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

by Hilton, Lisa

  Among the bored younger members of Louis’s family, the libertine spirit of the Regency seemed already to have taken hold. When they could, they escaped from Versailles to Clagny (now occupied by the Du Maines) or St. Cloud, or, increasingly, to Paris. La Maintenon was disgusted by their behavior, particularly that of the female courtiers: “The women of these days are insupportable to me,” she declared, “with their immodest dress, their tobacco, their wine, their greediness, their coarseness, their laziness.” She banned opera at Versailles and allowed only “respectable” plays to be performed in an effort to improve morality, but this policy served only to make the young people more frustrated and badly behaved. They responded by giving private entertainments of their own: Lully’s Alceste, for example, was performed at the Princesse de Conti’s little house in Versailles, the Grand Dauphin staged opera at his house at Meudon, and Molière’s early comedies, which had once delighted the King, were now performed in secret at the Palais Royal. Mme. de Maintenon had never approved much of the theater, but deep embarrassment was added to her antipathy when, much to the amusement of Athénaïs’s daughters, some of Scarron’s comedies were played at Versailles.

  Athénaïs’s daughters, the Duchesse de Chartres and Mme. la Duchesse, were the leaders of this scandalous younger set. “No one is safe from their ridicule,” criticized La Palatine, “and all this under the pretext of amusing the King.” They did not give a fig for La Main-tenon, and outraged her by taking what Saint-Simon politely calls “long repasts’ together. At Marly, the teenage duchesses were caught smoking pipes they had begged from the Swiss guards, given away by the smell, but when La Maintenon summoned them for a scolding, Mme. la Duchesse laughed in her old governess’s face. Despite their deadly quarrels over which of their daughters should marry the Duc de Berry (Mme. de Chartres eventually won), they joined forces to tease their beautiful but slow-witted half-sister, Louise de La Vallière’s daughter the Princesse de Conti. One evening, Mme. la Duchesse, rather drunk, was playing at olive-spitting with her father, to the Princesse’s evident disgust. Louis remarked that her sobriety hardly fitted their cheerful drunkenness, to which the Princesse retorted that she “would rather be a sobersides than a chronic boozer.” Mme. de Chartres replied in her slow, quavering voice, her mother’s voice, that she would rather be a wineskin than a tart. When the Princesse could find no witty riposte to this, Mme. la Duchesse vanquished her completely by writing some bawdy verses to the effect that Mme. de Conti had not inherited her mother’s modesty, and that the guards were always having to be sacked for being caught in bed with her. And so it went on.

  Athénaïs, meanwhile, continued to immerse herself in her charitable work. She too had been affected by the Spanish wars, having had her royal pension of 100,000 livres reduced by two thirds, but she was worried only about the effect this would have on the paupers she assisted. When she had first left Versailles for St. Joseph, Athénaïs had had several conversations with a lady celebrated for her devotion, Mme. Miramion, to whom she had explained that she sincerely wished to repent, and expressed hope for that lady’s good influence. Through her tears, Athénaïs had told Mme. Miramion, “Ah, Madame, he treats me like the least of women, nevertheless since the Comte de Toulouse, I have not so much as touched the tip of his finger.”3 Mme. Miramion, whose charitable interests were particularly concerned with “fallen women,” accepted that France’s most famous sinner was in earnest, but suggested that although Athénaïs wept much, her tears were “those of weakness and despair, not yet of penitence.” Perhaps inspired by Mme. de Miramion, who had founded a convent in Paris, Athénaïs decided that good works would be the first stage in conquering her still rebellious heart.

  Having come to believe that there was no better way to please God and be forgiven for her sins than to support the poor, Athénaïs had decided to transfer the refuge she had set up under the sisters of St. Lazare nearer to her new home. So she established a new hospital at Oiron, which still exists today, complete with a portrait of its founder by Mignard. The buildings were “furnished with beds, linen, crockery and everything necessary for the maintenance and lodging of poor people,” and in 1704, a foundation deed was passed which decreed that the hospital was to care for one hundred poor people of both sexes, six each from Curcay and Moncontour, sixteen from neighboring parishes, six from Fontrevault, where Athénaïs’s sister Marie-Madeleine was abbess, two nominated by the Bishop of Poitiers, and the remainder from Oiron itself. The directors were the Bishop of Poitiers, the owner and her successors of Oiron, the dean and priest of Oiron, and the seneschals, the royal lieutenants, of Oiron, Curcay and Moncon-tour. Twenty-four old men were also supported, with the express purpose of praying privately for Mme. de Montespan. Athénaïs had already instituted a private Mass for her family at Fontrevault, known as the “Mass of guardian angels.” It was celebrated daily, on Monday for all the children, on Tuesday for the Duc du Maine (who in 1684, when the Masses began, had not yet become estranged from his mother), on Wednesday for Mlle. de Nantes, on Thursday for Mlle. de Blois, on Friday for Athénaïs herself, on Saturday for the family again and on Sunday for the Comte de Toulouse. Athénaïs gave 5,000 livres for the purchase of land whose revenues would support the chaplains who said the Masses. Even before she left the court for good, it seems, then, that she was increasingly concerned about the state of her soul. Unkind tongues suggested, with reference to the rumors of the poisons scandal, that having made a friend of the Devil for so long, Athénaïs was now anxious to avoid his company for eternity.

  Athénaïs donated more than 110,000 livres to her pet project at Oiron, as well as some of her own plate and furniture carved with her coat of arms, and took a personal interest in every aspect of the hospital’s organization, from the decoration of the rooms to the timetable of the boarders’ days. She was pleased when in 1705 Louis confirmed the foundation with letters patent, and the hospital was officially opened with a Mass soon afterwards. As tribute to the owner of Oiron, the community was to pay an annual “rent” of a half-louis, and the first ripe grape from its vines. On the feast of St. François (Françoise was, of course, Athénaïs’s Christian name), the superior of the order of nuns which ran the hospital presented the host at the parish Mass, and presented the priest with an offering of a gold louis. The hospital was an imaginatively compassionate project, but Athénaïs seems still to have felt the need to impose herself upon it just as she had with the convent of St. Joseph. Her charity was far from discreet, as though she wished to advertise that she was now spending her ill-gotten gains for the good.

  While the Oiron plan was being realized, Athénaïs took to spending a good part of the year with her sister at Fontrevault, and Marie-Madeleine remarked with pleasure that her sister’s presence attracted many other visitors who helped her to evade what would otherwise have been a heavy solitude. It seemed that Athénaïs had still lost none of her capacity for drawing people to her. She did not reside in the convent itself, but in a small house in the grounds known, in a cruel reminder of former times, as the Petit Bourbon, though she participated in the routines of prayer and work of the nuns, taking particular pleasure in spending time with the younger novices and an interest in new vocations. She described Fontrevault to her friend the Duchesse de Noailles, whose daughter planned to enter the convent. “I have shown your letter to my sister, who thanks you for having decided to send her your daughter . . . As to the vocation, I can answer for that. This is a convent where no novice refuses to take the vows, and with reason, for it is most holy and most beautiful, and one where the nuns are a thousand times more happy than in all the rest of the world.”4 Is there a note of wistfulness here? Might Athénaïs, in the peaceful country surroundings of the abbey, have reflected that she might have been happier if she had followed her sister to the veil, rather than choosing the turbulent life of the court?

  She certainly loved the company of her learned, charming sister; indeed, Marie-Madeleine’s society was perhaps Athénaïs’s gr
eatest consolation for the loss of her beloved Louis. She never displayed her notorious temper to Marie-Madeleine, instead treating her deferentially, with a solicitous regard for her health and the exhausting effects of her duties as abbess. Together, the sisters could indulge in the whimsical conversation of their shared esprit Mortemart for, as Saint-Simon commented, Marie-Madeleine was “more witty than any of them, with that same turn which no one but themselves, or those who were continually in their society, have ever caught.” The sisters grew closer than ever after their brother Vivonne died in 1688, followed by that masterpiece of nature Mme. de Thianges in 1693.

  It was to Fontrevault that the Marquis d’Antin rode in the winter of 1701 to announce the death of his father to Athénaïs. Montespan had died in his son’s arms, and D’Antin had missed the interment to race to his mother’s side. Athénaïs responded very correctly, donning mourning and having a funeral Mass said, but she must have been astonished at what she discovered when the Marquis’s will was opened. For it was not until then that it became apparent that Montespan had been tormented for thirty-five years by his frustrated love for his wife. The document, witnessed by M. de Faulquier, the royal notary of the district, on 23 October 1701, requests that Athénaïs pray for her husband, and reminds her of “all the tender friendship that she well knows he has always had for her” and of his confidence in her piety on such a grave occasion. Despite his threats, his insults and his abuses, Montespan had preserved an untarnished image of the beautiful young woman he had once vengefully buried in effigy. He actually made Athénaïs coexecutrix of his will, emphasizing his “trust in her charity” and begging her to accept the charge for reasons of the “friendship and sincere tenderness” he felt for her.5 That this was more than a sentimental dying whim is confirmed by Montespan’s clear statement that these requests had been made in his other, preceding testaments. Athénaïs’s reaction to her husband’s posthumous declaration is unrecorded.

  Montespan’s fortunes had improved since the sorry inventory of his possessions at the time of his separation from his wife in 1674. In 1687, his uncle the Duc de Bellegarde had died, and although the Montespan claim to the title was dubious, since he was descended through the female line, Montespan eagerly assumed it, and removed from his château at Bonnefont to the Bellegarde residence at St. Elix, near Toulouse. Despite the fact that the title was never officially recognized outside the province, Montespan adopted the role of regional patriarch with gusto, dispensing justice on his estates and receiving his annual tribute of two capons from the councillors every All Saints’ Day. He improved his new property by adding an orangery, a formal garden and some fine statuary, in imitation of the fashion at Versailles. If this was a poor attempt to re-create the milieu in which his wife had so recently moved, Montespan was soon gratified by a taste of the real thing: by the 1690s he had finally become persona grata at court, much to the amusement of La Palatine, who described his card games with his “daughters” with much amusement. Montespan and D’Antin would be seated opposite one another, with Madame la Duchesse de Chartres on one side and Madame la Duchesse on the other, as Montespan dealt the cards most respectfully, amid much hand-kissing of his wife’s adulterous offspring.

  Montespan’s freedom did not, however, extend to the possibility of his marrying again. When he courted Mlle. Riquet, the daughter of a celebrated Toulouse engineer, announcing in characteristically theatrical style that he intended to write to the Pope to have his marriage annulled, the plan was given short shrift by Louvois, for even now the taint of Louis’s double adultery was a sensitive subject. And clearly it remained so for Montespan who, if he was able to play the fluttering gallant at Versailles, reverted to his usual manners in the provinces. In a game of lasquenet in Toulouse, Montespan lost his king of hearts. “Ah Monsieur!” piped up a witty lady. “That is not the king of hearts which has done you most harm.” The company sniggered, but Monsieur le Marquis was not amused. “If my wife is worth a louis, Madame,” he punned, “then you are valued at thirty sous.” Some days later, Toulouse held one of those masked balls where clumsy provincials aped the wicked behavior of the glittering denizens of Versailles. Taking advantage of their mutual anonymity, Montespan rewarded the witty lady with a good kick.6

  Montespan’s tumultuous existence settled towards the end of his life into apparent contentment; he divided his time between his château, Toulouse and the court, enjoying the increasing success of his son D’Antin and amusing his country guests with bear hunts and amateur theatricals.

  Even so, it is not difficult, given the romance of his lingering love, to pity Montespan. It was hardly his choice to play Amphitryon to Louis’s Jupiter. While it is tempting to cast him as a victim of his wife’s ambition, it must be recalled that Montespan had been an appalling husband: extravagant, neglectful, abusive and violent, behavior for which adultery, even on such a spectacular scale, seems, if not an equable, then at least an appropriate return.

  The contents of Montespan’s will are all the more surprising considering that, some time earlier, Athénaïs’s confessor, Père de la Tour, had exacted an act of penance in which Athénaïs had had to humbly beg her husband’s forgiveness. Athénaïs had chosen La Tour, whose sermons were well known in Paris, as her spiritual adviser as he was both devout and sufficiently worldly to be good company, but in the matter of her moral duty he was exigent and strict. It is a measure of Athénaïs’s sincere desire to repent and return to God that she accepted a humiliation that would have been intolerable to her pride a few years before: she had written to Montespan not only apologizing for the wrongs she had committed, but even offering to resume their conjugal life if he wished it, or alternatively to retire to any place he chose for her. Perhaps this submission was not entirely disingenuous, for even after such a long separation, Athénaïs knew her husband, and must have counted on his pride making such a reconciliation impossible. If so, she was proved right. Montespan replied tersely that he wished neither to see her nor to direct her in anything, nor indeed to speak to her for as long as she lived. What Athénaïs could not have known until after his death was how much such a renunciation must have hurt him.

  Of Athénaïs’s circle at court, the first to die was Monsieur, in June 1701. The royal brothers had dined together at Marly, but had quarreled about the extramarital activities of Athénaïs’s son-in-law the Duc de Chartres. Louis had become insufferably pompous on the subject of adultery now that he was piously married to La Main-tenon. The Duc was having simultaneous affairs with one of his mother’s ladies and a Parisian actress. The latter presented the Duc with a son at exactly the same time as the Duchesse de Chartres produced a daughter, Charlotte-Aglae, Athénaïs’s granddaughter. The Duc made no secret of visiting both new mothers in Paris together, much to the annoyance of his wife, who complained to Louis about the insult. Louis attempted to remonstrate with Monsieur, who pointed out that the King was hardly in a position to throw stones. What about the times he himself had driven Louise de La Vallière and Mme. de Montespan through Flanders in the same coach as the Queen? Louis was outraged that his brother should dare to allude to his past, and they both grew so angry that a servant had to remind them that the company in the next room were hanging on to their every word. Monsieur returned to his château at St. Cloud in a rage, and rather overrefreshed himself in an attempt to calm his nerves. When he suddenly collapsed, a thin trickle of blood oozing from his nostrils, a messenger was sent to Marly. La Maintenon, fearful and bitter towards a man who had always despised her, persuaded Louis that there was no immediate danger, so the King did not leave for St. Cloud until three in the morning, by which time his brother had fallen into a coma from which he never awakened. The deathbed scene was not edified by the spectacle of La Palatine, waddling about in terror in a nightgown, shrieking “No convent for me!”

  Louis wept publicly, and was for once unable to eat, but after an early night he seemed quite composed, and could be heard humming opera tunes the following morning. Th
at evening, the Duc de Mont-fort expressed his disgust at Louis’s grandson the Duc de Bourgogne, who had set up a card table in the salon while his great-uncle was practically still warm. The young man blushingly exclaimed that he was acting on orders, since “the King wishes that no one be bored at Marly.” Soon the room was full of tables and the gaming went on as usual.

  Athénaïs was deeply saddened by the death of Monsieur, her friend and ally for over forty years. Of course, her daughter the Duchesse de Chartres would now become Duchesse d’Orléans, since her husband inherited his father’s title, and therefore one of the most important women in France, but Athénaïs could feel no pleasure in this triumph, as much now as a result of her inclination to dissociate herself from the world as of her absence from the court. Uncharacteristically, she took long walks in the fields, remembering Monsieur and the life they had shared. With the death of her husband that same year and, tragically, that of Marie-Madeleine in 1704, Athénaïs was becoming obsessed with the prospect of her own end. The loss of her sister left Athénaïs prostrate with grief, and her spirits never really recovered. When Louis heard the news, at supper, he expressed his “extreme regret” at the passing of a woman he had esteemed as a friend, but he made no offer of condolence to Athénaïs, even though she was nearby in Paris when the word arrived.

  Athénaïs returned to Oiron and unpacked her clavichord and her writing desk, her four dozen plates embossed with her arms, her white taffeta bed curtains. With the exception of the “King’s bedroom,” she furnished the rest of the house with tasteful simplicity, choosing elegant pieces such as her marquetry dressing table, but avoiding the excessive luxury of Clagny. She unfolded her dresses, in gold and silver lace, in purple damask, in satin and velvet; her thirty corsets, coats brocaded in gold, embroidered skirts and taffeta gowns in blue, violet and lemon yellow or cerise-striped, blue and silver, green with silver working, white or blue covered with meadows of seamstresses’ flowers. Beneath her gorgeous Queen’s gowns, she wore a hair shirt to chafe her white skin, cruel belts and bracelets of steel with iron spikes to torment that “too beautiful, too weak flesh.”