CHAPTER 10

Madame Now

Madame de Maintenon is now Madame de Maintenant.

– Madame de Sévigné, September 1681

The Marquise de Brinvilliers, a notorious poisoner, was tortured and executed in July 1676; her tiny body was then burnt in a colossal fire, and her ashes scattered to the winds. It says something for the customs of the time that Madame de Sévigné, the most civilised woman of her age, took great pains to watch the process and was disappointed that the packed crowds meant that ‘I only saw a mob-cap'. Madame de Sévigné went on to fantasise about the effect of the dispersal of the murderess's ashes: ‘so we shall inhale her, and by absorbing the little vital spirits we shall become subject to some poisoning humour, which will surprise us all.’¹

Whatever the mythical potency of the guilty Marquise's remains, it was certainly true that during 1679 a first-class crisis brewed on the subject of poisonings and poisoners, in which some celebrated names were mentioned by notorious criminals already under threat of death. And for one moment the ashes blew close to the King with the invocation of the name of the Marquise de Montespan. So began the temporary implication of Athénaïs, banished from royal favour but not the royal presence, in that brutal labyrinth of an episode known as the Affair of the Poisons.*

The arrest of Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, on suspicion of witchcraft (a capital offence) in March 1679 was the effective start of it all. La Voisin was a supplier of potions of many different sorts to the great ladies of the court, and has as a result been felicitously described as ‘a duchess among witches’.³ La Fontaine airily summed up her various talents: whether you wanted to keep your lover or lose your husband, straightaway you went off to La Voisin for assistance. The solution to both these annoying problems might be powders, aphrodisiac or the reverse, and certainly La Voisin supplied a great many powders in her time. There was also the question of horoscopes, spells, black magic and even that blasphemous use of inverted ceremonial known as a Black Mass. The contemporary view of black magic in any aspect was expressed by Furetière in his Dictionnaire Universel as follows: ‘A detestable art which employs the invocation of devils and uses them to accomplish things beyond the force of nature.’⁴

Here a distinction must be drawn between the various functions La Voisin was supposed to perform. Supplying aphrodisiacs, which might or might not work, was a very different matter from providing poisons. Similarly, a visit to La Voisin to enquire about the future – of a love affair, for example – was a harmless activity; consultation about a horoscope might have something naïve about it but it was hardly evil (otherwise a great many people down the ages to the present day would have to be Condémned). To take part in a Black Mass on the other hand, with its use of the human body as an altar, with a murdered child's body and blood as sacraments, was something so blasphemous by the standards of the seventeenth century (to say nothing of its horror by any standards) that no Catholic could have done it without the deliberate intention of rejecting conventional religion.

La Voisin described herself as ‘a practitioner of chiromancy, a student of physiognomy', arts she said she had learned at the knee of her mother, also a sorceress. She named an enormous number of suspects on her arrest and was finally executed a year later. As a result of her revelations a tribunal unofficially but graphically known as the Chambre Ardente (Burning Chamber) was set up under La Reynie, the Chief of Police. It sat until July 1682. Over four hundred cases were heard, over three hundred arrests were ordered, thirty-four people were executed, nearly thirty more sent to the galleys or banished. Crimes varied, like the penalties, from poisonings to the use of horoscopes: it was, quite literally, a witch-hunt.

The court began to feel the heat when the name of Marie Mancini's elder sister Olympe, Comtesse de Soissons, was mentioned as having poisoned her husband, who died in 1673. Although the latest research on the subject suggests that Olympe was not guilty, she fled to Flanders in January 1680 and later on to Spain, leaving her large family of children behind. She had long lost the favour of the King – memories of the amorous past they had shared had faded, while her mischief-making caused Louis intense irritation. Olympe had lost her position as Superintendent of the Household and Louis was surely relieved to see her go. Another Mancini sister, Marianne, the ‘spontaneous and bold' Duchesse de Bouillon, was ‘unperturbed' by similar charges of planning to harm her husband: she appeared in front of the tribunal accompanied by the aforesaid husband as well as the lover who was supposed to benefit. It was a gesture of high style which succeeded. The Duchesse did not flee.⁵

The name of Athénaïs was not introduced until comparatively late in the proceedings, by which time La Voisin was dead. Crucially, La Voisin had never mentioned the favourite under torture, although she implicated twenty other people. Another conspirator named Falastre, who did name Athénaïs (under torture), withdrew the allegation on the eve of his death. La Voisin's evidence on the subject of the favourite came second-hand via her daughter Marie-Marguerite. This was not a very convincing route, since Marie-Marguerite was desperate to do something, anything, which would spare her torture and execution.

The suggestion that Athénaïs had taken part in a Black Mass, her voluptuous naked body stretched out as an altar, with a rogue priest performing the ‘ceremony', was frankly preposterous. Athénaïs's piety was genuine, as much part of her character as the radiant sexuality which had charmed the King for so long. She once gave a memorable dismissal to the Duchesse d'Uzès, who queried her sedulous church-going in view of her immoral life: ‘Because I commit one sin [i.e. adultery] it does not mean that I commit them all.'⁶This declaration should always be borne in mind where Athénaïs is concerned. In the years to come she would show herself almost as devout as Louise de La Vallière, although her expression of her piety was less extreme. If employing black magic – ‘the invocation of devils' – put a seventeenth-century Catholic in danger of hell, participation in the murderous blasphemy of the Black Mass would have Condémned anyone beyond a doubt – not only in the eyes of the Church but in the fearful imagination of Athénaïs, the Catholic in question.*

Equally preposterous were the allegations that the maîtresse en titre had also procured poisons ‘to accomplish things beyond the force of nature', in Furetiere's phrase – that is, with the intention of killing the King. How on earth would the death of Louis have benefited his long-term mistress? Her entire position in material terms depended on his favour, her lavish lifestyle, including her splendid apartments, her gems, her money, her house at Clagny; furthermore, status was equally important to her self-esteem, and the King was showing every sign of respecting that, even if the sexual bond had been broken. There was no question that the accession of the Dauphin to the throne (with her abiding adversary Marie-Thérèse as Queen Mother) would have led to disgrace and probably banishment from court.

As to allegations of other poisonings – did Angélique receive a bowl of poisoned milk? – these were so endemic to the French court, and indeed the society of that time, that any hostility expressed, followed by some kind of illness or death, was all too easily transformed into an accusation of poisoning.⁷ (Remember how the Chevalier de Lorraine had been falsely accused of poisoning Henriette-Anne simply because they were on bad terms at the time of her death.) Liselotte for example, who had a vindictive streak in her apparently jolly, extrovert nature, accused Madame de Maintenon of poisoning both the minister Colbert and the architect Mansart. Athénaïs was of a far higher rank than the wretched old women who got into quarrels with their neighbours and were duly burned as witches when the same neighbours collapsed from some common malady of the time. But her situation was essentially the same. Her unsurprising jealousy of Angélique, her role as furious Juno to Angelique's innocently lovely Io in the opera Isis, was all too easily transformed into an accusation of poisoning when the lethal ashes of the Marquise de Brinvilliers were blowing in the wind.

Where Athénaïs, like many of her friends, was probably guilty, if that is the right word, was in seeking aphrodisiacs from La Voisin: ‘powders for love’.⁸ The mention of her waiting-women in this connection, the saucy Demoiselle des Oeillets, who had probably had a child by the King in 1676, and another known as Catau, is perfectly plausible. No doubt they visited La Voisin on behalf of their mistress (and perhaps Oeillets on her own account too), especially since one date cited was 1678, when Athénaïs was losing her sexual hold over the King. Catau was said to have had her palm read: another fairly innocent pursuit despite the Church's prohibition. The name of Athénaïs's sister-in-law the Marquise de Vivonne was also cited. This behaviour might be louche but it was hardly heinous.

Aphrodisiacs were a subject of prodigious interest in the seventeenth century, as indeed they have been in every century down to the present one: like contraception, the need brought the solution, or hopefully the solution. (The same is true about recourse to horoscopes in time of personal anguish.) Cantharides – taken from the wing covers of the ‘Spanish fly' beetle – and other ground-up substances were advocated, including extract of toad and snake. When Margaret Lucas, one of Queen Henrietta Maria's maids-of-honour, was married off to the future Duke of Newcastle, thirty years her senior, she found him in the unfortunate position of being both impotent and in need of an heir. Since the popular remedy of ‘heating [i.e. spicy] foods' failed to do the trick, the Newcastles turned to Europe. From Rome Sir Kenelm Digby reported a cure by an apothecary who regularly killed three thousand adders to make his medicine: ‘By long use of such flesh of vipers,' he wrote, men who had turned eunuchs through age ‘become Priapus again'. (It did not work with the Duke; there was no male heir; the Duchess of Newcastle turned to writing.)⁹

There was an underworld market for such things in Paris. Nor was it only the great ladies or their maids who ventured there. All his life the King had plenty of discreet access to it. One of the most important men in the intimate life of Louis XIV was his chief valet, Alexandre Bontemps, whose reticence was so famous that keeping silent on a subject was proverbially known as ‘doing a Bontemps'. A huge fat man, nearly twenty years the King's senior, Bontemps was adored by Louis for his total loyalty, also his adept way of carrying out private missions for which he used a special royal coach without armorial bearings. Bontemps was without malice. After his death, it was said of him that he had never spoken an ill word of anyone and, even more remarkably at Versailles, had never let a day pass without speaking well ‘of someone to his master'.¹⁰ But for all his good nature, Bontemps was not without his contacts in the underworld.

Another of the King's devoted valets, François Quintin de La Vienne, had been a celebrated swimmer and became a baigneur, something between a bath attendant and a barber. He conducted an étuve or bath-house where the King had been in the past to be bathed and perfumed. (Being rubbed down with eau de toilette was the most fashionable form of hygiene in an age when water was widely distrusted, with good reason.)

These etuves had many of the same assets as a modern health club with their facilities for bathing and massage. But under the alibi of being bath-houses, they also performed – discreetly – some of the same functions as a brothel. Everyone knew what was meant by the discreet phrase coucher cheZ le baigneur (sleeping at the bathhouse). The women in attendance might be available for further services. Young men used them as places of rendezvous, especially with married women whose husbands had to be kept in ignorance. There was also a medicinal aspect to such establishments: people went to be cured of the problems brought about by ‘great pleasures', that is, venereal diseases. They were certainly places where aphrodisiacs might be obtained. It was La Vienne who was credited with supplying the King with ‘fortifiers' when Louis found he could no longer achieve ‘all he wished' in his love affair with Angélique. The genial La Vienne, always elegantly turned out, was a popular member of Louis's inner household.¹¹

All this is to say that the King, a man of terrific sexual energy in youth, encouraged to further heights in his thirties by the inspirational Athénaïs, was beginning to fall back just a little from the high standards he had come to expect as he approached forty. He therefore had recourse to stimulants. Athénaïs may have provided some of these ‘powders of love' from La Voisin via her maids or in her own right. (The point has been made that former maîtresse en titre Athénaïs had bodyguards installed by the King who would certainly have monitored such discreditable visits and reported them.) But Louis also had his own network of discreet servants when such things were required.

There is certainly no evidence to link the King's periodic fits of ‘vapeurs' with the potions supplied, let alone with poisons. The English word ‘vapours', with its hysterical female connotation, does not cover these royal attacks: they were more like mini-collapses. For example, Louis had an attack when his mother first fell really ill in the summer of 1664 (he cured it by going swimming). And he would have an attack in April 1684, long after Athénaïs had either opportunity or motive to administer a drug. These fits were perhaps nervous in origin, a periodic short-lived weakness Duc principally to his extraordinary daily schedule, which certainly included love-making (latterly with stimulants), but also hours in Council planning policy at home and military strategy abroad. As we shall see in the next chapter, other illnesses were on their way, including the dreaded gout to which both his father and grandfather had been subject. In the meantime the doctors' frequent purges and lavements (enemas), recounted in fearful detail in their industrious journals, were enough to weaken the strongest man and cause him collapses.

The reaction of Louis XIV to the ‘revelations' of La Voisin's daughter, and her unsavoury accomplices, also under arrest, was immediate. A freeze was put on all the papers relevant to the Marquise de Montespan. At the orders of the Council, all documents relevant to Athénaïs, her sister-in-law Madame de Vivonne and her maid Oeillets were to be taken out of the dossier. The criminals themselves were separated and put into dungeons where their voices could not and would not be heard. The King kept the papers himself for twenty-five years and then burned them. His conduct towards Athénaïs did not alter – the daily visits – and that alone is the most convincing proof that he believed in her innocence.

Louis XIV was a fanatic for order and a good public show, but he was also human. Had these charges of poisoning and the Black Mass been believed, the former maîtresse en titre would certainly have been told to retire from court, either to the country or abroad like Olympe Comtesse de Soissons. There is another proof, quite apart from the psychological implausibility of it all already stated. Colbert, the King's chief minister for his whole personal reign so far, the wise and prudent Colbert who had in the past handled the question of the bastards, did not believe in the charges either. He quoted the Latin tag that a single (unsupported) accusation meant no accusation: Testis unus, testis nullus. And he had examined all the evidence.¹²*

There was also a political dimension to the Affair of the Poisons which Colbert thoroughly understood. He had a long-standing rivalry with Louvois, Louis XIV's Minister of War. Athénaïs had always belonged to the Colbert camp, being connected to him by marriage; she disliked Louvois, who in turn resented her influence with the King. Colbert, absolving Athénaïs for good reason, was also protecting his own interests.

So, where Athénaïs was concerned, ‘all the external signs of friendship and consideration were maintained', wrote Voltaire in his history of the King's reign. He added: ‘although it offered her no consolation'.¹³ It was true. Athénaïs's long reign was at last well and truly over, not because of the Affair of the Poisons, which was a deeply unpleasant but temporary embarrassment, but because Françoise was now established in her place. The Affair of the Poisons did not help Athénaïs's position but it was a position lost in any case. It could even be argued that the King's resolute defence of his former mistress indicated the continuing depth of his feelings for her – affection if no longer passion.

Athénaïs de Montespan was of course the mother of Louis's children, and the court of France was increasingly dominated by the presence of the younger generation. Or, to put it another way, since this was a King-centred court, the King's role as patriarch was beginning to be glorified. In January 1681 a ballet was danced at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in honour of the Dauphine. If officially dedicated to Marianne-Victoire, it has been described as ‘a sort of celebration of the royal paternity'. Devised by the familiar team of Quinault and Lully, it is seen as the first true Opera-Ballet, and was later, slightly altered, performed in Paris at the Academy Royal. Love was the ostensible theme but the triumph of youth was also proclaimed. Louise-Françoise, the nine-year-old daughter of Louis and Athénaïs, played Youth itself. At the end of the performance she sang sweetly: ‘Reserve your criticisms for old age / All our days are charming / Everyone laughs at our desires.’¹⁴

Louise-Françoise was already a mischievous little creature: ‘a pretty cat, while you play with it, it lets you feel its claws.' In a few years' time – two months before her twelfth birthday* – she would be married off to a Prince of the Blood, the Duc de Bourbon, heir to the Prince de Condé and at court known as Monsieur le Duc. Her official title therefore, by which she was always addressed, was Madame la Duchesse.† The Duc de Bourbon was extremely small and his head was very large; he was singularly charmless, and arrogant on the subject of the rank which was his sole claim to distinction. At the time the Marquis de Sourches exclaimed that ‘it was a ridiculous thing to see these two young puppets’ getting married.¹⁵ The bride did not however long remain a puppet. The wilful Madame la Duchesse, irreverent and rather lazy, would come to exhibit the new values of Versailles, where everyone laughed at the behaviour of the young, or so the young thought.

It was however her half-sister Marie-Anne, daughter of La Vallière, who was the star of this particular ballet. She was newly married to another Prince of the Blood, the Prince de Conti,‡ a match that excited courtiers had predicted for ‘the little fiancés' when they first danced together. Marie-Anne's ravishing looks fully justified the promise of her childhood: her perfect heart-shaped face and huge wide-set eyes were celebrated at every ball, including the masked balls when Marie-Anne often declined to cover the famous eyes, lest their ‘fire' should be doused. (Like many beauties, Marie-Anne was extremely short-sighted: the kind of beguiling person who ‘lost' her magnifying glasses because she had pushed them on top of her head.) ‘The goddess Conti' was how she was often described, and was she not after all ‘descended from Olympus', ‘the Daughter of Jupiter', as La Fontaine apostrophised her? Her scented chamber was known as ‘the shrine of Venus'. Perhaps her bastard birth was even responsible for her allure. When Marie-Anne unwisely commented on the reclining Dauphine: ‘Look at her, just as ugly asleep as awake,' Marianne-Victoire opened her eyes and said: ‘Were I a love-child I would be as beautiful as you.’¹⁶

This paragon of grace, with no reason to be tormented by the spiritual anguish of her mother, was rated the best dancer at court; according to one contemporary she eclipsed the dancers of the Paris opera. In this ballet Marie-Anne danced the nymph Ariane in the plumes and luxurious embroidered costume which were considered suitable nymph-wear at the time. The poet Benserade described her as ‘effacing all the other flowers / Even to the lily of her origin'.¹⁷

The lily in question was her mother Louise, now in her convent, who had duly received a visit from Marie-Anne on the occasion of her marriage, as well as congratulations from the court. (Madame de Sévigné found Sister Louise as lovely as ever, if even thinner; her grace was unimpaired, as well as ‘the way she looked at you'.) Although her daughter was making a prestigious match, Louise's attitude to her ‘children of shame' remained ambivalent. A few years later Bishop Bossuet had to break to Louise the news of the death of her son, Vermandois, at the age of sixteen, under unsavoury circumstances: there had been some kind of homosexual scandal. Louise responded chillingly: ‘I ought to weep for his birth far more than I weep for his death.' Both children were to the nun, in her own words in her book, reminders of her ‘deplorable [former] life, all the more deplorable because it caused me no horror'.¹⁸

Like Madame la Duchesse, Marie-Anne belonged to a very different generation; after all she could not remember the distressing circumstances of her birth, her mother having to make an appearance in chapel only a few hours later. Marie-Anne set the tone for a new kind of emancipated princess when she complained on her wedding night that her husband ‘lacked force' and she preferred his brother. Courtiers wondered how, exactly, at the age of thirteen, she was able to compare the two; but Marie-Anne had begun as she meant to go on. During a short-lived marriage (the Prince de Conti died in 1685) Marie-Anne troubled him constantly with her wayward behaviour, according to Primi Visconti, who seldom heard a rumour he wouldn't pass on. The Prince de Conti complained to her father. But Marie-Anne would fling her arms around the King's neck and be forgiven for her prettiness, her charm and above all for amusing him with her adorable if naughty ways.¹⁹ As the King marched steadily, if at times laggardly, in the direction of virtue, there was a lesson here. The hard-working potentate still had to be amused.

After the death of her young husband, the eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne showed no signs of marrying again. Secure in her position, she was prepared to live a life of pleasure at court, enjoying the special friendship and favour of her half-brother the Dauphin. And there was one asset Marie-Anne enjoyed that was denied to Madame la Duchesse (Louise-Françoise). Although both were married to Princes of the Blood, Marie-Anne's mother had not been the wife of another man at the time of her birth; Madame la Duchesse on the other hand, for all her hauteur, was for ever stigmatised as the fruit of Double Adultery.

There were other princesses born in the seventies waiting in the wings: none of them showed signs of being docile. The King's younger surviving daughter by Athénaïs, Françoise-Marie, the fruit of their reconciliation, was a little tearaway. Liselotte's daughter Elisabeth-Charlotte, a Granddaughter of France, was described by her mother as ‘so terribly wild' and ‘rough as a boy'. There was something like pride in the way in which Liselotte added: ‘I think it must be the nature of all Liselottes to be so wayward in childhood.’.²⁰ (Her half-sister Anne-Marie, child ot Irlenriette-Anne, a gentler and sweeter character, was married off to the Duke of Savoy in 1684 and left France.) Then there were the Princesses of the Blood, the tiny daughters of the Prince de Condé and a Bavarian princess – nicknamed ‘the Dolls of the Blood' – such as Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, sister of Monsieur le Duc. Bénédicte made up for her lack of size with a sharp wit and a ranging intelligence which was quite prepared to challenge the orthodoxies of the court of Louis XIV.

All this was for the future, when the girls one might term the dragons' teeth of Louis XIV, with all their rivalries of birth and position, grew up.* In 1682 however the important family event was seen with reason to be the accouchement of the Dauphine. To Marianne-Victoire was entrusted the responsibility of producing a male heir in the direct line (if the Dauphin had no son, the succession went to the Orléans branch: his uncle Monsieur and so to the latter's only son Philippe Duc de Chartres), and she had already suffered two miscarriages.

On 6 August 1682, therefore, the tension was considerable as she went into labour, using the famous royal plank between two mattresses on which both Louis XIV and the Dauphin had been born. Louis was in attendance, taking his turn in promenading the Dauphine round the room as the hours passed. Also present among the host of courtiers exerting their rights to be in on important occasions of state were both Athénaïs and Françoise: the former as Superintendent of the Queen's Household, the latter as Second Mistress of the Wardrobe of the Dauphine herself. It was ordered however that no one wearing perfume should be admitted to the birthing-chamber: overwhelming scents were thought dangerous in this situation. Sniffer-dogs were posted at the door to make sure there were no back-slidings.

In attendance was the royal accoucheur (man-midwife), the calm and competent Julian Clément: he had already performed the same function for Athénaïs. When the baby was finally born shortly after ten o'clock in the evening, he answered the King's question about its sex according to a prearranged code: ‘I do not knowyet, Sire.' This meant a boy. (‘I do not know, Sire' was code for a girl.) It was therefore the suddenly radiant King who cried out: ‘We have a Duc de Bourgogne!’.²¹ The baby was put on a silver platter and examined – successfully – for perfection.* ‘The little Prince', as Bourgogne was known, was promised a splendid destiny according to his horoscope, with the Sun in the sign of the Lion, Saturn in the eleventh house at the hour of Jupiter. From Louis XIV's point of view, the dynasty was now secure, especially since Marianne-Victoire became pregnant again without mishap a few months later. As a forty-four-year-old grandfather (little older than his parents had been at his birth) he could now relax. He personally had no more need to produce further legitimate heirs.

The King's patriarchal contentment contrasted with the mood of Liselotte. In July 1682 she described herself as ‘miserable as an old dog'. Everyone went on about her being so sad, she wrote, ‘when they themselves are the daily and hourly cause'. Once again, as with Henriette-Anne, it was not Monsieur's homosexuality which was at issue, since for the last four years, following the birth of a healthy son and daughter, ‘I have been permitted to live in perfect chastity.' (A few years later she decided that abstinence had actually made her ‘a virgin' again.) It was Monsieur's slavish adoration of the Chevalier de Lorraine which upset the balance of what could have been a perfectly acceptable condition. There were also rumours, probably spread by Monsieur's supporters, of Liselotte's own gallantry with the Chevalier de Saint-Saëns: quite untrue, since Liselotte much preferred her dogs (‘the best people I have come across in France, I never have less than four about me … no eiderdown could ever be as cosy').²²

In her unhappiness and her indignation Liselotte asked to retire to a convent where one of her Palatine aunts was a Catholic Abbess. But Louis refused. He gave her three reasons. ‘First of all, you are Madame,' he said, ‘and obliged to uphold that position. Secondly you are my sister-in-law and my affection for you will not allow me to let you leave. Thirdly, you are my brother's wife and I cannot let him be touched by scandal.' To this Liselotte had no alternative but to submit with the words: ‘You are my King and thus my master.' King, Monsieur and Madame all three embraced.

With the genuine affection he felt for her, Louis now assured Liselotte that although he had taken his brother's part and would always do so, on all other issues he would take hers. It had to be enough. The number of Liselotte's dogs increased: her Mione, ‘the most beautiful little dog in the world', her Rachille behind her chair, her Titti near the writing-table, her Mille Millette on her feet, her Charmion beneath her skirts crying to be close to her mistress, her Charmante also under her skirts on the other side, her Strabdille, her Charmille …²³

There was a subtext to Liselotte's dissatisfaction, and that was her growing jealousy of Madame de Maintenon, a woman not only inferior in birth and with a questionable marriage behind her, but seventeen years her senior. Liselotte, in her frank and often extremely vulgar allusions to Françoise, never stopped harping upon her age: she was ‘die alte Zott' (the old trollop), and in future years old prune, frump, chambermaid, hag, whore, garbage and ordure (an extremely coarse German word was used for this). A handy German proverb was quoted: ‘Where the devil cannot go, he sends an old woman.’²⁴ It was the beginning of a duel which would only end with the death of the King.

Others, accustomed to the royal mistress being in her prime of beauty, were simply baffled by the spectacle of the King's attentions to a woman now nearer fifty than forty. Primi Visconti, for example, wondered if Françoise might be ‘a skilled person whom the King would use to help him rewrite his memoirs'.²⁵

Madame de Maintenon was not helping Louis with his memoirs, but the question remained open (and will always be subject to speculation) as to exactly what their relationship was at this point. It was in September 1681 that Madame de Sévigné made her famous pun on the French word for ‘now': Madame de Maintenon was ‘Madame de Maintenant' (Madame Now).

The following summer marked the date when Louis XIV officially designated Versailles the seat of his court and government. According to the Marquis de Sourches, on 6 May 1682 the King left Monsieur's château of Saint-Cloud to establish himself inVersailles, where ‘he wishes to be for a long time although it is still full of masons'.²⁶ Despite the presence of the masons and the plasterers which upset the great ladies, the disposition of apartments at the new official residence declared a great deal about the current state of his relationships. Françoise's rooms, for example, were of an ambivalent status, parallel to her own ambivalent position.

Queen Marie-Thérèse had immense and splendid rooms on the south face of the central block of the Parterre du Midi. The Dauphin and Dauphine were also on the royal floor, the latter annoying the King by her grumbling about the builders. Athénaïs, still theoretically maîtresse en titre, had four principal rooms on the same floor, looking out over the Cour Royale. Then there was the plethora of courtiers up above in cramped conditions occupying what would now be seen as attic rooms, obliged to share a common kitchen some way away, even if they had their own privies: nearness to the sovereign was preferred to spacious living.

But Françoise's accommodation fell into neither category. She had some little square rooms facing north and not very well heated (she suffered from cold, with the beginnings of arthritis, and loved cosy Maintenon for its warmth). The cabinet containing thechaise percée or commode was small enough to be extremely inconvenient: filling and emptying the copper bath tub would also not have been an easy task. A tiny wooden staircase led up to the landing where Françoise's faithful servant Nanon Balbien, her companion since the old Scarron days, kept Françoise's wardrobe in a single cupboard. The windows actually faced those of Athénaïs, but there was no comparison between the two suites of rooms: one demonstrated splendour, the other intimacy.²⁷*

As late as August 1682 Françoise was still taking care to separate herself from the position formerly occupied by Athénaïs. ‘People are saying that I want to put myself in her place,' she wrote, with her usual sensitivity to gossip about her reputation. ‘They don't understand my distance from these sorts of commerce [sex] nor the distance which I want to inspire in the King.'²⁸ The battle for the King's salvation was not certainly won: there had been some earlier talk of his flirtations with pretty younger women. Françoise was evidently bearing in mind the warning in Madeleine de Scudéry's Map of Love on the subject of the fast-flowing River of Inclination which led into the Sea of Danger. Her aim, she said, was to be Louis's ‘best friend'. The evidence is, however, that shortly after Françoise wrote these words, she decided that a best friend's duty to Louis XIV did unfortunately include sleeping with him, in order to prevent other more frivolous, less religiously focused people doing it without her own pure motives.

She did not of course put it like that to herself: six years earlier Françoise had criticised the King's confessor Father La Chaise for being content with ‘a demi-conversion' and commented to the Comtesse de Saint-Géran how ‘the atmosphere of the court spoils the most pure virtue and softens the most severe'. Now she herself had been softened. Much later, Françoise could look back with more detachment and tell her confidential secretary Marie-Jeanne d'Aumale that the King ‘would have looked for his pleasures elsewhere if he had not found them with me'.²⁹ Her take on Marie-Thérèse was along the same lines: the Queen was a saint but ‘not very intelligent', since she was always at prayer when the King needed her. But at the time her avoidance of public Communion in September caused her perturbation; still more did she agonise over the need to ‘make her Easter’ in 1683.* She told Madame de Brinon that it was true that she had taken her Easter Communion ‘after a very troubled night shedding many tears' although she knew only too well that they might be considered affected. Françoise then mentioned her charities as distinguishing her from other people in her position: an unfair allusion to Athénaïs, who was nothing if not charitable. But then Françoise could not bring herself to be generous about her effective predecessor. Something about past slights still rankled: Athénaïs was, Françoise wrote in May 1681, ‘fatter by a toot’ than when last seen.³⁰

There was therefore from the first something bleak about the sexual relationship of Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon: a necessity for two middle-aged people, but from completely the opposite point of view. For Louis it was the passion he could not master, for Françoise the passion she had to endure for the higher good. For Louis XIV there was no urge for conquest as with Louise, no rampant lust as with Athénaïs, no resurgence of youth as with Angélique. Whatever Françoise's sexual experiences with Scarron twenty-five years earlier, they had not given her a high opinion of men in that particular respect. How dominated they were by their physical urges! As she would reflect years later: ‘Men, if passion does not guide them, are not tender in their friendships.'³¹Madame Now on the contrary specialised in tender friendship in which physical passion played no part.

With a serene – if still theoretically sinful – private life, Louis XIV was free to concentrate on the further glorification of Versailles, for which the expenses peaked at over 6 million livres (20 million pounds sterling in today's money) in 1685. A place where strict hierarchical values reigned, Versailles was conversely the scene of extraordinary disorder. It was not just the perpetual building-works, scaffolding everywhere, the smell, the dust, the noise. Security was also non-existent by modern standards. The gold fringes of the King's own bed were cut off, the crime discovered only when an anonymous packet containing them was dumped on the royal dinner-table with a message for the valet Bontemps from the thief: ‘Take back your fringes, Bontemps, the pleasure is not worth the bother. My compliments to the King.' As the royal doctor examined the returned fringes for possible traces of poison, the King himself remained cool, merely observing: ‘What insolence!’³² Which was true enough.

Yet Versailles was, as Louis had intended it to be, glorious.³³ Perhaps the King's favourite silver furniture symbolised the apogee of this glory: the glittering silver chairs and tables, the shining silver pots, for example, which held the beloved orange trees in the Orangery, more and more added yearly, many of them brought from Fontainebleau. The relation of dark to light at Versailles was also symbolic. The outer corridors were dark, and servants had to guide visitors and residents with torches. Yet Versailles itself, thestate apartments, lit up by night by a myriad of candles and flambeaux, was a majestic, unforgettable sight.³⁴*

The King's militant and militaristic foreign policy was also part of his concept of personal glory. In 1682 two young Scots lords, sons of the Marquess of Queensberry, admired the huge gilded ship named the Grand Louis at Toulon: the legend on its hull ran: ‘I am unique on the waves / As my master is in the world.' This was how the French King was beginning to see himself. Unfortunately both aspects of the King's will – the creation of Versailles as the centre of Europe and his quest for military glory – demanded enormous sums of money: and money was finite, even if it did not seem so at the time to the Sun King.³⁵

The fragile Peace of Nijmegen of 1678 which ended the Dutch War was fractured as Louis indulged by stages in the annexation of certain cities and territories he considered to be justly French. This subversive policy of réunions was enough to lead to another Grand Alliance against France in 1682. The Habsburg Emperor, Spain, Holland and Sweden were involved and war was surely on the horizon. It was the arrival of the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683 which distracted the Emperor and the Christian Kings, and it was John Sobieski, King of Poland, who saved Europe from the Muslim invasion, not Louis XIV: he for his part, much less helpfully, saw his opportunity to foment revolt in Hungary. It was in this atmosphere of impending European chaos that a totally unexpected event took place in both the public and the private life of Louis XIV which was to have an irrevocable impact on its future course.

In the last week of July 1683 Queen Marie-Thérèse was seen happily wandering in the gardens of Versailles, admiring the play of the new fountains. Her health appeared to be perfect: her complexion clear, her colour good. A few days later she fell ill of a tumourunder her arm. The tumour turned purple and became an oozing abscess. In spite of the best – or worst – efforts of the doctors, the emetics in wine, the usual purgings and bleedings, the enervating clysters, the Queen became progressively sicker, and her pain increased proportionately.³⁶ To the amazement of her doctors, who understood the agonies she must be suffering, the Queen did not complain – but then she had seldom complained in her life.

As the situation rapidly worsened, the need for the Holy Sacrament to arrive from the chapel became acute. Normally the Sacrament was formally escorted by servants bearing enormous flaming torches: it was the King who ordered the ordinary candles on the altar to be taken because there was no time to lose. He was right. The Queen was dying fast. Did she murmur the words: ‘Since I have been Queen, I have had only one happy day'? And if so, which day was it? No one knew. Her wedding day? Her wedding night, when she was sure the King loved her? The day of the birth of her first child, the son that everyone wanted? She did not say. Marie-Thérèse, Infanta of Spain and Queen of France, died towards the end of her forty-fifth year at three in the afternoon on 30 July 1683. The King spoke his own epitaph on this shy, unhappy, dull but ever dutiful woman to whom he had been married for over twenty years: ‘This is the first trouble she has ever given me.'

Compared with the King's tender but solipsistic verdict, the oration of Bossuet at Marie-Thérèse's state funeral was predictably magnificent, as was Lully's Requiem, including its solemn, plangent Dies Irae. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking that Bossuet was actually lauding Louis XIV, not burying Marie-Thérèse, so great was the emphasis on the King and his works, above all his support of religion: ‘Let us not forget what made the Queen rejoice: Louis is the bulwark of religion: it is religion which he has served with his armies by land and sea.'

And in the prevailing tense political atmosphere, Marie-Thérèse's Spanish birth and the claims of succession deriving from it (now, of course, passed to her only child the Dauphin) were given a special lengthy commendation. Only as an afterthought did Bossuet throw in the fact that Marie-Thérèse's virtues, as well as her high birth, had made her a suitable bride for Louis XIV. With her Christian faith, her love of Holy Communion and her dependence on its efficacy: ‘she now walks with the Lamb because she is worthy of it.' To say however that Louis's love was as steadfast as ever after twenty-three years was surely economical with the truth. It was when Bossuet invoked the names of the two Queens, Anne and Marie-Thérèse, even closer in piety than in blood, that he struck a note with which everyone including the King could agree.

The funeral cortège was headed, by a splendid irony, by Madame de Montespan, since she had been Superintendent of the late Queen's Household (a job that had now vanished). According to the Grande Mademoiselle, Athénaïs, with her inborn sense of the grand style, was shocked by the levity of some of the younger members of the cortège. It remained to be seen in what direction the court would develop after the Queen's death: whether it would be dominated by the wayward spirit of the younger generation or whether the newly devout mood of the King, encouraged by Madame Now, would hold sway.

The most recent book in English, Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons (2003), gives a lucid account of it all.²

The index of books prohibited to Catholics after the Council of Trent in 1564 included (Regula IX) works on necromancy, chiromancy (palmistry), the preparation of magical drafts or poisons, auguries and magical incantations. ‘All these things are utterly forbidden.'

There is a comparison to be made between the Affair of the Poisons and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which Marie-Antoinette was pilloried, one hundred years later. People at the time (and historians later) believed in the guilt of Athénaïs and Marie-Antoinette if they wished to do so.

These marriages of state, made at such a young age (the Duc de Bourbon was seventeen to his bride's eleven), were not however consummated until a more appropriate time; in this case a year later, when Louise-Françoise was not quite thirteen.

† Louise-Françoise will henceforth be mainly designated as ‘Madame la Duchesse', in view of the quantity of similar forenames.

The royal houses of Bourbon-Condé and Bourbon-Conti in this period descended from two brothers, respectively Prince de Condé and Prince de Conti, born to Henri II Prince de Condé and Charlotte de Montmorency in the 1620s. the Prince de Condé (known as Monsieur le Prince as his heir was Monsieur le Duc) was the elder of the two; thus he was the senior Prince of the Blood. Intermarriage of the cousins would make them further inextricably entwined.

In the classical myth, Cadmus slew the dragon guarding the spring sacred to Ares; when he sowed some of its teeth in the ground on the orders of Athena, they sprang up into warriors.

Julian Clément, whose career as a royal accoucheur flourished, was finally ennobled in 1711. Given the strain of royal births, with their dynastic implications and the frenzied hope for boys, no one deserved it more.

Today these apartments, occupied by Madame de Maintenon for thirty years with certain modifications and adaptations, still have a poky feel.

This did not mean that Françoise never took Communion at all during this period; it was as ever the public nature of Easter which was the issue: to ‘make one's Easter’ when the whole world knew that adultery was being committed (by the King) or the lesser sin of fornication (by the widowed Françoise).

It would be wrong in this context to see today's Versailles, a tourist mecca, a maelstrom of different races, as representing something totally alien to the Versailles of the seventeenth century. Enormous crowds of carriages and other horse-drawn vehicles once thronged the areas which are now car-parks and bus-parks; as to race, Asiatic princes paid ceremonial visits and Africans were popular as pages and guards, as can be seen from the portraits of the period.