CHAPTER 9
You speak of throwing off a passion as if it was as easy as changing a chemise.
– Angelique de Fontanges to Françoise de Maintenon, 1680
On 10 April 1675, the Wednesday of Holy Week, an obscure priest in the local parish church of Versailles named Father Lécuyer refused absolution to Madame de Montespan. The sacrament of penance was an essential preliminary in order that Athénaïs should ‘make her Easter’: that is, take the requisite Holy Communion as ordained by the Church for practising Catholics.
Father Lécuyer issued this brave prohibition in a dramatic fashion. Through his grille he demanded: ‘Is this Madame de Montespan who scandalises all France? Go, Madame, abandon your shocking life and then come and throw yourself at the feet of the ministers of Jesus Christ’.1 This was not the sort of advice that the startled and indignant favourite was used to. An appeal was made to Father Lécuyer's superior, Father Thibout, but – horrors! – he backed Father Lécuyer. It turned out that even the King could not simply order the ‘ministers of Jesus Christ’ to break their own laws, and in order to solve the impasse, Bishop Bossuet was brought in.
Altogether, the Catholic Church showed no signs of giving up on its campaign for the salvation of the sovereign since those early days when Bossuet's sermons had dwelt with uncomfortable emphasis on the sins of that biblical philanderer King David. Bossuet himself had even been endorsed, as it were, by being appointed preceptor to the nine-year-old Dauphin in 1670. But the most celebrated prelate now preaching to the court was Father Louis Bourdaloue, a man in his early forties, who had originally run away from home to become a Jesuit. No stranger to the art of moral denunciation, Bourdaloue would give ten cycles of Lent and Advent sermons at court in the 1670s and 80s, more than any other preacher. His success in Paris, where he arrived in October 1669, had been immediate and he was first invited to the court in 1670. In the view of Madame de Sévigné, ‘he surpassed everything we had heard’ and on Good Friday 1671 she could not even get into the church where he was Duc to preach because it was full of the lackeys who had been there since Wednesday keeping seats for their masters.2
It might be supposed that such a popular preacher would give the sinful courtiers (and their sinful King) the kind of dulcet message that was easy to accept. On the contrary, Bourdaloue was famously strict in his judgements, pointing out how the morality preached by Jesus Christ was in direct contrast to that of the world; on occasion he juxtaposed the virtues of pagans with the laziness of Christians. He stressed the need for frequent Communion and the serious preparations a Christian should make for it: ‘Tomorrow I must approach the [Communion] table.’ But Bourdaloue, a man of exemplary piety himself, who placed emphasis on charitable visits to the sick and prisoners, understood how denunciations of sin could be allied with gentleness – but not indulgence – towards the sinners. His manner was friendly rather than stern, and as a result the general effect was compelling. He was widely regarded as an honnete homme or civilised man, that supreme contemporary word of praise, with his ‘probity, prudence and penetration’, in the words of the introduction to a book of his sermons in 1707. Later the King would say of the charismatic priest: ‘Father, you have made me dissatisfied with myself’.3
The rise of Bourdaloue was not good news for Athénaïs. Above all, Bourdaloue hammered home what the essential goal should be: ‘Live as a Christian king,' he told Louis XIV, ‘and you will merit salvation.’ It was that same salvation which Queen Anne had declared in peril in 1664, making her son weep. It was still in peril (and for the same reason). Now, in the interests of a double salvation, where there had once been a Double Adultery, the King and Athénaïs abandoned their relationship. It was a decision which amazed sophisticated Parisian women such as Madeleine de Scudéry.
The pair had broken up, she wrote to Bussy-Rabutin on 20 April, ‘purely for a principle of religion’. Such a reaction was very far from Father Bourdaloue's advocacy of Magdalen as a role model: ‘Love as Magdalen loved’ and, from this, ‘inner peace would be born out of the severity of penitence.4
By this time there was another woman also interested in the ‘project’ of Louis's salvation. Maternal, already middle-aged by the standards of the time (she was forty in 1675), virtuous and intelligent, Françoise de Maintenon had developed a benevolent but controlling character, suitable for dealing with children. As her correspondence with her confessor Gobelin shows, she found it easy to adapt these qualities to the new situation in which she found herself: being the discreet governess to the King's children was not so many steps away from discreetly advising if not governing the King himself.
Yet as her relationship with Louis developed, Françoise was in no sense acting as a substitute for Athénaïs. Françoise was pleasant company, everyone said so, natural sweetness combined with years in a subservient position had seen to that, but she was not especially witty or even amusing. And whatever the King's roving eye, in 1675 he was still in sexual thrall to Athénaïs.
The following vignette is significant, since the source is Madame de Maintenon herself, who confided it many years later to her protégée Marguerite de Caylus, daughter of her cousin Philippe de Villette. The quarrels of Athénaïs and Françoise had continued and there were some ‘terrible exchanges’ between them, as the governess told Gobelin. The uncomfortable intimacy thrust upon them with all the outward show of friendship – it was Athénaïs that Françoise took on a ‘camping’ expedition to Maintenon in April – did not help matters. Finally Françoise, provoked out of her usual serenity, succeeded in speaking to the King alone, something Athénaïs had tried to circumvent. Then Françoise poured out her troubles with the children's mother to their father, to the man Gobelin had encouraged her to regard as her true employer.5
She outlined Athénaïs's frequent and tempestuous fits of jealousy (of which Louis himself had had ample experience in the last eight years). The King responded: ‘Haven't you yourself often noticed, Madame, how her beautiful eyes fill with tears when you tell her about any generous or touching action?’ They were the words of a man still in love and can scarcely have soothed the indignant governess, more accustomed these days to seeing Athénaïs's beautiful eyes flashing with anger than with adorable compassion. And perhaps Françoise herself had just a little pang of jealousy for the triumphant beauty of her erstwhile friend, something, with all her attraction, she could never rival.
For all these upsets, the women were of course destined to remain in a kind of spurious intimacy, of the sort which had once united Athénaïs and Louise. That was the way of the court, the will of the King. Now that Athénaïs was duly separated from the King as a result of that ecclesiastical ambush, Françoise took care to preserve her neutrality – and her reputation – by taking the five-year-old Duc du Maine on a long trip to the thermal baths at Bourbon in the hopes of doing something for his unfortunate physique. It was an action she performed from the heart, since the helpless Maine was probably the human being Françoise loved most in the world, but it also placed public emphasis on her motherly tenderness.
In the meantime Bossuet devoted himself to the struggle for Athénaïs's soul, as well as the soul of the King, and for the continued separation of two people who had certainly not lost their deep attachment to each other. Louis was still determined that his mistress – or rather his former mistress – should have every whim indulged. In 1675 alone Colbert was obliged to spend nearly 23,000 livres on orange trees, those palpable signs of Louis's favour, for her house at Clagny. It was an explicit royal command: ‘Continue to take the most beautiful [to her] … in order to please me’.6
Bossuet acted as the go-between, a task made easier by the fact that the King departed for Flanders campaigning. The Dutch War begun in 1672 had not yet brought him the victories of the earlier War of Devolution. The optimistic Bishop suggested that Providence would now reward him for his sacrifice with victory: the implication being that previous military troubles (like the deaths of so many of his legitimate children) had been the divine vengeance on his philandering.7
By a joyous coincidence – from the dévot point of view – the final vows of Louise de La Vallière as Sister Louise de La Miséricorde took place on 3 June 1675. A great crowd attended, including the Queen herself, only too happy with this spectacle of the penitent mistress, and undoubtedly wishing that Athénaïs would follow suit. All commented on the new spiritual beauty of Louise in her dark vestments. A few years later she wrote, with some help from Bossuet, who edited the manuscript, a religious tract:Reflections on the Mercy of God. Her rank was not quite forgotten, for the author was described as a ‘Carmelite Nun, known in the world as the Duchesse de La Vallière’. A rhyme used as a prefix described how Sister Louise had once given ‘her heart to the Earth’ until a flash of holy light had obliged her ‘to declare war / On the World and the Devil in order to merit Heaven’. Throughout Sister Louise declared her devotion to the penitent saint who was her role model: ‘above all regard me without cease as Magdalen. Like her I will wash your feet with my tears …’8
Meanwhile Bossuet was not finding it altogether easy dealing with that other Magdalen whose penitence, it seemed, was incomplete. Was the Bishop the right man for the task? ‘He has plenty of intelligence,’ wrote Françoise, ‘but it is not the worldly wisdom of the court.’ Nor did he quite appreciate that Athénaïs might be a hard habit to break. There is an indication in his correspondence in the summer of 1675 that even the forty-eight-year-old prelate, a man of exemplary piety, felt her physical attraction. In an ambiguous letter on the subject of his heavy burden, he asked the Marquis de Bellefonds to ‘pray for me’ and ‘may God make all the man in me die’.9 To Louis, Bossuet reported that Athénaïs was calm enough, occupying herself with good works (as time would show, another aspect of her undoubted energy was an appetite for philanthropy). But he had come to understand that ending the liaison – stamping out ‘a flame so violent’ – was not the work of a day. The King returned from campaigning in August, but surely there was no danger: Madame de Montespan, no longer at court, resided at Clagny. It was Bossuet who observed with some foreboding: ‘Yes, Sire, but God would be more satisfied if Clagny was seventy leagues from Versailles.’
Bossuet was right. The thought of poor Athénaïs languishing was too much for the King; she was allowed back to court, but with some touching if slightly ludicrous caveats. The couple would never be alone together, or if they were, it would be in a room with glass windows so that the court could supervise their conduct and make sure it was sufficiently proper.
But perhaps the caveat was not so ludicrous after all. In May 1676 Athénaïs went on a restorative trip to the thermal baths at Bourbon, for the sake of her health (and figure). Bourbon, near Moulins in the Bourbonnais province south-east of Paris, was a spa which had been known since Roman times when its waters – aquae Borvonis – were praised by Vitruvius. There were other spas such as Vichy and Baréges, but this was the most fashionable one.* And Athénaïs was duly given an extremely lavish welcome, with loyal addresses in every town through which she passed. The status of the King's maîtresse en titre surely demanded it. Ironically enough the local governor was Louise's brother, the Marquis de La Vallière. Athénaïs herself however was more interested in her new outlet, good works: she endowed twelve beds at the local poor-house and gave a considerable amount of money to local charities.10
In July however a scene took place at Clagny worthy of the most successful playwright at court, Racine. Great care was taken that ‘respectable ladies’ should be present as chaperones, and at first Louis spoke to his former mistress in grave tones as though he was some kind of cleric – a Bossuet. Athénaïs interrupted him: ‘It's useless to read me a sermon: I understand that my time is over.’ Then gradually the pair – who had not been alone together for fifteen months – withdrew to a windowed alcove, while the courtiers, including the respectable ladies, remained at a respectful distance. The conversation grew more intense, and later still more tender. ‘You're mad,’ said Athénaïs. ‘Yes, I am mad,' replied Louis ardently, ‘since I still love you.’ After this avowal, both King and Athénaïs made together a profound reverence to these venerable matrons’.11 Then they withdrew to her bedroom … This was the moment feared by Bossuet and Madame de Maintenon alike.
Athénaïs proceeded to make short work of some of the objects of the King's gallantry during his absence from her bed. The Princesse de Soubise proved not to be quite so virtuous a mature married woman as she had been as a teenager: there was a rumour that one of her children was the King's. Her husband however was remarkably complaisant about the association. After all, in the words of Saint-Simon: the family's rise was all Duc to the beauty of the Princesse de Soubise ‘and the use to which she put it’.
Isabelle de Ludres with her statuesque body and striking red-gold hair was a more serious contender. This royal affair began in the course of a minuet. The King gazed rapturously into Isabelle's beautiful blue eyes: ‘I am sure, Madame, that these fripons [rascals] have caused plenty of damage in their time’. Isabelle was ready with the appropriate gallant response: ‘Not as much as I would wish, Sire, for I know someone who still defends himself too strongly against their force’.12 Sure enough the King proceeded to lower his defences. What the Princesse de Soubise and Isabelle de Ludres lacked, it seemed, was the intelligence or wit to hold the King even if they had the spirit to capture him. Nevertheless, before Isabelle de Ludres could be thoroughly defeated, the court drama of her rivalry with Athénaïs had to take expression on the stage, in true Versailles fashion. Isis, an opera by Quinault and Lully, made a clear allusion to Isabelle as Io, who aroused the rage of Juno for daring to seduce Jupiter; Athénaïs was obviously caricatured as the jealous Juno to whom in the end Jupiter promised to be faithful. The whole court sang Io's lovely song from Act III: ‘It is a cruel offence / To appear beautiful / To jealous eyes,’ and Madame de Sévigné knew it by heart.13*
There were two visible mementos of the King's rapprochement with Athénaïs. As one observer summed it up in fairly crude terms: ‘And along came the second Mademoiselle de Blois and the Comte de Toulouse’.15 It was true. Athénaïs was very soon pregnant again, and her daughter Françoise-Marie, conceived in August, was born on 10 March 1677. She was created Mademoiselle de Blois like Marie-Anne. It was an example of the intimacy of Athénaïs and Françoise, as well as the delicacy of the renewed relationship with the King, that the little girl was actually born at Maintenon (although Françoise was by now too grand to look after these latter children). Athénaïs's sixth child by the King, Louis-Alexandre, created Comte de Toulouse, was born on 6 June 1678. ‘You have had Augustus [Maine] and you have had Caesar [Vexin],' said Athénaïs to her lover. ‘Now of course you have to have Alexander.’
No more martial heroes were however to be commemorated in the names of Louis's children. There is good reason to believe that the King ceased to have sexual relations with Athénaïs after the birth of Toulouse. Ungallantly, but realistically, the cessation may have had something to do with Athénaïs's increasing weight in her thirty-eighth year, on which the courtiers were beginning to comment. The kindly Madame de Sévigné noted that her ‘angelic’ face was as beautiful as ever, with the delicious blonde ringlets, ‘a thousand of them’, which were made to frame it in a style called hurluberlu, so flattering that even the Queen copied it (maybe the blondness now owed something to art but the effect was still stunning). Malicious Primi Visconti on the other hand described one of her legs as being as big as his own thigh, although he added, as though to soften the insult: ‘I have lost weight lately.’16 Athénaïs's physical family inheritance, remembering the notorious girth of her brother Vivonne, had proved a fatal combination when her large appetite and repeated pregnancies were added to it. She was endlessly massaged and perfumed: it made no difference against these more potent factors.
Louis still visited Athénaïs in his orderly way for the regulation two hours daily and she continued to enjoy her sumptuous apartments at Versailles. But his passion had passed on.
The Dutch War was concluded at last in 1678. By the Peace of Nijmegen of 1678–9, Franche-Comte, originally conquered ten years earlier, was formally annexed to France from Spain. Louis XIV now had leisure for two new enthusiasms. In the first place he concentrated once more on Versailles. His new official architect Mansart was given sums to spend which rose sharply over the next few years, reaching 512 million livres in 1680 from a mere three-quarters of a million in 1676 (eighteen million and 212 million pounds respectively in modern money). The aim in all cases of modifications and additions was grandeur, grandeur in the eyes of all Europe, the continent where the Peace of Nijmegen had made him the visibly preeminent monarch. Liselotte as a resident of the palace had another take on the subject: ‘There is nowhere that hasn't been altered ten times,’ she wrote of Versailles. The unpleasant smell of wet plaster was something with which all the grand ladies of Versailles had to contend, to say nothing of the inevitable dirt and noise of perpetual building works.17
The second enthusiasm was of the familiar sort. The King fell in love. Her name was Angélique. But since this was the love of a forty-year-old man for a girl of eighteen there was a new aspect to it: sheer infatuation with her youth, her blonde, ethereal, unsullied looks; wit or intelligence was no longer demanded. There was even an embarrassing aspect to it all, as the courtiers watched the Sun King, who passed his fortieth birthday on 5 September 1678, become a fool for love, devoting himself to a girl who was the same age as his son the Dauphin and twenty years younger than his maîtresse en titre Athénaïs.
Perhaps the warrior in him deserved this delightful reward: this was certainly the line taken, albeit satirically, by Bussy-Rabutin. As Louis seduced the virginal Angelique against a background of Le Brun's tapestries depicting his military victories, he could regard her as his latest conquest. Naturally Angelique fell madly in love with the King: in this, wrote Liselotte, she was more like the heroine of a novel. And if she was also stupid – Louis ‘seemed ashamed every time she opened her mouth in the presence of a third party’ – her sweetness was a pleasant contrast with the tartness of Athénaïs, by no means decreasing with age.18
Angelique de Scorailles de Roussille, Demoiselle de Fontanges, came of an ancient family in the Auvergne region where her father, the Comte de Roussille, was the King's Lieutenant. She was indeed very pretty, something of the same type as the young Louise de La Vallière although her features were more classically perfect: she looked ‘like a statue’, said the scornful Athénaïs. Others said more flatteringly that she was the most beautiful woman ever to appear at Versailles. Angélique arrived at court in October 1678 as a maid-of-honour to Liselotte. According to Liselotte later, the girl had had a prescient dream about her own fate which she duly recounted to her mistress: how she had found herself ascending a lofty mountain, but on reaching the peak, she was suddenly enveloped in an enormous cloud and plunged into total obscurity … Angélique awoke from this vision in terror and consulted a local monk. His interpretation was scarcely reassuring: the mountain was the court, where she was destined to achieve great fame, but this fame would be of short duration. In short, said the monk, ‘if you abandon God, He will abandon you, and you will fall into eternal darkness’.19
Although Liselotte's recounting of the dream surely owed something to hindsight, it was true enough that Angelique ascended the ‘mountain’ remarkably quickly: by February Bussy-Rabutin, a gossip but an accurate one, predicted ‘changes of love at court'. Madame de Maintenon was of course horrified. She contributed her own analogy, also taken from dramatic scenery. ‘The King,’ she told Gobelin on 17 March 1679, ‘is on the edge of a great precipice.’
What was happening now to his famous salvation, on which she, Bossuet and Bourdaloue were working so hard in their different ways? Happily indifferent to this important subject, intoxicated with the air at the peak of the mountain, Angélique flaunted her success. Her carriage was drawn by eight horses, two more than Athénaïs had ever commanded. Her servants wore grey livery to match the celebrated grey of her sea-nymph eyes. La Fontaine had paid tribute to her in verse with the permission of Athénaïs (who saw in Angélique less of a threat to her personally than Françoise). She was installed first of all in a pavilion of the château Neuf at Saint-Germain and then in an apartment close to Louis's own. Undoubtedly the exquisite Demoiselle de Fontanges briefly aroused the King's flagging sexual powers in a way that Athénaïs, with all her arts, had failed to do in recent years. The men of letters knew all about that kind of excitement. It was a case of ‘the charm of novelty … the bloom on the fruit’, in the words of La Rochefoucauld. Saint-Évremond discoursed on the difference: ‘In a new Amour you will find delights in every hour of the day,’ whereas in a passion of long standing ‘our time lingers very uneasily’.20
In striking contrast to the King's pampering of his youthful mistress was his cruel imposition of dynastic duty upon another girl of roughly the same age. This was Marie-Louise, Mademoiselle d'Orléans, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the late Henriette-Anne and Monsieur. In the absence of war, Louis XIV turned to that other convenient method of boosting a nation's power, the strategic marriage alliance. In 1679 an impartial observer would not have considered King Carlos of Spain promising bridegroom material. At the age of eighteen Carlos was notorious for his gross, even brutal behaviour to his courtiers. He had a high eunuch's voice and disgusting eating habits, with an over-long tongue which lolled from his mouth and loose lips above a receding chin; his thick fair hair, his best point, was generally left matted and dirty. To marry such a man was a ghastly prospect for any girl – unless one took the line that he was the greatest parti in Europe and that could never be a ghastly prospect for any girl who was a princess.
The obvious bride in dynastic terms would have been Louis's daughter, the Petite Madame, but after her death in 1672, Louis turned his attention to the senior Princess at the French Bourbon court, his niece Marie-Louise. He was especially anxious, as ever, to win the race against any Habsburg candidate. Frankly, all the doubts about Carlos's physical ability to beget an heir remained unresolved; however, in the autumn of 1678 the Spanish court announced that he was in fact eager to be married.
In his capricious way, Carlos took a violent fancy to his pretty cousin's portrait. (Both were descended from Philip III.) And Marie-Louise was pretty. With her large sloe-black eyes and black hair, she had inherited the Médicis looks of her grandmother Henrietta Maria; in other ways she resembled her famously charming mother, if a darker version. Her bearing was superb: ‘She deserves a throne,’ whispered the French courtiers. A formal proposal came in January, followed by a proxy marriage and the planned departure of Marie-Louise for her new kingdom.
Marie-Louise was devastated. She too had envisaged a royal destiny to which as a Granddaughter of France she considered herself entitled. But her preferred bridegroom, the one she had believed since infancy would be hers, was her first cousin, the Dauphin Louis. A robust fellow, whose fair looks favoured his mother, the Dauphin was more interested in hunting than anything else except possibly his food. He was capable of much ingenuity in pursuit of his passion, only failing when he tried to hunt a weasel in a granary with basset hounds. He had however no intellectual tastes, and a brutal governor in childhood had left him terrified of authority in the shape of his father. But the Dauphin was essentially good-natured and popular with the people as well as the court.
In the royal lottery any princess could do a lot worse than drawing him for her mate, quite apart from the prospect of being Queen of France in the future. Like any French princess, Marie-Louise considered this the highest possible destiny. Her mother Henriette-Anne, although fobbed off with Monsieur, had certainly believed it; it was the same view that the French-born Queen of Spain had inculcated in Marie-Thérèse. Unfortunately, in his ruthless way where such matters were concerned, Louis XIV intended his son for a German princess to secure his position in the east still further.* To the weeping Princess, Louis remarked that he could not have done more for his own daughter. ‘Yes, Sire,’ replied Marie-Louise, in sad reference to her dashed hopes of marrying the Dauphin. ‘But you could have done more for your niece.’21
Marie-Louise paid a series of farewell state visits, including to the convent of Val-de-Grâce where the heart of her mother was interred; she was perpetually in tears. She even flung herself at the feet of the King, who was on his way to Mass, crying: ‘Don't make me go!’
‘Madame,’ joked Louis, ‘it would be a fine thing if the Most Catholic Queen [of Spain] prevented the Most Christian King from going to Mass.’ His true indifference to her suffering in the interests of ‘glory’ was made clear when Marie-Louise said her last goodbyes. It was the case of the Grande Mademoiselle and Lauzun all over again: the dynasty must come first, whatever its demands. ‘Farewell,’ said the King, firmly. ‘For ever. It would be your greatest misfortune to see France again.’ He referred to the tradition by which a princess married to a foreign sovereign never returned to her native country except in circumstances of disgrace or failure. Yet Louis was extremely fond of this unhappy young woman, originally for her mother's sake and now for her own. He simply put duty as he saw it – her duty to uphold the interests of France in Spain – above human feelings. And expected others to do so.
So Marie-Louise departed to a life quite as miserable as she had anticipated. By the rules of the repressive Spanish court she was so confined that she could not even look out of the window. She was obliged to spend at least four hours a day in private prayer, quite apart from the prolonged rituals of the services. As for the local entertainment of watching heretics being burned by the Inquisition, that, as the French Ambassador in Madrid drily observed, ‘gives horror to those not accustomed to it’. At first Carlos himself was obsessed with his young wife and highly jealous of her; then he started to dislike her for her (unsurprising) inability to conceive. He took to kicking the pets with which she tried to console herself: ‘Get out, get out, French dogs.’ By coincidence, another victim of Louis XIV's sense of duty had fetched up in Spain in a convent in Madrid: Marie Mancini, still warring with her husband. Queen Marie-Louise took her for rides in her carriage: two women, one of forty, one of seventeen, who pined for France.22
The fate of that other young woman, Angelique, whose duty was no more than to divert the King of France, was in the end not much better, if less protracted than that of Marie-Louise. In this case Louis XIV cannot be blamed entirely, since Angelique was essentially a willing victim who had used her charms to aim at a high position. She duly became pregnant, like all the other mistresses, but not for her the triumphant fertility of Athénaïs. On the contrary, her baby boy died at birth, and in the process of the confinement Angelique herself received injuries which made her, as the cruel courtiers said, ‘wounded in the King's service’. As sex faded, so did the King's love, and the imprudence of the whole episode became apparent. Religion was playing an increasingly prominent part in the scenario of the court. The celebration of the Mass would find both women with a claim on the King, Athénaïs and Angelique, praying hard on their knees and jangling their rosaries. Athénaïs and her children would be on the right, Angélique on the left. ‘Truly,’ wrote Primi Visconti, ‘court life provides the funniest scenes imaginable.’23
In the end Angélique was made a duchess: the traditional farewell gift of the sovereign. She also received a visit from Madame de Maintenon, who argued with her for two hours about the need to give up the guilty relationship. At one point the wretched Angélique exclaimed: ‘You speak of throwing off a passion as if it was as easy as changing a chemise!’24 A romantic if foolish character herself, who loved to dress in colours which matched the King's clothes, she could not understand the pious practicality of someone like Françoise. Angélique's ill health increased, and she began to show signs of lung disease. She retired to the convent of Port-Royal and endured a protracted death, probably caused in the end by a pulmonary abscess.
Louis's general policy was to ignore those mistresses who left the court: he never, for example, visited Sister Louise de La Miséricorde in her convent. (That was left to Athénaïs, who on one famous occasion made the sauce for the convent meal, food, as has been noted, being one of her interests in life.) But Louis, either out of tenderness or a bad conscience, did pay a visit to Angélique in extremis on his way from hunting. She saw the tears in his eyes – how could anyone, let alone Louis, fail to cry at the sight of a girl of twenty about to die? – and according to one story, reconciled herself to death as a result: ‘I die happy since I have seen my King weep.’ It was guilt, perhaps, that made Louis give money for an annual service in Angélique's memory, something once again he would do for no other mistress. Sic transit gloria mundi, commented Madame de Sévigné: it was the same allusion to the transitory nature of worldly glory which Louise had had inscribed on the pillar of her farewell picture by Mignard.25
The withdrawal of Angelique, and the effective ousting of Athénaïs from the King's intimate affections, paved the way for the more public ascendancy of Françoise. Athénaïs received the rank and rights of a duchess (she could not receive the actual title because her separated husband refused to be elevated from his Marquisate). She was also given the post of Superintendent of the Queen's Household, the most prestigious female office at court, something Louis had always declined to accord her. But the public role which pointed to the future was that given to Madame de Maintenon.
January 1680 saw the arrival in France of the Dauphin's bride, the Bavarian princess who had taken the place so much coveted by Marie-Louise. A new royal meant a new household: it was Madame de Maintenon who was made the Dauphine's Second Dame d'Atour (Mistress of the Robes). She now had in public estimation that respectability and status which by her own admission meant so much to her. This appointment was a tribute to those conversations, perhaps two hours a day, which the King was beginning to have with her. This man who had experienced most forms of heterosexual relationship was, wrote Madame de Sévigné, tasting for the first time the delights of friendship. In consequence of her appointment Françoise had to adopt the grave costume which went with the post: ‘Now I belong to a princess I shall always wear black,’ she told Gobelin.26*
Marianne-Victoire, Princess of Bavaria and now Dauphine of France, was a year older than her bridegroom. She had little to commend her by the standards of the French court except French blood: her grandmother had been Christine de France, Duchess of Savoy. She was on her way to being an intellectual, speaking German, French and Italian with some knowledge of Latin. Marianne-Victoire was uninterested in the hunting which was her new husband's passion (she disliked exercise of any sort), nor in the gambling which the court loved; she preferred poetry and music. The trouble was that she was distinctly plain: Liselotte called her ‘horribly ugly’, an exaggeration perhaps, but then Liselotte was now displaced from being the Second Lady at Versailles to being the Third. Madame de Sévigné wrote more detachedly that it was odd how Marianne-Victoire's various features did not combine to make an attractive whole, her forehead being too high, her nose a little bulbous, even if she did have lively and penetrating dark eyes. But the fact that Marianne-Victoire was interested in the new art of conversation endeared her to the King, who not only respected her rank (the Second Lady would always have been sacred to him), but positively enjoyed her staid but intelligent company.28 And she was devout too, something that was becoming more and more important to him, as in his conversations with Françoise.
There is a comparison to be made at this date with another gallant King who was at last settling down – with his mistress. Charles II was eight years older than his first cousin, and thus celebrated his fiftieth birthday in May 1680. He too had led a life of extreme profligacy, in which one maîtresse en titre was surrounded by a changing cast of lesser mistresses. For many years the resplendent foremost position had been occupied by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, whose sensual beauty in youth, ‘the sleepy eye that spoke the melting soul’, made her one of Lely's favourite subjects. She had much in common with Athénaïs, including high fertility, an awkward husband and a tempestuous nature which alternated torrents of jealousy and high-spirited laughter.
But Charles, with the growing indolence of age, had settled for a quieter life. His current maîtresse en titre, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was a highly domesticated little French-woman, nicknamed ‘Fubbs’ (Chubby) by the King for her plump figure and childish face; he even named one of his ships the Fubbs in her honour. Charles's unhappily barren Portuguese Queen, Catherine of Braganza, found Fubbs a great deal more congenial than the insolent Barbara: she even protected her when Fubbs was attacked publicly for her Catholicism. There was therefore something like a contented domestic triangle in what proved to be the last years of Charles II's life. In France a contented domestic triangle was also in the making.
Louise Portsmouth's relationship with King Charles had been sexual in origin, however cosy it had become. To return to Louis XIV in 1680 and his demure conversationalist Françoise (who was incidentally fifteen years older than the French mistress across the Channel): was he by this time sleeping with her? In short, was the role of Mistress of the Robes to the Dauphine, accorded to her at this date, a reward or a recognition of a new role? Or was it perhaps neither of these things, but an inducement to adopt a new role in the future? There is considerable difference of opinion among biographers over the date on which the pair first became lovers, and a ten-year range of suggested timings, starting as early as 1673.29* In the absence of any absolute certainty, two things become crucial: Françoise's known character, developed over the forty-five years of an often troubled life, and her correspondence with her confessor.
Taking her character first, Françoise was certainly capable of feminine jealousy as we have seen, including rivalry for the attentions of the King with her erstwhile employer Athénaïs. But she was no female Tartuffe, a scheming hypocrite who outwardly preached one thing and lived another. Her piety was sincere and her concern for the King's salvation was genuine. So was the friendship she offered him. At the same time life had made of her a realist. If occasionally priggish, she was not a prude, as her down-to-earth advice to girls in her care would show. She mocked one who was horrified when her father used the word ‘culotte’: as if a mere ‘arrangement of letters’ made something immodest. And she laughed at those who could only bring themselves to discuss pregnancy in whispers – despite it being mentioned in the Bible.30 In any case, six years at court, if nothing else, had surely convinced her that the King would be with difficulty weaned away from the pleasures of illicit sex altogether.
In a significant step the new Mistress of the Robes actually persuaded the King to ‘return’ to his wife in the summer of 1680 and sleep with her again from time to time: something which made Marie-Thérèse intensely happy.† This good deed was all part of Françoise's picture to herself (and her confessor) of the work-for-salvation policy she was committed to at court. Gradually it became evident that there might be some kind of price to pay for all this good work. Angélique might fade and lose her charms but it was by no means out of the question that the King's eye would fall upon another pretty moppet at court. There might be further bastards (how providential that Angélique's son had died!): after all, as the cheerful Gascon proverb had it, ‘A man can beget as long as he can lift a sheaf of straw.’31 Perhaps friendship – that hitherto unknown territory to the King, was not quite enough to keep the King safe.
The evidence of Françoise's correspondence with Gobelin points delicately to the possibility of compromise some time in the future. In a letter of 27 September 1679 for example she wrote that she was determined to profit from the instructions he had sent to her ‘and make up by charities for the bad things I am doing’.32 This is of course the conventional language of a penitent to her confessor, but it also points to the bargain Françoise was beginning to make with herself (and hopefully God, via her confessor). Good deeds could atone for other deeds which were not quite so good; in short the motto of the Jesuits might be discreetly applied, that the end justified the means.
All this was not immediate. It is surely inconceivable that Françoise was sleeping with the King at the time when she was lecturing Angelique on the need to throw away her passion in March 1680. The appointment to be the Second Mistresss of the Robes was therefore a reward for her services and a recognition of her value to the King – that value not yet, if it ever would be in the true sense of the word, sexual. Significantly, Louis made a public communion at Pentecost 1680, which coupled with the decline of Angélique's charms and his staged return to the Queen's bed, seems to indicate at least a partial repentance for past misdeeds.
At the same time Madame de Sévigné reported in early June that Madame de Maintenon's long interviews with the King were ‘making everyone wonder’; her favour was growing all the time, and that of Madame de Montespan was diminishing.33 It was true. At the start of 1680, that inviolable position Athénaïs had attained for herself, with her apartments, her children, her regulation hours of talk with the King every evening, was apparently under threat. But the danger in this case did not come from the Catholic Church. It came from the heart of seventeenth-century evil: allegations of poison.
* Madame de Sévigné, attending for rheumatism, described a regime of thermal baths interspersed with painful jets of boiling hot or icy water, which was much like that of modern hydros. The little underground ‘theatre’ where this took place made her think of Purgatory.
* The librettist Quinault was briefly sacked for the satire, giving the Mortemarts an opportunity to push forward their favourite La Fontaine, but Lully did not suffer, Louis acting as godfather to his son shortly afterwards.14
* Louis XIV had once considered Mary, elder daughter of James Duke of York, for his son, although (like Liselotte) she was a Protestant; it is an interesting speculation what the consequences of this union would have been. Mary's actual marriage to William of Orange led to the Protestant takeover and the rule of King William and Queen Mary.
* From this regulation court dress, which she had to wear for ten years, sprang the many slurs on Madame de Maintenon as a crone forever clothed in black. Françoise in fact preferred brightness to black, and when young loved blue above all other colours.27
* The main theories and their supporters are listed in the Notes.
† Marie-Thérèse, at nearly forty-two, had last given birth eight years previously; one supposes that the King had ceased his marital attentions when the fact that she was past childbearing became evident.