Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  Athénaïs was jealous of the way her children had bonded with their caregiver. Even worse, soon their father was spending more time than usual in the nursery. The king adored his children by Athénaïs, but Madame Scarron, whom at first he had found to be a bluestocking and a prig, had begun to grow on him. He enjoyed her intelligent conversation, but what had changed his mind about her was that she loved and cared for his kids as if they had been her own.

  On September 7, 1673, by issuance of letters patent, a legal instrument formally issued by a sovereign conferring a title or grant upon a designee, Louis XIV formally legitimized his children by Athénaïs de Montespan. It was a risky move, because her husband could contest it, but Louis had already declared legitimate his offspring by Louise de La Vallière, and he could do no less for his beloved Athénaïs. This act, more than any other expression of favor he had shown the marquise, demonstrated to the court that Athénaïs was now his maîtresse en titre after spending six years as an also-ran beside Louise. But His Majesty had to dig deep for a legal precedent that would allow him to legitimize the children without naming their mother (the specter of the marquis de Montespan galloping in from Gascony was an omnipresent fear, and the adulterous sin in which the légitimés were conceived was even more problematic).

  The ceremony dripped with irony. To avoid the mention of Madame de Montespan, even though everyone knew the children were hers, the wording of the letters patent was spectacularly oblique. Louise was undoubtedly humiliated to have been selected as one of the godparents, yet did she hide a triumphant smile at the memory of the letters patent legitimizing her own royal bastards, which referred to “our well-beloved Louise de La Vallière”?

  In 1674, Madame Scarron’s arrival at court with Athénaïs’s children, where they would all be housed from then on, created additional conflict, as the former official mistress and the current one competed for the attention of the king, who was finding the nanny ever more intriguing. “The Dew and the Torrent are bound close together by the need for concealment, and every day they keep company with Fire and Ice [Louis and Françoise Scarron]. This cannot continue long without an explosion,” wrote Madame de Sevigné.

  That year, recognizing that His Majesty had romantically moved on for good, Louise decided to leave the court—and her children—forever. Atoning for her sins, she took the veil, becoming a Carmelite nun.

  With her longtime rival safely behind the high walls of a convent, Athénaïs was overjoyed to finally take her place in the sun as Louis’ maîtresse en titre. Her formal separation from the marquis de Montespan was finally adjudicated in 1674 as well, but he continued to contest it, journeying to Paris for the hearing. His presence unnerved the monarch as well as his estranged wife, and the hotheaded Gascon did indeed make things as uncomfortable as possible for Athénaïs. He demanded reimbursement for the entirety of her dowry, despite the fact that her father didn’t have the funds in a lump sum, and in any case the marquis was hardly entitled to it, as he had squandered the dowry (in loans against it) at the gambling tables. If anyone had a claim to Athénaïs’s dowry, it was her husband’s creditors.

  The case before the bar got ugly. Athénaïs availed herself of the king’s counsel as an attorney, and he did all he could to demonstrate Montespan’s pattern of cruelty against her. Louis-Henri’s lawyer was, of course, bent on proving that his client was the injured party. Witnesses for both sides were called, and final judgment was passed by a panel of magistrates on July 7, 1674. The vote was overwhelmingly in Athénaïs’s favor. It would seem like a no-brainer, since her lover was the king, but the court relied upon all the evidence presented. Her husband had stalked her, physically attacked and beaten her, and dissipated her money; all that, as well as his own pattern of disorderly conduct and adultery, contributed to their verdict.

  The marquis de Montespan was ordered to reimburse Athénaïs for her dowry money that he had already spent (some sixty thousand livres). Plus he had to pay her four thousand livres in annual alimony, in addition to settling any debts she’d amassed during the course of their marriage. He was also banned from coming anywhere near her, the equivalent of a modern-day order of protection, a separate document that he was served with on July 16, 1674.

  The contents of the marquis’ household in Paris were appraised at a grand total of only 985 livres. Essentially, he lacked the proverbial pot to pee in. Upon learning just how destitute her estranged husband had become, Athénaïs took pity on him and insisted, through her attorneys, that it had never been her intention to ruin “the house of the said Seigneur her husband nor to prejudice his children.” She directed that her alimony payments be used for their care and education instead, and postponed her claim for the restitution of the sixty thousand livres of her dowry that he’d breezed through at the gaming tables. And since her royal lover was exceedingly generous to her, she decided to pay it forward, electing to discharge ninety thousand livres of the marquis de Montespan’s debts.

  For the next few years, Athénaïs was the uncontested beauty at court, her voluptuous golden splendor the feminine equivalent of the sovereign’s. While Louis was busy turning the kingdom into the most envied spot on the globe, achieving his desire of making everyone want to emulate French fashions, cuisine, and culture; wear their perfume; and practice their etiquette, Madame de Montespan herself was the ultimate advertisement, named “the most splendid ornament of this splendid century.”

  Madame de Maintenon’s cousin, Madame de Caylus, wrote of Athénaïs, “Her mettle, her spirit, her beauty which surpassed everything seen at the court, flattered the pride of the King, who showed her off like a treasure. He was proud of his mistress, and even when he was unfaithful to her he returned quickly because she was more gratifying to his vanity.”

  During Athénaïs’s bad moods, she would accuse Louis of loving her only because she was a trophy who enhanced his gloire and made such a spectacular accoutrement. What Louis did find so sexy about her, in addition to her looks, was her self-confidence and self-esteem. This ultimate egoist was also excited by her apparent refusal to be intimidated by him, owing to her ingrained certainty that her ancient Rochechouart de Mortemart genes trumped his nouveau Bourbon blood any day of the week. Their relationship was singular for a megalomaniac monarch and his lover: She felt completely at ease bantering with him, and even scolding him, always treating His Majesty as a social equal. During the dozen years that their passion blazed, Athénaïs loved Louis the man as much as she loved Louis the king, and never behaved as though she were in awe of his title.

  During the span of their romance Louis founded the Académie des Sciences (1666), the Académie Royale de Musique (1669), and the Académie d’Architecture (1671). He and Athénaïs shared a love of high culture (she promoted the work of Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine), as well as a mania for extravagance. Beginning in 1674, by the time her royal bastards were acknowledged and her husband was legally out of her famously coiffed hair, Madame de Montespan became the ultimate material girl. Her rather snarky nickname at court, purportedly bestowed by the quick-tongued Madame de Sevigné, was “Quanto,” after the popular Italian card game Quanto-va, meaning “How much?” because it was common knowledge that Athénaïs always wanted more.

  Louis wasn’t generous when it came to gifts of jewelry, and Athénaïs had always made a point of refusing gems, perhaps so she would not appear too greedy. But both of them finagled a way around the traditional man-gives-his-mistress-jewelry issue in an intriguing way. Louis instructed his finance minister to prepare a casket of gems that Madame de Montespan could “borrow,” drawing up a laundry list of earrings and necklaces of diamonds and pearls, the latter even more prized than the former in seventeenth-century France. The pearls Louis specified to be set aside for Athénaïs were larger than those owned by the queen.

  Typical of all maîtresses en titre, Madame de Montespan used her position to further her family’s interests. Her father was made governor of Paris and the Île-de-France, and her mo
rbidly obese brother, the marquis de Vivonne, was made Captain General of His Majesty’s Galleys in charge of the Mediterranean Fleet; vice admiral of the Levant; viceroy of Sicily; and governor of Brie and Champagne, an amusing sinecure for a gourmand. In every one of his offices, Vivonne, who was embarrassed about being the recipient of nepotism, served the crown with distinction.

  Although he didn’t shower Athénaïs with jewels, Louis made up for it with real estate. In 1665 he purchased an estate at Clagny and hired the same architect and landscaper who were redoing Versailles, Jules-Hardouin Mansart and André Le Nôtre. Clagny took twelve hundred men and more than two million livres to build. It was so opulent, even the queen wished to see it. More than a century before Marie Antoinette’s hameau de la reine at the Petit Trianon, Madame de Montespan had a working farm designed with faux rusticity.

  In 1670, the blue-and-white-tiled Porcelain Trianon near Versailles was completed. The boudoir, named the Chambre des Amours, boasted an enormous mirrored bed festooned with silver and gold lace, tasseled fringe, gold-and-silver braid, a gilded canopy, and flounced curtains. The Sun King delighted in abundance and excess and found Athénaïs’s ripe sensuality, even during her numerous pregnancies, to be exceptionally erotic.

  The grandly theatrical style known as Baroque was the order of the day, but Athénaïs’s taste was not only excessive; it was downright eccentric. She kept barnyard animals, including pigs and goats, in her rooms at the royal châteaux. To amuse Louis, she owned a silver-filigreed carriage designed to be pulled by white mice, and a full-size one that would be drawn by the pet bears she kept in the menagerie at Versailles.

  It was around this time that Primi Visconti, an Italian count who chronicled the Sun King’s reign, bestowed upon Athénaïs the nickname “the real queen of France.” Foreign ambassadors gave her presents when they came to court as though she were le Roi Soleil’s “second wife.” And the duc de Saint-Simon described her salon as “the center of court life—the center of pleasures, of fortunes, of hopes, the terror of ministers.”

  Royal mistresses were often surmised to be the powers behind the throne, but in many cases their influence was far less than envious courtiers and ministers believed. Such was the case with Athénaïs, who astutely realized that her role was to amuse the king rather than advise him. Madame de Caylus was of the opinion that she “had an ambition to govern and made her authority felt,” but in truth, Louis never permitted his mistresses to have any such sway. “[T]ime given up to love affairs must never be allowed to prejudice affairs of state,” he wrote in his memoirs. “And if we yield our heart, we must never yield our mind or will. We must maintain a rigorous distinction between a lover’s tenderness and a sovereign’s resolution…and we must make sure that the beauty who is the source of our delight never takes the liberty of interfering in political affairs.”

  Madame de Montespan’s networking consisted of arranging brilliant matches for the légitimés, and creating a coterie of supporters among the courtiers so that people would look to her for favors.

  But pride goeth before a fall, as the old adage goes, and in 1675, Athénaïs discovered that she had some powerful enemies at court. On April 11, when she went to make her Easter confession, not only did the priest, Père Lécuyer, deny her the sacrament, but he lambasted her through the grille. “Is that the Mme. de Montespan who scandalizes the whole of France? Well, Madame, cease your scandals and come and throw yourself at the feet of Jesus Christ!”

  The local priest also refused to hear her confession, which meant that she could not receive Holy Communion at Easter Mass, a devastating blow to any devout Catholic. The king himself went to the court cleric, Bishop Jacques Bossuet, to arbitrate the matter, but received a rebuke and a lecture on the perils of adultery instead. The bishop so terrorized Louis that he ultimately agreed to dump his mistress.

  His decision, predictably, did not sit well with Athénaïs, who flew into a rage, closeted herself in her boudoir for two days, and allegedly shredded the bed linens with her teeth in her sleep.

  But there was more to the story. Bishop Bossuet had been coached by the babysitter. He had become close friends with the pious Madame Scarron, who had taken it upon herself to save the king’s soul by turning Louis away from his mistress and sending him back into the arms of his lonely queen, even though she owed her position at court to Madame de Montespan. By this time, Françoise Scarron was so sick of arguing with Athénaïs over the upbringing of the légitimés that she was ready to leave the court. Nothing substantive remained of the women’s friendship, and the only reason the governess could be persuaded to remain was the prospect of persuading His Majesty to embark on a straight and narrow path to heaven. Consequently, in 1675 a plot was hatched to frighten Louis into abandoning Athénaïs de Montespan.

  At Lent, Père Louis Bourdaloue preached—for the third time—his forceful sermon against adultery, condemning the monarch’s practice of it and encouraging him to set an example for his subjects by returning to a pious life.

  Then, at Easter, when Athénaïs was twice refused absolution by the confessors at Versailles, Bishop Bossuet managed to convince the superstitious king that God’s hand was at work and that he should break with her. However, Louis couldn’t abandon his mistress cold turkey. After all, he was used to making love with her three times a day, and he was a man of routines.

  “I do not require, Sire, that you should extinguish in a single moment a flame so violent, but, Sire, try, little by little, to diminish it; beware of entertaining it,” Bossuet advised.

  The clergy came down harshly on the genuinely pious Athénaïs because they couldn’t do so on the king of France. He was never refused communion; on the other hand, he wasn’t hypocritical enough to attend confession. And yet the marquise sincerely wished to repent and continually struggled between her devotion to her religion and her devotion to the king.

  After emerging from her two-day tantrum, Athénaïs accused Bishop Bossuet of using Louis’ soul as a political football and a path to controlling the king himself. But the cleric held his ground. Increasingly desperate to hang on to her lover and her position, Madame de Montespan began to forfeit her dignity and her kindness. She tried to smear Bossuet’s reputation, but could find no dirt to dig up. Then she tried to bribe him with the promise of a cardinal’s hat, but the bishop could not be bought with a biretta.

  Tongues wagged at court about the favorite’s failure to corrupt Bishop Bossuet. Athénaïs went to Clagny to regroup her thoughts, which gave rise to further gossip. Mademoiselle de Scudéry exulted, “The King and Mme. de Montespan have left one another, loving one another more than life, purely on a principle of religion. It is said that she will return to court without being lodged there, never seeing the King except in the presence of the Queen.”

  Meanwhile, Louis kept to himself, rarely visiting Athénaïs, and allowing Bossuet to lecture him daily on his religious obligations. Torn between love and duty, the king requested a final meeting with Madame de Montespan, after promising to lead a blameless life from then on, but the bishop scolded him, saying that good Christians avoided temptation. Bossuet ultimately relented and the estranged lovers met in a glass room, where courtiers handpicked for their piety could observe their movements.

  “Their conversations were long and sad,” reported Madame de Caylus. Nonetheless, the courtiers were placing bets that the enforced separation would be only temporary.

  Bishop Bossuet stressed to the king, “Sire, you must know that you cannot be truly converted unless you work to remove from your heart not only the sin, but the cause of it,” compelling Louis to stamp out all traces of love for Athénaïs. Even crueler, Bossuet sent a copy of his lecture to the marquise at Clagny, a sermon insisting that if His Majesty returned to the arms of his maîtresse en titre, it would bring about France’s ruin.

  That summer Louis set off on a military campaign, but absence from Athénaïs only made his heart grow fonder. He ordered his finance minister, Jean-Baptis
te Colbert, to purchase as many orange trees for the marquise as she liked, a coded love message, owing to their mutual appreciation for them. Colbert spent nearly twenty-three thousand livres on orange trees for Clagny in the summer of 1675 alone. In July, the king returned from the successful siege of Maastricht determined to see his beloved.

  Some at court were defending the couple, insisting there was no reason they couldn’t reunite as friends. Madame de Caylus agreed. “Madame de Montespan ought to be there because of her birth and her duties; she can live as a Christian as well there as anywhere else.”

  Athénaïs’s apartments at Versailles were aired out and dusted in preparation for her arrival after she had endured a year of separation from her lover. In a triumph of the devil-you-know principle, Louis’ ministers recognized that it was better for the king to return to her arms than to watch him surrender his soul to the bishop and his cadre of dévots. Yet Athénaïs’s victory was somewhat hollow; the king assured his family, and the court, that he intended to honor the vows he had made before heading off to the war in Holland—meaning that he would no longer visit her bed. He greeted Athénaïs civilly upon her return to Versailles and would see her only in the company of others, falling back on the stringent dictates of the court etiquette he had devised himself in order to avoid anything beyond a cool cordiality in her presence. His face betrayed not a glimmer of acknowledgment of their years of passion and shared intimacy.

  Madame de Montespan had no alternative but to bite back her bitterness. Regardless of their personal history, and the fact that they were the parents of five children together, it would have been a gross transgression of protocol for her to question the king’s behavior toward her.

  In 1675, Madame de Sevigné wrote, “Everybody thinks that the King is no longer in love, and that Mme. de Montespan is torn between the consequences that might follow the return of his favors…and the fear that he might turn elsewhere.”