The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon
Page 1
FOR PHILIPP
—SO WENIG FÜR SO VIEL
I said to her one day, after the King’s death, “Madame, I’ve brought you a book to write the story of your life in. Because you know they’ll write your life one day, and they won’t tell the truth, so you should write it yourself, Madame.” And she said to me, “My life…has been a miracle.”
—MADEMOISELLE D’AUMALE
Contents
List of Illustrations
The Bourbon Family Tree
The d’Aubigné Family Tree
Part One
Prologue
ONE Doubtful Origins
TWO America!
THREE Terra Infirma
FOUR Burlesque
FIVE Marriage of True Minds
SIX End of the Beginning
SEVEN The Merry Widow
EIGHT City of Light
NINE Duty Calls
TEN L’Arrivée
ELEVEN The Course of True Loves
TWELVE The Poisons Affair
Part Two
THIRTEEN Madame de Maintenant
FOURTEEN Uncrowned Queen
FIFTEEN La Vie en Rose
SIXTEEN La Vie en Bleu
SEVENTEEN Crusaders
EIGHTEEN Castles in Spain
NINETEEN All Passion Spent
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Les petites Antilles ou Les îsles du vent. Copperplate engraving by Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703–72), 1764. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Copyright © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Beggars Receiving Alms at the Door. Etching, burin, and drypoint by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), 1648. London, British Museum. Copyright © Trustees of the British Museum.
Le château de Mursay (1550–1630), ancienne demeure de Madame de Maintenon, près de Sciecq (Deux-Sèvres). Private Collection. Copyright © LL/Roger-Viollet.
Portrait dit autrefois de Paul Scarron (1610–60). Oil on canvas, French School, seventeenth century. Le Mans, Musée de Tessé.
Portrait of Ninon de Lenclos (presumed). Oil on canvas, attributed to Pierre Mignard (1612–95). Marseilles, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Copyright © Roger-Viollet.
Portrait of Madame de Sévigné. Oil on canvas by Claude Lefèbvre (1632–75). Paris, Musée Carnavalet. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Louis XIV, roi de France et de Navarre, portrait en buste et en cuirasse, vers 1662. Oil on canvas by Charles Le Brun (1619–90). Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo copyright © RMN/Franck Raux.
Portrait of Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise de Montespan (presumed). Oil on canvas by Pierre Mignard (1612–95). Bourges, France, Musée du Berry. Lauros/Giraudon copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Portrait présumé du marquis de Villarceaux. Miniature on enamel by Jean Petitot, dit Le Vieux (1607–91). Paris, Musée du Louvre. Copyright © Musée du Louvre, M. Beck-Coppola.
Portrait de Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, gouvernante des bâtards légitimés de Louis XIV, fils de Madame de Montespan: Louis-Auguste, duc du Maine et Louis-César, comte de Vexin. Oil on canvas. Maintenon, France, Château de Maintenon. Copyright © Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.
Portrait of Louise Françoise de La Baume Le Blanc, duchesse de La Vallière (presumed). Oil on canvas, French School, seventeenth century. Nelahozeves Castle, Czech Republic, Lobkowicz Collections. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality.
Portrait of Queen Marie-Thérèse of France. Oil on canvas, French School, follower of Charles Beaubrun (1604–92). Paris, Musée Carnavalet. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
View of the Château, Gardens and Park of Versailles from the Avenue de Paris (detail), 1668. Oil on canvas by Pierre Patel (1605–76). Versailles, France, Château de Versailles. Copyright © Peter Willi/The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality.
The Building of Versailles, c. 1680. Oil on canvas, attributed to Adam-François van der Meulen (1632–90). London, Buckingham Palace, The Royal Collection. Copyright © 2007, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Vue de l’Orangerie, des escaliers des Cent-Marches et du château de Versailles, vers 1695. Oil on canvas, attributed to Jean-Baptiste Martin, l’Ancien (1659–1735). Versailles, France, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo copyright © RMN/Franck Raux.
Portrait de Philippe d’Orléans, Monsieur, frère du roi Louis XIV. Oil on canvas. Copyright © Roger-Viollet.
Portrait of Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, duchesse d’Orléans (la princesse Palatine). Oil on canvas, after Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743). Versailles, France, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), ministre. Oil on canvas by Claude Lefèbvre (1632–75). Versailles, France, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo copyright © RMN/Gérard Blot.
Portrait of François-Michel Le Tellier, marquis de Louvois (1641–91), Secrétaire d’État pour la Guerre, Intendant Général des Postes, Surintendant des Bâtiments Civils, Arts et Manufactures. Anonymous print. Versailles, France, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo copyright © RMN/Gérard Blot.
The Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Watercolour, English School, eighteenth century. Private Collection. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Portrait of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archévêque de Cambrai. Oil on canvas by Vivien Joseph (1657–1734). Versailles, France, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.
Portrait of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. Oil on canvas by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743). Paris, Musée du Louvre.
L’Evesque de Meaux, Secrétaire du Conseil de la Sainte Ligue. Dutch caricature, attributed to Dusart and Gole, 1691. Paris, Bibliothèque Historique du Protestantisme. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Madame de Maintenon, Veuve de Scarron. Dutch caricature, attributed to Dusart and Gole, 1691. Paris, Bibliothèque Historique du Protestantisme. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
A Missionary Dragoon Forces a Huguenot to Sign His Conversion to Catholicism. Engraving by Gottfried Englemann (1788–1839), after an original drawing of 1686. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon. Oil on canvas by Pierre Mignard (1612–95). Paris, Musée du Louvre. Copyright © Peter Willi/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Portrait of Louis XIV. Drawing on papier gris and pastel by Charles Le Brun (1619–90). Paris, Musée du Louvre, D.A.G. Photo copyright © RMN/Jean-Gilles Berizzi.
La maison d’éducation pour jeunes filles de la noblesse créée par Madame de Maintenon en 1686. Anonymous engraving. Yvelines, France, École militaire spéciale de Saint-Cyr. Copyright © Roger-Viollet.
Portrait of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, memoirist. Nineteenth-century lithograph by François Delpech, after a French portrait of 1715. Copyright © Roger-Viollet.
Portrait de Philippe, duc d’Orléans, Régent de France (1674–1723) et Minerve, sous les traits présumés de Marie-Magdeleine de La Vieuville, comtesse de Parabère, sa maîtresse (1693–1750) (détail), 1717–18. Oil on canvas by Jean-Baptiste Santerre (1651–1717). Versailles, France, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo copyright © RMN/Gérard Blot.
Portrait of Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine. Oil on canvas, after François de Troy (1645–1730). Sceaux, France, Musée de l’Île de France. Copyright © Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridge
man Art Library.
Portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon. Oil on canvas, French School, eighteenth century. Private Collection, Archives Charmet. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Portrait of Louis XIV. Oil on canvas by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743). Madrid, Prado. Copyright © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Part One
Prologue
There is a palace twelve miles from Paris, set in a forest rich with game, a Renaissance château of vaulted ceilings and marble floors, graced with elegant terraces leading down to the river Seine. Here, on a bright September morning near four hundred years ago, a fine little boy was born. He was his mother’s first child, though she had been twenty-three years married. She rejoiced, and the nation rejoiced with her, for she was a queen, and her squalling little boy the long-awaited heir to the fleur-de-lys throne of the Bourbons.
There is a fortress in western France, inland from the rough Atlantic coast, a medieval donjon of cold grey stone, surrounded by swamp and woodland. Here, on a bleak November day, another child was born, a sister for two little ragged boys. Their mother was young and beautiful and the baby whole and strong, but the mother did not rejoice. She sighed, or wept, perhaps, though there was no one with pity to spare for her, for her home was a prison, and its stone walls deaf.
One
Doubtful Origins
There were no chains or balls of pitted lead. There were no shrieks from racks or wheels of torture. It was a long and narrow cell, without much air, without much light, damp, bare, its window barred. Bundles of drab belongings lay piled in the corners, with half a dozen mugs in brown clay and a few chipped bowls, sticky with the leavings of the last grey meal. Hard sleeping-benches lined the walls, spread with dirty blankets, and in the middle of the floor, wittily, defiantly, stood a gaming table served by a couple of rickety chairs. Next door, a bigger but equally bleak room for the indebted and the destitute, then a dreary sickroom, and one chilly little private cell, available to anyone in exchange for a silver coin. Below, there was “the cave,” a dank cell like the first, and like the first, serving both men and women. And beside this, the dungeon, where the least fortunate coughed and sighed through the days and nights of lives with no more hope.
Thus the home of Sieur Constant d’Aubigné de Surimeau, only son of the famous Agrippa d’Aubigné, poet and Protestant warrior, friend of kings, angry, disinheriting father. With the fifty-year-old Constant in his grim confinement were his wife, Jeanne, aged twenty-four, their little boys, Constant, aged six, and Charles, just one year old, and a baby girl, newborn in the prison, in the sickroom perhaps, or in the little private cell, struggling to life on the narrow bed or on the rough floor. They named her Françoise.
It might all have been very different. Constant had stood to inherit, in whole or in part, three substantial estates, in addition to the lucrative governorship of an important Protestant town in his native region of Poitou, in western France. All this would have come to him through the efforts of his father, whose constancy in faith, bravery in battle, and shrewdness in outwitting his in-laws had won him a premier place among France’s Huguenot gentry. Agrippa d’Aubigné had made his name in the previous century, during France’s “spectacularly un-Christian” wars of religion; he had been the close friend and comrade-in-arms of the Protestant Henri of Navarre, later King Henri IV, first Bourbon King of France. After more than fifty years of pitched battles and acts of savagery on both sides, the matter had been more or less resolved in 1594, when Henri agreed to accept Catholicism as the price of the French crown. “Paris is worth a mass” was his legendary remark on this occasion; cynically setting aside his unpredictable wife into the bargain, he had then married the solid and solidly Catholic Marie de’ Medici.
Apart from his capture of the crown itself, the signal achievement of Henri’s life was beyond doubt his promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, four years after his accession to the throne, in 1598. This famous Edict, at the time one of the most advanced pieces of legislation in Europe, guaranteed a limited toleration of Protestantism within predominantly Catholic France. Members of the Protestant RPR, the Religion Prétendue Réformée (“so-called reformed religion”), as hostile Catholics referred to it, were thenceforth permitted to train pastors, retain their temples (though not more than two in the same district), conduct services, get married, baptize their children and educate them, all within their own Huguenot sect; moreover, Protestant men could once again purchase civil service posts or commissions in the King’s army, two vital methods of social and economic advancement. On the surface a peacemaking measure between two factions long at war, the Edict of Nantes contained a grain of revolutionary significance for France: it recognized that religious and political allegiance could be two separate things. After 1598, a Frenchman could officially be both a Protestant and a loyal servant of his Catholic King.
Nonetheless, Henri’s farsighted Edict was too soon, or perhaps too weakly enforced, to overcome the country’s religious divide, and far from integrating the two communities, it finally dictated their formal separation. Most of France remained officially and exclusively Catholic. The Huguenots were accorded 120 “places of safety,” towns with an already Protestant majority, mostly in the south and west of the country, where their cult might be freely practised. And it was to one of these, his own staunch western province of Poitou, that the disgusted Agrippa d’Aubigné had retreated after the King’s apostasy to the “stinking” Catholic Church. Here, over the next twelve years or so, he had raised three children (Marie, Louise, and Constant), buried his wife, fathered an illegitimate son (Nathan), and produced a series of poems and tracts of high literary merit, “my spiritual children,” as he termed them. On the clever and spirited Constant, “my eldest and only son,” Nathan notwithstanding, Agrippa lavished “the care and expense,” as he said, “that might have been spent on the son of a prince.” The boy was taught “by the best tutors in France, all enticed away from the best families by the doubling of their wages.”
Agrippa’s efforts were to no avail. Constant proved an unwilling pupil and a most ungrateful son. By the age of twenty he was squandering his talent and his property in the time-honoured ways. “This wretch,” wrote his father, “first abandoned his books, then took to gaming and drinking, and then managed to undo himself completely in the stews of Holland.” Returning to France, Constant had compounded his reputation, first by marrying without his father’s consent, and then by killing a man in a duel; the latter, however, an affaire d’honneur, occasioned him no penalty. It was only in 1613, when he abducted a girl admired by one of his friends, that Constant was arrested and, at the age of twenty-eight, condemned to death.
He escaped execution by agreeing to enlist in the army, a Protestant army then in rebellion against the Queen Mother, Marie de’ Medici. King Henri IV, royal friend of Agrippa’s youth, had been assassinated in 1610, and his widow Marie was now Regent of France on behalf of her son, the twelve-year-old Louis XIII. On Henri’s death, his widow had at first confirmed his great religious Edict, but in the ensuing three years, guided from afar by the Pope and from closer at hand by her own court favourites, the malleable Marie had begun a general suppression of Protestantism within the country. In practice, the terms of the Edict had never been fully observed, but now the protective walls of the Protestant “safe places” were crumbling, and the soldiers deputed to guard them were well in arrears of pay. Huguenots on their deathbeds were being accosted by Catholic priests threatening hellfire, funerals were being disrupted, and Huguenots going innocently about their business were being harassed in a thousand petty acts, in direct violation of the Edict.
More important than all the daily frictions of Catholic-Protestant life, however, was the Queen Mother’s increasingly apparent enthusiasm for the cause of the Spanish Habsburgs, which loyal Frenchmen of both confessions eyed with distaste and anxiety. The Habsburgs in general, and the Spanish in particular, were among France’s bitterest enemi
es. It was their fanatical King, Felipe II, the “stately Catholic,” who had kept the fires of France’s internal religious wars stoked for decades, providing “Indian gold”—money from his mines in South America—to Catholic extremists in France. Fears of outright war between France and Spain had remained alive right until Henri’s death. Naïve politically, his widow, Marie, had failed to grasp that the death of her powerful husband had greatly weakened the country’s standing; France was no longer viewed in Europe as a steady bulwark against Spanish Habsburg influence. A Habsburg herself on her mother’s side, Marie was even seeking to forge an alliance with the Spaniards by a double royal marriage: her daughter Elisabeth was to marry the Prince of Asturias, heir to the Spanish imperial throne, and even more alarmingly, her son, France’s boy-King Louis XIII, was to marry the Spanish King’s daughter. In these two impending marriages, Marie saw a double celebration of alliance between two equal powers, while the Spaniards, and many Frenchmen, too, saw instead the doubly sure Spanish capture of a weakened but still useful dominion, and its certain continuance thereafter in the Catholic religion.
In 1613, just in time to ensure Constant d’Aubigné’s reprieve from execution, the boy-King’s cousin, the prince de Bourbon-Condé, decided to oust Marie and capture the Regency for himself. He set himself at the head of an army manned by anxious Huguenots concerned for their fate if France should fall under the control of fiercely Catholic Spain. Condé himself was Protestant less by conviction than by political convenience, but he was Frenchman enough and nobleman enough to resent the power of the German-Italian Marie de’ Medici, sprung from a despised branch of parvenu merchant bankers and manipulated by her papist puppet masters in Madrid—which provided a good excuse, at least, for an ambitious and greedy prince more than ready to capitalize on the genuine fears of his Protestant compatriots.