Athenais: The Life of Louis XIV's Mistress, the Real Queen of France

by Hilton, Lisa

  Gabrielle’s pride appears both petty and absurd in a democratic age, but the internal logic of aristocratic breeding must have influenced Athénaïs’s personal psychology, as well as the circumstances of her life. From the sixteenth century to the French Revolution, there existed a powerful hostility on the part of the nobility to social change as manifested in the “gate-crashing” of aristocratic privilege by politically powerful or wealthy families. François I sowed the seeds of this discontent by creating a noblesse de robe, “nobility of the robe,” who owed their titles to political or financial service to the crown, as distinct from the noblesse d’épée, or “nobility of the sword,” the ancient families whose prestige was based upon military power. The nobility of the sword were outraged that anyone should attain aristocratic status by money or hard work — neither of which was considered to be the concern of a gentleman. Relationships between these two types of aristocrat were immensely complex and subtle, but the main principle of the “natural” social hierarchy, in which Louis XIV emphatically believed, was blood. Rank, effectively, was destiny, and a confidence in her own breeding distinguishes Athénaïs de Montespan from the two other chief mistresses of the King, Louise de La Vallière and the Marquise de Maintenon. Indeed, part of her attraction may have been that she considered herself very nearly his equal. Certainly she was the only person in the whole of France who ever dared to scold him.

  The connections between the Rochechouarts and the royal family had always been strong. Athénaïs’s father, Gabriel de Rochechouart, Duc de Mortemart, Prince de Tonnay-Charente, Marquis de Lussac and Vivonne, was brought up with Louis XIII and held a number of distinguished posts: first gentleman of the chamber, knight of the St. Esprit, governor and lieutenant-general of Metz, Toul and Verdun. He was elevated to his dukedom and peerage in 1650 during the minority of Louis XIV. The Duc de Mortemart was a handsome, sensual man who combined intelligence and cultivation with a taste for luxurious living. He loved hunting and eating as well as music, books and making love. Such vigorous passion for life was in contrast to the more delicate personality of his wife, Diane de Grandseigne, who was descended from the Marsillac family. Diane served as lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria, and was as pious and virtuous as her mistress, although less dull. She was a celebrated conversationalist and a talented musician who spent much of her time working for charity. From her mother, Athénaïs absorbed the devout Catholic faith which remained with her throughout her life, those “seeds of religion which

  were never eradicated,”1 and probably her extraordinary blond hair. The Duc bequeathed her his appetites and a curvaceous, sexy mouth. The characters of her parents were mixed in her temperament as in her face, and the conflict between her father’s passions and her mother’s piety was to shape her life.

  Although the Duc and Duchesse de Mortemart were not a happy couple, they managed to have five children: Gabrielle (born 1634), the superbly snobbish Marquise de Thianges; Louis-Victor (born 1636), the Marquis de Vivonne; Françoise, the future Athénaïs (born at Lussac in 1640), and Marie-Madeleine (born 1645). The life of the fifth child, Marie-Christine, is almost unrecorded: having adopted an early vocation at the convent of Chaillot, she led a sequestered life of fasting and prayer. Clever and good-looking, the other four children shared with their father a famous characteristic of the family known as the “esprit Mortemart.” Voltaire wrote of them: “These five persons enchanted everyone by their conversation, an inimitable turn of phrase, a mixture of jokes, pretended innocence and art.”2 The Duc de Saint-Simon, whose memoirs chronicle the reign of Louis XIV, loathed Athénaïs de Montespan, but even he had to admit that her conversation was “the gift of saying things both amusing and singular, always original, and which no one expected, not even she herself as she said them.”

  As her husband returned from an evening of romancing the maids of his country estate, the Duchesse reproached him, “Do you spend your life with devils?”

  “I know that my devils are better-tempered than your good angels,” said the Duc, smiling.3 The Mortemarts were certainly funny; their charm lay in their way of speaking, described by Visconti as their great gift. They adapted their high, cultivated voices at one moment to perfect academic French, the next to the argot of the streets. Their conversation was always daring, always surprising; it privileged amusing untruths over dreary veracity. They delivered the most cutting cruelties in a tone of dreamy naïveté, and though they spared no one, their malice was so delicious that everyone adored it. They invented a private language for their jokes — “Bourgignon,” for example, was a terrible insult, stemming from Mme. de Thianges’s loathing of her husband’s drab country estates in Burgundy. Saint-Simon recalled that well into the following century, Athénaïs’s accent, and her particular turn of phrase, could be heard in the voices of her daughters and the daughters of the women who had served her, an ephemeral legacy that whispered in the corridors of Versailles long after her death.

  It is sad that conversation is such a transitory gift, for it is impossible to gain a full sense of the captivating Mortemarts from their letters. Athénaïs preferred talking to writing, as is apparent from her eloquent but rather unoriginal correspondence with the Bishop of Soissons in the 1680s, which display a sense of constraint in their unconvincing attempts to support the Bishop’s proposal that letters were superior to conversation. Words, Athénaïs wrote, are blown away by the wind, vanishing too quickly into the air, but she took a delight in their insubstantiality which can be appreciated only from contemporary descriptions of her conversation. “You know,” Louis once remarked to the Princesse Palatine, “I like clever, amusing people.” The Mortemarts, in their way, were artists, and the King admired them.4

  All that remains of the massive medieval castle of Lussac, where Athénaïs spent her childhood, are the towers of a drawbridge, and very little is known about her early life in the Poitou countryside. The Duc and Duchesse were away for much of the year pursuing their court commitments, and Athénaïs was cared for, as was usual at the time, by nurses and servants. Sometimes the child would accompany her parents to the Louvre, where she would stay in the Grand Logis with her nurse Auzanneau, nicknamed Nono. It is quite possible that during these visits she might have seen the little boy who became king in 1643.

  Louis XIV had been initiated into his royal status practically from birth. He performed his first official function at the age of sixteen months, in 1640, when he took a napkin from the maître d’hôtel and handed it to his father, the King. In 1643, now King himself, he was shown to his people in a coach and six, gazing curiously from a pile of cushions at the streets crowded with his cheering subjects. The Venetian ambassador painted a picture of him a few years later:

  His Majesty Louis XIV has a lively and attractive nature which gives promise of virtue. His body is strong, his eyes bright and rather severe, but this severity is full of charm. He seldom laughs, even at play. He insists on being obeyed and respected by his brother . . . aged three. In short, if he lives and receives a good education, he gives promise of being a great king.5

  It is unlikely that Athénaïs and Louis played together, since the little King preferred his toy soldiers and miniature guns to the hoops and dolls provided for little girls. Already, perhaps, the young Athénaïs was drawn to the excitements of the court, since despite the beauty of her childhood home, she never until the end of her life expressed a great liking for the country.

  Aged about twelve, Françoise followed her elder sister Gabrielle to the convent of Ste. Marie des Saintes, founded in 1047, where in the fifteenth century two successive Mortemart ancestors had been bishops. The convent was one of a few great foundations that educated the daughters of the aristocracy at considerable expense. It was an interesting time to go to school, as the education of women, a source of controversy since medieval times, was then being reexamined from both religious and philosophical perspectives.

  After the crisis of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church instig
ated a drive to inculcate good religious practice in children, with a particular emphasis on girls, who would, it was hoped, grow up into influential Catholic mothers. Simultaneously, the radical idea that women’s brains might be as intellectually capable as men’s was being debated in the Parisian salons, championed by writers like Mlle. de Scudéry and the famous correspondent Mme. de Sévigné. Something of a quiet revolution in female education was taking place in seventeenth-century France, and despite Molière’s satires on “learned” women, the movement gained real ground towards the end of the century with the publication of De l’Egalité des Sexes (1673), in which De la Barre proposed that “if women studied in universities . . . they could take degrees and aspire to the titles of Doctor and Master in Theology, Medicine . . . and Law,” and Fénélon’s De l’Education des Filles (1687), which inspired the curriculum for the girls’ school founded by Mme. de Maintenon at St. Cyr. “Nothing is more bizarre,” wrote Mlle. de Scudéry, “than the educational system for females. They are taught nothing to fortify their virtue or occupy their mind.”6 Very gradually, it was being recognized that keeping girls in almost total ignorance was foolish, if not dangerous.

  However, it appears that neither Athénaïs de Rochechouart’s environment nor, for all her cleverness, her temperament, were conducive to making an educational pioneer of her, although her younger sister Marie-Madeleine was to become one of the most truly learned women

  of the age. Seventeenth-century convents were not the sinister, corrupt prisons depicted in later (Protestant) gothic fiction, and many girls passed through them with no intention of entering the novitiate. Forced vocations were common enough, often as a means of disposing of an excess of marriageable daughters in order to concentrate family funds for dowries, but not all pupils were subjected to religious oppression. Piety was omnipresent though: by far the most important element in the curriculum was religious instruction. “No matter what school a girl went to, there was little danger she would emerge a scholar.”7 Aside from religious studies, Françoise would have learned sewing, reading, arithmetic and writing (the latter none too successfully, since her spelling was flamboyant, even by the standards of the day). For those who could afford it, these lessons were supplemented by private tuition in dancing, history, geography and music. Secular literature was regarded with suspicion, but the arts were valued as a means for a girl to show herself to advantage in the marriage market of the salons. Students may have acted in suitable plays, a good preparation for the court ballets and masques in which they would be expected to participate, and they learned to play and to sing to the harpsichord. Athénaïs was a wonderful dancer, and loved performing at court entertainments. She must have enjoyed reading, particularly history, drama and poetry, as in later life she showed exceptional taste in her encouragement and patronage of some of France’s greatest writers. She was adept at writing poetry herself, the playful, witty and sometimes cruel verses which were exchanged at court, and she went on to compose verses for her correspondents.

  Domestic economy was also an important skill for girls expecting to manage large households, so an understanding of business letters and basic accounting was taught. Needlework was a wholesome occupation for hands which otherwise might lie dangerously idle. It is hard to imagine that Athénaïs de Montespan spent much time on so tranquil a pursuit, but she appreciated fine embroidery and became a connoisseur of tapestries. Later, she made a contribution of beautiful gold and blue bed curtains for the Grand Dauphin’s suite at Versailles, which was so well decorated that it became a popular tourist attraction. She certainly learned to cook, as Mme. de Sévigné records that in 1676, Athénaïs paid a visit to the convent at Chaillot, where she perked up the nuns, including one Sister Louise de la Miséricorde, with a game of lotto. When supper was served she found the nuns’ provisions rather meager, so she sent out for cream, butter and spices and cooked a delicious sauce with her own beautiful white hands.8 This unconventional enthusiasm for cookery came in handy during Athénaïs’s relationship with the King, who had a gargantuan appetite, and disliked seeing women refuse food. The consequences for her figure were less convenient, and Athénaïs battled with her weight for most of her life. A tendency to stoutness ran in the family, and the Mortemarts’ cousin the Duc d’Aumont was notoriously the fattest man at court. Athénaïs’s brother Vivonne was especially large. In a discussion about the value of reading, he once remarked to the King that books had the same effect on the mind as partridges had on his cheeks. On another occasion, the King reprimanded his friend, “You are growing visibly fatter, you don’t take enough exercise,” to which Vivonne replied, “What slander! Not a day goes by that I do not walk around my cousin D’Aumont at least four times.”

  The most important part of Athénaïs’s education began when she made her social debut, aged twenty, in 1660, under the name Mlle. de Tonnay-Charente, one of the family titles. Thanks to her mother’s influence with Anne of Austria, on being presented at court she was given the post of maid of honor to the new Queen, Marie-Thérèse. One of her first appearances was in Bensérade’s ballet Hercule Amoureux, in which she danced alongside the young King, who played the roles of Mars, the god of war, and the Sun. The most beautiful young woman of her day, she caused an immediate sensation.

  There is some dispute as to her exact physical appearance. Athénaïs is most often described as a blond, though some commentators, interestingly the most hostile, claim that her hair was naturally dark, presumably for the satisfaction of suggesting that she dyed it. She was of medium height, with bright blue eyes, a straight nose and firm chin, and at this stage had a perfect figure by the standards of the time, with slender wrists, waist and neck to set off a full, creamy bosom, an advantage when wearing the low-cut, tight-bodiced dresses that were fashionable early in Louis’s reign. Her teeth, extremely unusually, were white and even — “in short, a perfect face,” wrote Visconti. Whatever the true color of her hair, it was thick and luxuriant, and she invented a becoming new style by wearing it pulled back off the crown and cascading in delicate ringlets around the face. The Queen

  also adopted this hairstyle, which became known as the hurluberlu, though she sulkily claimed that she was not doing so to copy Athénaïs, but only because the King liked it.

  Mme. de Sévigné describes Athénaïs later, at Versailles:

  Seriously, her beauty is amazing, and her figure is not half as heavy as it was, while her complexion, eyes, lips, have lost none of their beauty. She was dressed from head to foot in point de France, her hair done in a thousand curls. From each temple they hung down low over her cheeks . . . in a word, a triumphant beauty to make all the ambassadors admire.9

  Even the Princesse Palatine, the fat second wife of Monsieur, who hated Athénaïs with all the fury inspired in an ugly woman by a beautiful one, had to acknowledge her “superb éclat,” her beautiful fair hair, fine, shapely arms and hands, and her pretty mouth with its charming smile.10

  What Athénaïs had in abundance was sex appeal, which is apparent in one of the few portraits of her that seem to capture her personality. Reclining on a divan in her château at Clagny, Athénaïs reveals herself as a voluptuous, gorgeous toy who seems to exist for delight. The cupids above her draw back the curtains as on a stage, emphasizing the comparison of their mistress with Venus in her role of erotic display. She is in knowing, negligent déshabillé, tantalizingly exposing one strawberry nipple, her slippers kicked away with a courtesan’s carelessness from her soft, plump feet; arranged with her splendid palace stretching behind her, demonstrating her wealth and influence, to be approved, admired, desired, envied. Her gaze is expectantly directed to the right foreground, as though awaiting — who? This picture has more in common with Boucher’s enchanting erotic paintings of Louis XV’s teenage lover Louise O’Murphy than with representations of other maîtresses en titre such as Mme. de Pompadour, who seem anxious to regulate their ambiguous social position by representing themselves amid cultural or religious paraphern
alia. Athénaïs is unashamed, celebratory, luxuriating in this display of a purely sexual power. It was not until the end of her career that she had herself painted as a repentant Magdalene.

  Every scribbler at court vied to produce elegant verses in praise of this stunning beauty. After seeing her at Mass with the King at St. Germain L’Auxerrois, a courtier named Loret called her

  This charming miracle

  This divine paradise of the eyes

  This rare masterpiece of the gods.11

  He continued in similar vein for another twenty-eight verses of hyperbolic praise. More striking even than her looks was the famous “esprit Mortemart.” At all court entertainments — dancing as a beribboned shepherdess with Monsieur in the ballet, promenading by torchlight in the Tuileries gardens — Athénaïs’s wit flashed out, sharp and sparkling, commanding attention, demanding homage. “Though she might pass for the finest woman in the world, there was yet something more agreeable in her Wit than in her Countenance,” one writer later asserted.12 And in the eighteenth century, Saint-Simon recalled: