Despite his boast to initiate his teenage bride into as many sottises as possible (the word literally means “foolishness,” but he was obliquely referring to sexual experimentation as well as other hijinks), it was Françoise who tamed the libertine Scarron, transforming his salon from bawdy to elegant. In time she would work the same magic with the libidinous king of France.
Eight years later, on October 6, 1660, Paul Scarron died, and his widow emerged with an utter dislike, if not a dread, of sex. Much later, she would refer to herself in a letter to her younger brother Charles as “a woman who has never been married,” leading one to conclude that her union with Scarron was never consummated in any traditional sense.
Until he’d written a scathing satire against her cohort Cardinal Mazarin, Scarron had been the Honorable Invalid to the Queen, the recipient of a five-hundred-livre annual royal pension. As his widow, Françoise applied to get his pension reinstated.
But Anne of Austria claimed to have forgotten the amount, and a quick-thinking courtier advised Her Majesty that it had been two thousand livres. Consequently, and quite serendipitously, Madame Scarron ended up with a comfortable income.
After Athénaïs de Montespan bore the king their first child together, Françoise was approached by a mutual friend, Bonne de Pons. A discreet and modest woman was needed to care for the increasing number of royal bastards, and Françoise filled the job description to perfection. The widow Scarron hesitated. She did not approve of her old pal’s doubly adulterous liaison and had no desire to condone it by agreeing to be the secret nanny of her illegitimate children. Françoise discussed the job offer with her confessor, who equivocated: If the children were merely the offspring of the king’s whore, then he agreed that even though Françoise needed the salary, she should decline the employment. But if the father of Athénaïs’s kids was the king, then she would be passing up the opportunity to raise and influence them. Afer all, if her sovereign needed her, then she could justify accepting the gig. However, if this was indeed the case, her confessor recommended that Madame Scarron insist Louis XIV himself make the offer of employment.
The king sardonically nicknamed her votre belle esprit—“learned lady.” It was only as he came to know her by visiting his children with increasing frequency that his opinion began to soften. “The King did not like me at first. For a long time he had an aversion for me. He was afraid of me as a pedant, thinking that I was austere and cared only for things sublime,” she confessed many years later.
Françoise was compelled to shuttle between the house in the Marais district where she secretly cared for the royal bastards of Louis and Athénaïs and her own home in the same neighborhood. Madame Scarron remained socially ambitious, enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere of the salons, and hoped not to have to abandon her lifestyle entirely, forced to remain hidden from view with precious little adult companionship or stimulating conversation. Taking the act of suffering for her job to an extreme, she had herself bled before any event where she might be questioned about her activities because she had a tendency to blush when she lied.
Madame Scarron was a born teacher and took delight in shaping the minds of the young, whether the subject was religion, manners, or culture. But in an age that didn’t sentimentalize a woman’s relationships with children (whether they were her own or in her care), Françoise was an exception. Despite the fact that, as she once sorrowfully admitted, her own mother never kissed her when she was a girl, she loved all children, although she never bore any of her own. She grew especially fond of the king’s first son by Athénaïs, the crippled duc du Maine. He in turn considered her his true maman, for she was the woman who raised him, taking him from Antwerp to the Pyrenees in search of cures for his gamey leg and twisted spine.
After Madame de Montespan gave birth to the king’s third child in 1672, Louis purchased an unprepossessing house for his children at 25 rue de Vaugirard on the Rive Gauche, near the Palais de Luxembourg, across the river from the prying eyes of the courtiers who frequented the salons of the Marais. There Madame Scarron, visited by only a few trustworthy friends, looked after the expanding passel of royal bastards, augmented by a couple of other children, one of whom was her own relation, in order to stave off the whiff of scandal. The king himself, in disguise, would pop in unannounced, and become utterly charmed to find his children’s nanny with one kid on her knee, another in her lap, one in a cradle, and one hanging lovingly about her, while she read aloud to them. Over time, his opinion of the governess changed. “She knows how to love…one would be very happy to be loved by her,” he mused one day.
In 1674 and 1675, Athénaïs bore the king two more daughters. By this time, their illegitimate children’s existence had been leaked by one of the ladies of the court who’d confided it to her lover. As the gossip spread, the identity of the children’s governess was revealed. No sooner was Madame Scarron outed than she and her semiroyal charges were moved to rooms within Madame de Montespan’s apartments in the palace of Saint-Germain. Françoise suddenly became an important person, and the toadies came hopping, under the assumption that she had some influence with the monarch.
Yet Madame Scarron had no sway and even less ego. Even at court she dressed simply, preferring discreet jewelry, and gowns in her favorite shades of blue and green, constructed of expensive textiles, but with little in the way of embellishments.
The proximity of the governess to the children’s mother led to no end of quarrels. By this time tensions between the two women ran high. Madame de Montespan was envious of Françoise’s close relationship with her offspring, and of the time the king passed in their company. They argued frequently about methods of child rearing. One day, after a violent quarrel, Athénaïs complained to the king about Madame Scarron. The gouvernante retaliated by considering quitting not only her job, but the court, and becoming a nun instead, vowing, “I swear that I suffer a good deal by remaining in a state where I will have such experiences every day, and it would be kind to me to let me have my freedom…. I cannot understand that it is God’s will that I suffer Mme. de Montespan. She is incapable of friendship…she speaks of me as she likes to the King, and causes me to lose esteem…. I do not dare to speak to him directly because she would never forgive me, and even if I could all I owe her would prevent my talking against her.”
Anxious that her lover was becoming too intrigued by the babysitter, Madame de Montespan tried to marry her off to another hunchback, the odiferous and notoriously dishonest duc de Brancas. The union would elevate the widow Scarron to a status that was technically higher than Athénaïs’s, as a duchesse would have the “right of the tabouret” and could sit in the presence of the king, a perquisite forbidden to a mere marquise. Aware that la Montespan was up to something, Françoise had no interest in being fobbed off on one of the ugliest and most unpleasant men at court and refused to entertain the match.
The king thrived on the competitive dynamic between the two most important women in his life (neither of whom was the queen). But Madame Scarron didn’t desire him in the same way his mistress did. Around 1675, she began to make it her purpose to save his soul—which she, and the ultraconservative coterie of religious dévots, intended to do by detaching him from his lover. One wonders whether Françoise would have embarked upon her crusade if Athénaïs had been nicer to her and had not consistently endeavored to undermine her credibility by criticizing her job performance to the king.
In January 1675, Louis created Madame Scarron the marquise de Maintenon, although she would never permanently reside at the eponymous château, and during the course of her hectic life at court could manage only a few flying visits. Courtiers began to notice how much time the king spent with the woman he had nicknamed “Votre Solidité” for her pragmatism and her grounded, no-nonsense approach to everything. They didn’t doubt a burgeoning affair of the heart, although no one could have predicted how important the marquise would become to him. Besides, at the time not only was Louis madly in lust with the nub
ile, blond Angélique de Fontanges, but Françoise’s employer, Madame de Montespan, remained firmly in possession of the title of maîtresse declarée.
Their contemporary, the abbé de Choisy, provides numerous reasons the Sun King basked in la Maintenon’s glow. “She had looked after the education of M. le duc du Maine which had given her a thousand occasions to show what she could do, her wit, her judgment, her straightforwardness, her piety and all the other natural virtues which do not always win hearts as fast as beauty, but which settle their conquests on a much sounder, indeed almost indestructible, base. She was no longer very young but her eyes were so alive, so brilliant, and there was such sparkling wit in her expression when she spoke, that it was difficult to see her often without feeling an inclination for her. The King, accustomed since his childhood to being surrounded with women, was delighted to find one who only spoke about virtue; he did not fear that people would say she ruled him; he had seen that she was undemanding and incapable of abusing her close connection with him.”
In 1679, the rivalry between Mesdames de Maintenon and de Montespan flared up again over the children. And in 1680, after the dim-witted Madame de Fontanges’ pregnancy was tragically terminated, it was the marquise de Maintenon whom the king turned to for solace and companionship. Although he usually gravitated to smart, quick-witted women (la Fontanges being an exception), Madame de Maintenon’s background was so humble that people assumed she received all of her elevations and perquisites because of some sexual service she rendered him. In truth, it was because he loved her, even if the nature of his ardor was not necessarily physical; it was her innate decency that so attracted him. By this point Madame de Maintenon was enjoying her tenure as second dame d’atour (mistress of the robes) to the dauphine. She became more determined than ever to save Louis’ soul by persuading him to return to his conjugal duties to the queen, which naturally pleased Marie-Thérèse immensely. The marquise freely admitted her role in encouraging the king to break with his mistresses, first Athénaïs, and then Angélique, because the adulterous liaisons were sinful.
By 1681, however, Madame de Sevigné was punning that the king’s favorite was indeed no longer Athénaïs de Montespan, but the governess, whom she had nicknamed “Madame de Maintenant.” If the widow Scarron wasn’t necessarily “Mrs. Right,” she was “Mrs. Right Now.”
The courtiers didn’t understand the attraction. The Italian count Primi Visconti wrote:
No one knew what to believe of it, because she was old: some saw her as the confidante of the King, others as a procuress, others as a skillful person to whom the King was dictating his memoirs of his reign. It is certain that with regard to the change in her clothes and manners, no one could explain what had taken place. Many were of the opinion that there are men who are drawn much more towards older women than to younger ones.
Although the courtiers were setting her up as a rival to Madame de Montespan, in August 1682, Madame de Maintenon insisted, “People are saying that I want to put myself in her place. They don’t understand my distance from these sorts of commerce [sex] nor the distance which I want to inspire in the King.”
Soon after she wrote those words, however, Françoise may have become Louis’ mistress. Her most recent biographer, Veronica Buckley, suggests the pair consummated their romance as early as 1675, the same year Madame Scarron was made marquise de Maintenon. Additionally, Buckley posits that the newly minted marquise was also distracting the king from Madame de Montespan’s alluring embraces with intellectually unthreatening young girls, but that contention seems so antithetical to Françoise’s morals and is equally difficult to justify given everything else we know about her character: her piety, her purity, and her distaste not only for sex, but for hypocrisy. Buckley also believes that the marquise de Maintenon and the king resumed their physical relationship in 1680, as Françoise reclaimed him from the ailing Angélique de Fontanges. This would date their reunion to three years before the queen died, again incongruously violating everything the marquise held herself up to be: the poster girl for decency and morality. Moreover, in 1681 Madame de Sevigné reported the delight and gratitude of Marie-Thérèse, who saw the marquise as her personal savior, exclaiming, “God has raised up Mme. de Maintenon to bring me back to the heart of the King!”
So, if the marquise did agree to sleep with Louis even as early as the summer of 1682, she must have begrudgingly submitted herself to the king’s will for the higher good. But she also must have been gritting her teeth and thinking of the kingdom of heaven, justifying the adultery and the betrayal of her new bosom buddy, the queen, by telling herself that if she didn’t warm his bed, the role would soon be filled by someone else, someone frivolous whose motives were focused not on the care and feeding of the sovereign’s soul, but of her own purse.
Nevertheless, it seems hard to swallow the idea that Madame de Maintenon was openly and actively campaigning to restore the king to the arms of his neglected wife while she herself was his mistress. It seems much more plausible to believe that the marquise won the king’s affection through her kindness to his children and her conversation. She was a terrific listener who never demanded anything from him, and her rooms provided a nonjudgmental place for him to relax. Had she succumbed to any sexual seduction while the queen was still alive, she would have (a) become one of the moral hypocrites she deplored, and (b) lost the king’s affection, because her discomfort with “commerce” would have been abundantly apparent. It is doubtful that Louis would have tolerated for very long a lover who was a lousy lay—not after so many years in the arms of the sexually liberated Athénaïs, who had taken the time to learn his pleasure both in and out of bed and devoted herself to his physical satisfaction.
Another point of view regarding Madame de Maintenon’s influence on the king comes from Monsieur Lavallée, one of her chief supporters:
People saw with dismay that this Prince had not yet abandoned the irregularities of his youth, that he was becoming more and more the slave of his pleasures, and that he was advancing towards a disgraceful old age, in which his own glory and that of his country would be tarnished…. [T]he King was not only the head of the state, but its very soul; he was the country incarnate…the lieutenant of God on earth…. Out of this slough Mme. de Maintenon drew Louis XIV; she brought him back to his duties, to the assiduous care of his realm, to the good example which he owed his subjects; she dissipated the clouds of pride which enveloped him, and made him descend from Olympus to inspire him with Christian sentiments of repentance, of moderation, of tenderness…and, above all, of humility.
On July 30, 1683, at the age of forty-five, the queen died a few days after an abscess under her arm was so horrifically mistreated by the court physicians that they effectively killed her. Finally, the field was open for the forty-four-year-old king to remarry. He had no political need for an international alliance, and in any event, there were few appropriate candidates.
According to the abbé de Choisy, “Mme. de Maintenon pleased him greatly. Her gentle, insinuating wit promised him an agreeable intercourse capable of regenerating him after the cares of royalty. Her person was still engaging and her age prevented her from having children. To which we may add that Louis was sincerely desirous of leading a regular life.”
The marquise de Maintenon accompanied him to Fontainebleau shortly after the queen’s death. According to Françoise’s secretary, Mademoiselle d’Aumale, “During this visit her favor grew greater than ever. The King, unable to do without her, had her lodged in the Queen’s apartment, the counsels were held in her room, and he did the greater part of his work there and consulted her often about it.”
The marquise de Maintenon’s cousin Madame de Caylus contended that at this time the king endeavored to persuade Françoise to become his maîtresse en titre. But she refused to be Louis’ harlot, even in the absence of a wife, and was willing to risk banishment from court for her principles. This belief, supported by Madame de Maintenon’s twentieth-century biographer
Maud Cruttwell, completely negates Victoria Buckley’s theory that Louis and la Maintenon became lovers not only while his wife was alive, but while he was also still sleeping with other women.
The marquise grew anxious about her future and started moping about Fontainebleau in tears, complaining of headaches and suffering from attacks of the vapors. Would the king of France actually wed the widow of a paralyzed poet, a woman who’d been born in a prison, and who had been the governess of his children?
And what about Louis? He’d been lovelessly married to Marie-Thérèse for twenty-three years, in perpetual conflict between duty and desire. If he now espoused a woman he was attracted to, he wouldn’t be tempted to stray, and could honor his newly found faith as well. As the writer Alphonse de Lamartine put it, “An attachment to Mme. de Maintenon seemed almost the same thing as an attachment to virtue itself.”
Yet to marry a commoner would violate the natural order of the world as Louis knew it. He dared not make his commitment public.
Madame de Maintenon held out for marriage. Cruttwell posits that, somewhat displeased by her all-or-nothing terms, the king laid out a major ground rule of his own. He demanded that their union had to be discreet. Not desirous of power and glory in the manner of Athénaïs de Montespan, the marquise de Maintenon accepted the offer of a secret, morganatic marriage. Only a few days after joining the king at Fontainebleau in the wake of the queen’s death she wrote to her ambitious and grasping brother, cautioning him to cancel his immediate plans to visit her, with the cryptic “It does not suit me to have any intercourse with you and the reason is so favorable and so glorious that you should feel nothing but joy.”
Was this a hint that Louis had informed her of his intention to make her Mrs. Despotic King of France? Even so, Françoise would always remain a marquise. As such, the rigid court etiquette forbade her from being seated in her husband’s presence, and compelled her instead to take her place behind the least important duchesse at court. Louis also awarded her no increase to her pension. Cruttwell believes that this was a punishment for her insistence on making their liaison legal. The Sun King also permitted Maintenon’s position at court, and in his personal life, to be forever misunderstood—the object of endless speculation, gossip, innuendo, and rumor that persists to this day, in the absence of a marriage certificate.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 11