to please. Late in her life Françoise told Madame de Glapion: ‘I was what you call a good little girl,' always obedient and in particular loved by the servants because she tried to please them as well as their masters and mistresses. While her difficult upbringing might have made a subversive of some women, Françoise had on the contrary a strong sense of the hierarchy of society according to the divine will. A characteristic instruction to girls in her care was to avoid murmuring against the rich: ‘God has wanted to make them rich as He has wanted to make you poor’.²¹ (It was of course a philosophy which could also cover an upward trajectory in society: that too could be seen as according to the divine will.)

Furthermore, she was desperate to secure the good opinion of respectable people: ‘That was my weakness,' as she put it. But it was of course a weakness which made her excellent company for these same respectable people she was so anxious to please. Equallyher fervent concern for her own reputation – ‘it was my good name that I cared about' – meant she constituted no danger or challenge to other women.²² Or so it seemed then.

It was during her expedition to Paris that Françoise first met the playwright Paul Scarron, who already by 1648 had described himself as ‘a Condénsation of human misery' thanks to the acute rheumatoid arthritis which twisted him unbearably. Later Scarron was amused and impressed by her letters, written from the country to a Mademoiselle de Saint-Herment, one of those useful female friends Françoise had acquired.* These letters were not what one expected from a girl ‘brought up in Niort' or, worse still, ‘the isles of America', as the West Indies were generally termed. So, in a sense, Scarron's relationship with Françoise began as the epistolary romance beloved of novelists in which letters to one party actually cause another party to fall in love.²³

Perhaps the playwright, twenty-five years older than Françoise and physically tormented, did not exactly fall in love. It was too late for that. What he did do in 1652, with the cheerful, worldly kindness which was one of his characteristics, was offer the poverty-stricken Françoise, whose mother had died two years earlier, a solution to her life. He would either provide the dowry necessary for a convent or he would marry her. And Françoise, for all her piety, was no fan of convents. Her first surviving letter of 1648 or 1649, imploring her aunt Madame de Villette to rescue her, had run: ‘You can't imagine what hell it is for me, this so-called House of God’.²⁴ So she chose marriage.‡

It is unlikely that Scarron was able to consummate the marriage fully if at all by this time. It was a question raised by the priest at their wedding, to Scarron's annoyance. ‘That is between Madame and me,' he retorted. That was true enough, and finally the details of what happened between Monsieur and Madame Scarron must remain a mystery. The fact that Françoise emerged from the experience of marriage at Scarron's death eight years later with a lifelong indifference if not aversion to sex, as being something rather unpleasant that men expected of women, might indicate that activity of some limited sort took place. Much later Françoise would write of herself to her scapegrace brother Charles, when giving marital advice, ‘as a woman who has never been married’.²⁵ If she was being honest, that makes full consummation unlikely. Nevertheless it is only fair to point out that Françoise's attitude to sex within marriage, though weary at best, was a great deal more common among women of her generation than the free-wheeling enthusiasm of Athénaïs.

Françoise certainly had no good words to say about marriage itself; when in August 1674 she was offered a convenient marriage to an unsavoury old duke she replied: ‘I have already got a singular position, envied by the whole world, without seeking out one which makes three-quarters of the human race unhappy.’ Twenty years later she was still preaching the same gloomy if realistic doctrine: ‘Don't hope for perfect happiness from marriage.’ The female sex would always be exposed to suffering because it was dependent: marriage was ‘the state where one experiences the most tribulations, even in the best'. And she had after all had early contacts with the high-born Parisian ladies who from their privileged positions sighed and complained of marriage as ‘slavery’.²⁶

The death of Scarron, on 6 October 1660 (shortly after that triumphal entry to Paris of Louis and his Queen which Françoise witnessed), left his widow once again plunged into poverty, and with debts in addition. But Françoise had preserved her precious reputation. It would have been easy for the pretty young wife of a cripple to enjoy romances; on the contrary, Françoise made a point of avoiding such encounters, going to her room after dinner when the company got too raucous. The story that she took part in ‘gallantries' with the rakish Marquis de Villarceaux has no contemporary backing and a great deal of evidence to the contrary, starting with Françoise's obsession with her virtue.*

The woman who told it thirty years later, claiming to have lent her own accommodation for the affair, was the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. Once so beautiful that she could seduce any man of any age, fathers and sons a speciality, and perhaps grandfathers too, such was the longevity of her reign, Ninon in old age became jealous of the august position of her erstwhile modest friend. And in her report, Ninon managed to have it both ways. Françoise had indeed had an affair, but she had been ‘clumsy' in her love-making (unlike Ninon was the implication).* La Rochefoucauld had a maxim on the subject of ladies and their gallantries which seems relevant to the case of Françoise. Plenty of women, he wrote, had no affairs at all, but there was seldom a woman who had only one.²⁹Since Villarceaux was the sole named candidate (and that so many years later), Françoise was surely in the former category.

Laminated by her virtue, Françoise was able to enjoy the patronage and friendship of other women, one of these being Athénaïs. Queen Anne was persuaded to grant her a pension. Aristocrats such as the Duchesse de Richelieu and the Marquise de Montchevreuil had her to stay for periods in their country houses unofficially acting as something between a secretary and a housekeeper. One of the Montchevreuil children was lame in the leg: a foretaste of the problems of the Duc du Maine.

Françoise was pliant but she was by no means weak and she had a strong practical streak. Above all, she loved being with children, teaching them to read and seeing to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare, by teaching the catechism. This addiction might sound an obvious feminine trait, but in fact there was no sentimentalisation of children at this date; such a profound liking for and interest in children was yet another characteristic which made Françoise unusual for her time.

In the course of her work with and for children, Françoise also encountered several of the illegitimate ones of whom there were many examples in society, not only in royal circles. Scarron's sister, also called Françoise Scarron, was the mistress of the Duc de Tresmes-Gescres, having been seduced by him at fifteen; she had five illegitimate children. At one point Françoise d'Aubigné spent a year in the same house as her sister-in-law and family.* In 1667 she included her brother Charles's bastards Toscan and Chariot in a little nursery.

In so many ways therefore Françoise seemed the ideal person to take on the prestigious – but tricky – post of governess to the royal bastards. Where her religious nature was concerned, the fact that in 1666 she took on a confessor in the shape of the Abbé Gobelin made her even more suitable. Gobelin, whose correspondence with Françoise would become a vital source for her true feelings, was not only profoundly spiritual himself, but also intellectually brilliant. He demanded – and got – Françoise's obedience over many years, for that was part of the bargain. As Françoise confided to the Marquise de Montchevreuil, she knew that once she had chosen Gobelin, she must obey him in everything.

It was thus to Gobelin that Françoise put the proposition of her new post. The Abbe's reply was to tell her to make sure that they really were the King's children, not the byblows of a great court lady's love affair with an unknown noble: there was a rumour that the Duc de Lauzun was involved, Duc to the secrecy in which the household was cloaked. If they were the King's offspring, then tending to them could be seen as some kind of duty … even a holy destiny (Gobelin was very interested in the individual's search for his or her holy destiny). Thus the connection in Françoise's mind between religious duty and her role as semi-royal governess was there from the first. Above all, said Gobelin, Françoise must distinguish between Madame de Montespan and her lover: ‘She is neither here nor there but he is the King’.³¹

So Françoise did accept: another rather unusual decision in an unusual life. By the time she was welcomed with her ennobled and legitimised charges to the court in the summer of 1674, she had spent four years running an unorthodox but comfortable andwelcoming household, mainly at 25 rue de Vaugirard, near the Palais du Luxembourg in the parish of Saint-Sulpice.* Madame de Sévigné, who visited the house, described it as having large rooms and a necessarily large garden in which the children (still officially hidden from the world) could play in safety. Unfortunately this need for secrecy meant a lack of domestic help and even builders: Françoise would later describe how she had rushed about, painting, scrubbing, decorating … all unaided for fear of inviting dangerous speculation. Nevertheless she created, as she was able to do, a happy domesticated atmosphere.

It was here, at this out-of-the-way house, ‘in the shadows', as Saint-Simon put it, that Louis XIV, who had seduced so many women, was himself in quite a different way seduced: although the process was not intentional. He would pay unannounced visits on his way from hunting. He found a charming, tender mother figure, with one child on her lap, another at her shoulder, a third in a cradle, reading a book aloud. ‘How good it would be to be loved by a woman like that,' he mused. In the modern sense of the word, Françoise was cool – something expressed in the nickname given to her in the Sévigné circle: ‘The Thaw’, where Louise had been ‘The Dew' and Athénaïs ‘The Torrent' among other names.

To her genuine maternal instinct, Françoise added another very different quality, that of conversation, and its concomitant, the art of being a good listener. It was Madame de Sévigné, no mean judge of the subject, who attested to Françoise's abilities in this respect. Louis, who in principle disliked blue-stocking women and had thus been prejudiced against Françoise at the start, was quite won over by the gentle social arts she had learned among her Précieuses friends. Françoise understood perfectly well the force of that observation by Madeleine de Scudéry that a woman should never sound like a book talking.

Of course Françoise in her thirties was still an attractive woman. Did the King, according to his wont, make a pass at her at this early stage? A letter of March 1673 in which she complained of ‘the master' and his advances, how he went away ‘disappointed but not discouraged', is certainly forged, with the benefit of hindsight.* The importance of the bond between them by the time she reached court and stayed there in 1674 was its basis in his admiration for her virtue, her respectability, her femininity, exactly those qualities which Françoise prided herself on possessing. It was a happy match of temperaments.

Unfortunately there was a loser in this, and that loser was Athénaïs, the mother of the children. It was not a question of sexual jealousy: the issue was the perennial jealousy of the (mainly absent) parent for the (ever-present) nurse or governess. Athénaïs surely loved her children as much as grand ladies did and could, especially one whose role in life – richly rewarded – was to amuse the King. Equally Françoise gave vent to correct sentiments: ‘Nothing is more foolish than to love to excess a child who is not mine' (although her love for her darling, Maine, was certainly to excess). This common sense did not prevent her experiencing her own jealousy for the beautiful, dominating mother whose behaviour towards her children was, in Françoise's opinion at least, disruptive. Françoise considered that Athénaïs spoiled the children with sweets and other treats; Athénaïs believed that Françoise was trying to divide her children from her. It was the classic struggle.

And no one had ever suggested that Athénaïs, fascinating as she might be, was easy to get on with. By September 1674, Françoise was complaining regularly to the Abbé Gobelin of the royal mistress's rages and caprices: surely it was not the will of God that she should continue to suffer in this way? Françoise began to talk wistfully of retirement. She even threatened to become a nun, although she quickly retracted the threat: ‘I am too old to change my condition’.³⁴

When the King rewarded Fracoise for all her faithful care with a large sum of money towards the end of 1674, she was able to begin the purchase of a property at Maintenon. This lovely water-girt château, twenty-five miles from Versailles, thirty-five miles fromParis, reminded her vividly of the lost paradise of her childhood, Mursay.* Medieval in origin, it had been embellished and added to over the years, principally in the sixteenth century. Françoise described it to her brother Charles in January 1675 as ‘rather a beautiful house, a little too big for the household I intend to have, in an agreeable situation'. Here she dreamed of retirement, Françoise told Gobelin, leaving ‘the sinful court' behind. She loved everything about this country retreat, her butter, her apples, her linen (which had to be stored with lavender as fragrance, not rose petals). And she could swim in the river Eure, whose waters lapped the ancient stone tower.³⁵

But she would retire under the name of Madame de Maintenon. The King had given her permission to use the designation taken from ‘my land' as she proudly called it (the title of Marquise came later). That name of Scarron, with its faintly disreputable tinge, was left behind. Even if the dream of retirement was to remain just that, something to which the new Madame de Maintenon would refer sorrowfully when things at court were not going according to her plan, she had already, as she said herself, achieved ‘a singular position', she who had been first a poor relation, then a poverty-stricken widow.

What neither Françoise, Athénaïs nor Louis XIV could foresee was that the Easter of 1675 would bring an extraordinary threat to the maîtresse en titre, affecting all their destinies. Athénaïs's true adversary turned out to be not the upwardly mobile governess she had chosen but the Catholic Church itself.

* Saint-Sulpice, much simpler then than it is today, was built in 1646 on the site of a previous structure and enlarged from 1670 onwards. The present imposing classical front dates from the eighteenth century; many further embellishments and additions were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

* At Versailles the smell of tuberoses on a summer's night was sometimes so strong that the court was driven indoors; as has been noted, it was sometimes a convenient cover-up perfume indoors.

* Still to be seen at Versailles today, although moved to the Orangery: a remarkable souvenir of bygone amours.

* A plaque marks her suggested birthplace, at the Hôtel du Chaumont, 5 rue du Pont, Niort.¹³

* A classic combination of intimacy and inequality best captured by Jane Austen describing the position of Fanny Price at Mansfield Park in the eponymous novel.

* Next to the Maine of Prêcheur, one of the most ancient villages in Martinique, a little plaque on the side of the church commemorates the presence there of Françoise d'Aubigné during her childhood.¹⁶

* The writer the Chevalier de Méré, who lived in Poitou and knew Françoise when she was young, may have helped with advice over these letters, although he subsequently much exaggerated his importance in Françoise's life.

† They lived in a house in the rue de Turenne, near the Place des Vosges in the Marais; it is now a sports shop.

* The drunken ramblings of Françoise's jealous brother Charles – ‘a madman who should have been shut up', in the opinion of Saint-Simon – on the subject of her debaucheries in the Scarron days should certainly be ignored: this was Charles's payback for his lifelong dependence on her.²⁷

* A painting of a naked woman, optimistically described as Françoise, which belonged to Villarceaux, is sometimes put forward as proof of the affair; it actually looks rather more like Ninon (who definitely had an affair with Villarceaux); even if it does depict Françoise there is no proof that she posed for it.²⁸

* It has been suggested that the coincidence of the two Françoise Scarrons, one of whom certainly had a colourful private life, may have been responsible for later slurs.³⁰

* The Allee Maintenon, reached from no. 108 rue de Vaugirard, commemorates that lost time: a quiet leafy cul-de-sac off the busy traffic-ridden street, it is guarded by a door; the courtyard inside contains various houses including a Quaker mission.³²

* Unfortunately an eighteenth-century editor of her letters, Angliviel de La Beaumelle, behaved ‘without regard to honesty', rearranging and even forging documents; later nineteenth-century editors built on this material.³³

* Today the Foundation of the château de Maintenon, created in 1983, thanks to the generosity of collateral descendants of Madame de Maintenon, means that the château is accessible to the public. It is beautiful and tranquil in its watery setting.