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

by Hilton, Lisa

  It was not until July that D’Antin bestirred himself to attend to his mother’s interment. It is probable that the newly rehabilitated courtier was afraid of offending La Maintenon by asking for his mother’s body to be placed at St. Germain, so, even in death, Athénaïs was not permitted to return to court. Instead, the coffin was taken to the church at Cordeliers, where the Rochechouart de Mortemarts had buried their family since 1595, and where Athénaïs’s mother and brother were interred. On 4 August, in a torchlight procession, her body was finally laid to rest beneath the black marble monument of her family mausoleum. After this humiliating end, Saint-Simon finally did justice to the mother of his mortal enemies, the royal bastards: “The poor of the province, on whom she had rained alms, mourned for her bitterly, as did vast numbers of other people who had benefited by her generosity.”

  At Versailles, the reaction to the death of the former favorite proved entirely typical of the callous, superficial life of the court. Du Maine could hardly conceal his joy at his mother’s decease. While the Duchesse de Chartres, Mme. la Duchesse and the Comte de Toulouse grieved deeply, they were unkindly forbidden by their father from wearing mourning. But Athénaïs’s daughters did not conceal their grief, and for some time they dispensed with their beloved finery and stayed in their rooms, avoiding social life and dancing, even gambling, as a mark of respect. Their mourning, La Maintenon complained, began to seem excessive after a month, since, she added wryly, “We don’t like long afflictions at court.”

  The King had heard the news in a letter from D’Antin at Marly as he was about to go hunting. The company heard him read several lines aloud: “In dying, the Marquise de Montespan manifested the most Christian sentiments . . .” and then he told everyone to mount and they set off as usual. But when the party returned, Louis went to his rooms without even removing his riding boots and said that he wished to be alone. His footsteps could be heard pacing restlessly until night fell. In public, however, not a tear escaped him. His favorite, the Duchesse de Bourgogne, dared to ask him why he did not even sigh for a love that had endured so passionately for so many years. “When she retired,” he replied, “I thought never to see her again, so from then on she was dead to me.”

  And La Maintenon? Did she rejoice that the woman she had driven from her love and her home was finally gone? Some days after hearing the news, she described her reaction to a correspondent. “The death of Mme. de Montespan has not left me unable to write to you, but it is true that I was strongly moved, because she was a person who could never leave me indifferent at any time of my life.” Even after Athénaïs had left the court, she and La Maintenon had remained fascinated by one another, unable, whatever their own protestations, to release themselves from the close and intense rivalry of twenty years. In 1691, La Maintenon had written to Athénaïs’s sister the Abbesse de Fontrevault: “I am overjoyed, Madame, to have received some tokens of remembrance from Madame de Montespan. I feared she was annoyed with me. God knows if I have done anything to merit that, and how my heart is hers!” On the face of it, such declarations may seem merely typical of the former governess’s customary breathtaking hypocrisy, yet they also attest to that fascination which neither woman could quite bear to break. In 1698, Athénaïs, in turn, wrote to the Duchesse de Noailles:

  I wrote today to extol your merits to Madame de Maintenon and to felicitate her on the pleasure which she must find in your society ...You will remember what I said to you about it at St. Joseph, and I repeated it today to Madame de Maintenon in the effusion of my heart which her letter has provoked, for she has told me all that I desired of her, which consisted merely in showing me very plainly that intercourse with me is not agreeable to her. Such may well be the case, and so well do I understand it that I ask nothing else to set my mind and heart at rest about a person who has made too deep an impression upon both not to retain her place there. Nor can I sufficiently impress on you, Madame, the good you have done me by relieving me from so heavy a burden, which to endure or shake off entirely was always very painful. . . . It is done, and I ask nothing more, either from you or Madame de Maintenon ...I have only to conclude your letter, as I have concluded hers, by saying that silence between her and me becomes agreeable to myself when I know that it is so to her.6

  Three years later, though, La Maintenon was still writing to Fontre-vault, “You do not often mention Madame de Montespan’s name. She is too often present in my thoughts . . . believe both of you that the sentiments I entertain for you give me a claim to your regard.”

  For years, Athénaïs’s love for Louis had been ossified, as empty and static as the unused bedchamber at Oiron. There had been no real intimacy or private moments between them since the birth of the Comte de Toulouse in 1678, and even during her last decade at court, Athénaïs had barely seen the King alone, surrounded as he was by the crowds of Versailles and the impregnable barriers of etiquette. He had receded into images, a young man on a painted white horse, a cipher in an embroidered pageant on her wall. The sick, sad old man in his chilly mausoleum of a palace had nothing in common with the lover Athénaïs remembered, who had danced with her in the Amants Magnifiques or galloped over to Clagny to make love to her while the ambassadors waited at Versailles. La Maintenon, perversely, proved more of a link with Louis than Louis himself, and the intensity of their feelings for one another was perhaps greater, in the end, than for the man who had ordered both their lives.

  La Maintenon was always anxious to prove her disinterestedness in Athénaïs’s removal, as she is here in attempting to explain her motivations to the pupils at St. Cyr: “If loving Madame de Montespan as I had loved her, I had launched an intrigue for wicked reasons ...if instead of urging her to break with the King I had shown her the best way of keeping him, then indeed I would have given her the ammunition with which to destroy me.” But her protestations of virtue sat uneasily with what was clearly a conflict between affection and ruthless ambition. She seemed unable to dissociate her “love” for Athénaïs not only from what she saw as her worthy intent, but also from a fearful knowledge that their relationship would inevitably become a fight to the death. It was, perhaps, not love that the two women shared, but something akin to it, something forged by all their years of jealousy and rivalry, by a shared affection for “their” children, by their thorough knowledge of all that was best and worst in one another; something, ultimately, that meant they could never be entirely free of their own reflection in the other’s eyes. By 1707, hardly any of their old circle were living, either friends or enemies. Racine was gone, and Molière; the King’s artist Le Brun, Marie-Thérèse and Monsieur, Louvois and Colbert, the Prince de Condé and the Duc de Luxembourg, Ninon de Lenclos, the scandalous friend of La Maintenon’s youth, and Bossuet, the pious ally of her old age, Athénaïs’s brother and sisters. The two marquises were bound in a curious isolation of memory, their relationship a bond with their shared past.

  In truth, La Maintenon’s reaction to Athénaïs’s death was not nearly as measured as she gave her correspondent to believe. She remembered her friend from the Hôtel d’Albret, her patron, her companion on the weary journeys north to Flanders; she remembered that Athénaïs had given her her children and her husband; she remembered their quarrels and their reconciliations, Athénaïs’s dazzling, willful beauty and her ferocious temper, their coalitions and their battles. She remembered Athénaïs in the days of her triumph at Versailles. “Seated in the ravishing pink marble rotunda of the Baths of Siam at Versailles, she held her court attended with all the arts: she commanded waterfalls, the Grand Canal, the tapestry of lawns, the groups of cupids, satyrs and nymphs. Leaning on the alabaster balustrade of the terrace, above the porphyry staircase, she hollowed out the Fontaine des Suisses, which refracted a shimmering reflection of the wood at Satory. Like a goddess, she rode in her gondola along the Grand Canal to the Ile des Cygnes . . .”7

  In the end, perhaps no one mourned Athénaïs more profoundly than the Marquise de Maintenon. She ran away fr
om Louis and from Du Maine, from her priests and her ladies and her ministers, from the world she had stolen from her oldest friend. Hidden in the privy, an old woman alone in the dark, she wept.

  Histor ical Sources

  Many of the primary sources that must be drawn upon in any reconstruction of the life of Athénaïs de Montespan are considered in their own right to be some of the most important works of French literature of the seventeenth century. As such, they are not merely factual reportage, but subject to the same complexities of interpretation as might be applied to novels or plays. Academia speaks, for example, of Sévignéen poetics in describing a particular type of subjective language, while Saint-Simon’s unusual manipulations of seventeenth-century French suggest that he was engaged as much on a work of art as on a gazette of his age. The reader must therefore be alert not only to factual discrepancies in the work of the writers of letters or memoirs, but also to the peculiar subjectivity of the authors, their personal motivations and characters, and the location of both letters and memoirs within a very specialized genre of communication which can be as expressive of the changing nature of the French language as it is of the events of the French court.

  Letters and memoirs are obviously defined stylistically by the cultural climate in which they are produced, and their function can alter accordingly. In Mme. de Sévigné’s letters, for example, it is possible to discern a change in register between the relatively intimate communication of her correspondence with her daughter, Mme. de Grignan, and the more “public” letters, to Bussy-Rabutin, for instance, which were written to be read aloud or shared, and therefore have a more dramatic tone, stagey descriptions and flamboyant language. Since even “personal” writing was performative and carefully designed to display the intellectual qualities and esprit of the writer, such sources cannot be taken at face value. The influence of the cultivated language of the salons meant that linguistic skill was linked to a moral capacity; honnêteté was demonstrated in the elegant use of words. The vogue for the pen portrait meant that even private descriptions of personalities were flavored by a need to conform to a certain style.

  The bulk of memoirs in seventeenth-century France were written by men, with the notable exceptions of Mademoiselle, Mme. de Longueville, Mme. de Motteville and Mme. de la Guette, and they were frequently written partly or wholly after the events they record, which meant they could be polished to form a coherent narrative to present to the world. So vivid are the Duc de Saint-Simon’s descriptions of the court of Louis XIV that it is easy to forget that he did not arrive there until 1691, and was therefore not an eyewitness to many of the events he detailed. Athénaïs de Montespan was little more than a memory at Versailles for almost all of the time Saint-Simon spent there. His personal agenda, and its political implications, are clear in his memoirs: he was committed to the ideal of a ruling aristocracy based on birth which had ceased to have any political potential after the suppression of the Fronde. So he loathed the snobbish aspirations of the noblesse de robe, believing emphatically in the social hierarchy ordained, in his view, by God, and his respect for the King was greatly tempered whenever he felt that Louis was betraying his kingly role by encouraging parvenus, or when Louis’s autocratic ambition came into conflict with what Saint-Simon saw as the essential privileges of his class. The Duc was critical of anyone who offended his sense of the rightness of the social order, but he was also pious, hence his particular loathing for Athénaïs de Montespan’s children, whose elevation was not only a glorification of a sin against the holy sacrament of marriage but an insult to the aristocracy from which he came.

  Saint-Simon’s memoirs can be read as a political manifesto, in that they invoke an ideal of government based on a monarch and a strong aristocracy that he hoped to see realized in the reforms of the next reign. Vincent Cronin suggests that “one can be fair to Louis only by treating with extreme caution the writings of a man so hostile to the King,”1 and if “hostility” seems too strong a word for what was clearly a troubled fascination, Saint-Simon’s criticisms of Louis must nonetheless be read in the light of his attempts to bolster the new order of the Regency under his friend Philippe d’Orléans. This might not seem terribly relevant to the Duc’s assessment of Athénaïs’s character, but in dwelling upon her vanity and pride, Saint-Simon is criticizing a social revolution (the legitimization of her children and their inclusion in the succession) that offended his most profound beliefs. It is testament to Athénaïs’s famous charm, then, that Saint-Simon is able to overcome his loathing of the royal bastards to describe it at all.

  Mademoiselle’s memoirs, though created rather more spontaneously than Saint-Simon’s, in three periods around 1660, 1677 and 1689–90, had just as much of a personal agenda. In her account, the Lauzun affair, as well as her involvement in the Fronde, are vindicated for posterity. The famous incident when she had the cannon of the Bastille turned upon the royal troops, to protect the Frondeurs, led by the Prince de Condé, is lengthily considered, and Mademoiselle is unable to suppress her satisfaction at her own heroism, even as she tries to attribute her actions to the weak prevarication of her father, Gaston d’Orléans. Even though it took some time for the truth to emerge, when it did she was never able to forgive Athénaïs de Montespan for her involvement in the conspiracy to prevent her own marriage to Lauzun, or to take into consideration the fact that Athénaïs was just as much a victim of Louis’s deceitfulness in the business as she was. Mademoiselle’s justification of her own actions was sufficiently critical of the regime for Philippe d’Orléans to ban her memoirs when they appeared in 1718 and, like Saint-Simon, she must be read with an awareness of a subtext.

  Both Saint-Simon and Mme. de Sévigné have been used as sources and models for subsequent French writers, perhaps most famously by Proust in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. He compares the style of Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to the painting of the artist Elstir, suggesting that she is absorbed by the personal, subjective qualities of a situation and disregards its “reality” as perceived by others. Her subjectivity, Proust proposes, had nothing of the communal to it. It is concerned with creating an affective world, constructed from what acts upon the senses of the individual. Again, such a rarefied reading of Mme. de Sévigné might not seem relevant to her eager reportage of Athénaïs de Montespan’s triumphs and decline, but this interpretation emphasizes the specialized individualism that makes Mme. de Sévigné’s letters such an important literary work and such a problematic historical source. In a sense, her subjectivity presents an opposite problem from Saint-Simon’s in that many of her letters were in a sense love letters, stemming from the urgent need to communicate with her daughter, whom she loved in a way that seems positively sinister to modern psychology, and not designed as a chronicle to be admired by posterity. Whether the Sévignéen tone is seen to be compromised by its intimacy or by its performative qualities, the relationship between the author of the letters and their recipients prevents them from ever being relied upon as an entirely objective historical source.

  The nicknames employed by Mme. de Sévigné to such amusing effect signpost another problem with the primary sources of information about Louis XIV’s court, for these also had a serious function as code names, required for the sake of discretion by a writer whose political sympathies had once been allied with the Fronde, and who knew about the spy network that operated at Versailles. Louis was famous as a king who “wanted to know everything,” and letter-writing, as his daughter the Princesse de Conti discovered when she insulted Mme. de Maintenon, could be a dangerous business. The Princesse Palatine was fully aware that her letters were read by the King’s spies, and her comments often got her into trouble. Yet she engaged in an indirect dialogue with Louis via the spies, using her letters to express feelings and criticisms that she would never have dared utter to his face. “I must confess,” she huffed after a scolding from Louis, “that I am thoroughly angry with the King for treating me like a chambermaid, which would be more befitting for hi
s Maintenon, for she was born to it, but I was not.”

  Madame used her letters to complain about the duplicities of the court, highlighting the atmosphere of verbal obscurity that was so alien to her straight-talking character. “Perhaps,” she wrote about the rumors that her son was to marry Athénaïs de Montespan’s daughter, “I shall be exiled over this . . . for I shall not fail to let [Monsieur] know my exact opinion, which, as usual, he will report to the King . . . And if the King himself, to intimidate me, should speak to me about this matter, I shall tell him in plain words that I do not like it at all.” Of course, poor Madame never did any such thing, but her knowledge that Louis had access to her “private” thoughts created an opportunity for communication which was, paradoxically, more honest.

  Philippe Beaussant’s stunning analysis of the symbolic ritual that pervaded even the most quotidian activities at Louis XIV’s court shows just how difficult it is to penetrate the hermeneutical labyrinth the King established around him, and the reservations about the objectivity of primary sources expressed here could be elaborated upon at length. The genre of the memoir, the public use of letters, as exemplified by Mme. de Maintenon’s desire to manipulate her story for posterity, and the checks on personal expression imposed by censorship all contribute to the caution with which those sources must be approached, and yet, of course, they remain the only access we have to the world Athénaïs de Montespan inhabited.

  “Secrets add to the taste of things,” Athénaïs once remarked to Mademoiselle, and she was probably far better equipped than the modern historian to deal with a world where no one quite meant what they said.

  DAUPHIN, DAUPHINE, SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF FRANCE GRAND- CHILDREN OF FRANCE PRINCESSES OF THE BLOOD PRINCES OF THE BLOOD CARDINALS DUCHESSES, FOREIGN PRINCESSES, SPANISH GRANDEES DUKES, FOREIGN PRINCES, SPANISH GRANDEES LADIES OF QUALITY GENTLEMEN OF QUALITY