For Françoise, as Père Gobelin realized, a near connection with Lauzun could only be disadvantageous. Until now, she had maintained a reputation for probity; her very income from the court depended on it; her name should not be publicly linked with that of the disreputable duc. Père Gobelin’s view was that if Lauzun was in fact the father of Athénaïs’s children, Françoise should decline their charge. If the King was their father, on the other hand, the usual constraints did not apply; in this case, she should agree. After all, the King’s children by Louise de la Vallière were in the official care of Madame Colbert, wife of the ubiquitous minister and certainly a lady of considerable standing. Françoise duly requested confirmation of the children’s paternity, and it seems that a letter from Louis himself was soon in her hands, requesting her, or rather commanding her, in his usual chevaleresque way, to accept the charge. She did so at once.
“Jupiter had a son…”
It was a dramatic, not to say melodramatic, beginning. Within the château of Saint-Germain, Athénaïs was nearing the end of her labour. Beneath the terraced windows, Françoise waited, masked and cloaked, in an unmarked coach. At the stroke of midnight the baby arrived, a healthy boy. No one dared take time to wrap the usual yards of swaddling cloth around him; he was simply covered in a piece of linen and tucked inside the cloak of the duc de Lauzun, who had sneaked in, some say, by way of the Queen’s own bedroom. However he had come in, he very quickly got out again, and made his way down to the waiting coach, “scared to death” that the baby would begin to cry. Françoise took the little bundle from him and clambered in, and the coachman whipped his horses all the way back to Paris. By the time they reached the city, an early summer sun was rising on the last day of March 1670, and the first morning in the world for Athénaïs’s little boy, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon.
“Dont abuse my secret,” Madame de Sévigné wrote a fortnight later to her cousin, the comte de Bussy-Rabutin. “I wouldn’t want the whole of Paris knowing it.” But this secret was no more than a reconciliation between the two of them: she had refused to lend him money, and he had taken his revenge in an unflattering public portrait of her; now she was once more declaring her fondness of him. The normally well informed Madame de Sévigné had heard not a whisper about the new arrival at Saint-Germain.
Françoise’s work had in fact begun some time before the baby’s arrival. In anticipation of his needs, she and her maid Nanon had moved from the rue des Trois-Pavillons to a larger house in the rue des Tournelles; courtesan Ninon and confessor Gobelin thus became more or less their next-door neighbours. By now Françoise was also supervising the care of Athénaïs’s first child to the King. He, or more probably she, had been tucked away with a Mademoiselle des Oeillets, one of Athénaïs’s chambermaids and an obliging mistress of the King whenever the later stages of pregnancy left Athénaïs herself less inclined to love. Conveniently, Mademoiselle des Oeillets lived in the Marais, too, in the rue de l’Echelle, and here Françoise had been appearing daily to ensure the smooth running of this secretly important household.
Back at her own new house in the rue des Tournelles, she had been recruiting servants to assist with the care of the new baby. Most vital of all these was, of course, the wet-nurse, by preference a youngish mother in robust health, prepared to abandon her own newborn in order to feed a richer woman’s baby. The medical men of the day regarding all bodily fluids as intermixing, sex and breast-feeding were held to be mutually exclusive, at least for those who could afford to separate them, lest the mother’s milk become tainted with semen. With the priests declaring a husband’s right to marital intercourse above all other family needs, well-to-do Catholic mothers were expected to avoid breast-feeding, and poorer Catholic mothers to avoid sex.
In La Maison réglée, a popular “good housekeeping” guide of the day, the former Versailles steward Monsieur Audiger listed the duties, as he saw them, of the contemporary wet-nurse:
The duty of a wet-nurse is to take good care of the baby. She must keep his linen clean…and never let him cry at night or during the day, but must put him at once to the breast…To keep her milk, the nurse must take breakfast in the morning and have a little bite in the afternoon; she must take only a little wine with her meals, and must abstain from seeing her husband. And she must be constantly cheerful and lively and in good humour, and sing and laugh all the time to amuse and distract the baby…The swaddling mustn’t be too loose or too tight, and the nurse must take care that the pins don’t prick him…She may have a servant to rock the baby…
Madame de Sévigné, herself the mother of two children, was more succinct in her requirements, stating simply that “a wet-nurse must be able to produce milk like a cow.” Françoise would have known what to expect, in any case. She had had plenty of practice caring for babies at the home of the Montchevreuils. After meeting with several potential nurses, she chose the capable but, as it turned out, rather greedy Madame Barri, at a generous fixed wage, “and other little sums, very frequently.”
Françoise’s charge increased almost immediately. In order to allay suspicion of the baby boy’s identity, she decided to take in two other children with him: the first, two-year-old Toscan, is believed to have been an illegitimate son of her brother Charles, apparently deposited at the rue des Tournelles in a picnic basket—with Athénaïs’s help, the undeserving Charles had been given an infantry commission, and had readily taken to at least one traditional aspect of seventeenth-century soldiering.
The second child whom Françoise asked for was Bonne’s little Louise, “and Madame d’Heudicourt gave her the child without any trouble, since they were good friends, and she knew how fond she was of children.” There was no particular hard-heartedness in Bonne’s handing over of her two-year-old daughter. As a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, she would certainly not have been looking after the child herself; Louise would have been in the care of a nurse, very likely hardly seeing her mother at all. In 1671, cousin Philippe in Mursay welcomed a daughter of his own into the world. A child of the Huguenot country gentry, Marthe-Marguerite was not put out to nurse, nor, as yet, did Françoise ask for her, but in due course this little girl, too, was to find her way into her care.
Françoise’s friendship with Bonne de Pons, now la marquise d’Heudicourt, had so far been most advantageous: it had probably brought her the position of governess itself, and also, in little Louise, a good means of keeping it secret. Bonne was a good friend and reliably amusing company, but there was a streak of mischief in her which led her to frequent indiscretions and, now and then, to serious troublemaking. Since her marriage to the marquis d’Heudicourt, the King’s “Master of the Wolf-hunt,” she had been known as “the big she-wolf,” suggesting that her legendarily easy virtue contained something of the predatory, too. And early in 1671, two years after Françoise had taken on her charge as governess, Bonne let slip her never more than flimsy social guard.
She had been having an affair, and her de facto uncle, the maréchal d’Albret, had chided her for her indiscreet conduct of it. D’Albret was at this time in high favour at court, and it is no doubt the risk to himself that had roused his ire, since marital fidelity, on his own or anyone else’s part, had never before figured among his concerns. Bonne countered with accusations of her own: d’Albret was a hypocrite; he had rallied smartly to Athénaïs, “like a good courtier, and taken her part, and become her best friend and advisor,” abandoning Monsieur de Montespan, who was his own cousin. And what about his own affair with Françoise? Bonne proceeded to say “the most awful things you can imagine about him and Madame Scarron.”
But this was by no means the main cause of d’Albret’s anger. Not content with saying bad things about her friend Françoise, Bonne had been writing worse things about her friend Athénaïs, revealing to her lover, and to another inquisitive suitor, the secret of the household at the rue des Tournelles. It had taken eighteen months for these compromising letters to find their way into Athénaïs’s hands, and when Fran
çoise was told of them, she refused to believe it. Bonne would never be so disloyal to her friends or to her King, she insisted. Unless she saw the letters with her own eyes, until she saw Bonne’s own handwriting, she would maintain her innocence.
At Athénaïs’s urging, Françoise was summoned to court, and here, for the first time, in February 1671, she was presented to the King in person. Louis showed her the letters; astonished, she acknowledged Bonne’s guilt, and agreed to sever all contact with her forthwith. Bonne was banished to her husband’s château in the country, and departed “in absolute despair, having lost all her friends…and accused of every treachery under the sun.” For failing to keep his niece in check, d’Albret was paid the backhanded compliment of an appointment as governor of Guyenne, an effective demotion from the court life in which he delighted to a stint in the dreaded provinces.
“I was quite distressed to have to abandon Madame d’Heudicourt,” Françoise wrote to her cousin Philippe, “but I could not support her any further without doing real harm to my own reputation and to my fortune.” Herself too recently arrived in court circles, Françoise had not the courage to forgive her friend outright and risk her own dismissal. Besides, Bonne’s guilt was clear. And if Françoise could not support her, she did not abandon her entirely. “Send me news of that poor woman,” she later told Philippe, “and tell her that nothing can lessen my fondness of her. If I saw her she’d see that I love her with all my heart.”
Bonne’s daughter, Louise, remained with Françoise, and life at the rue des Tournelles continued much as before, apart from a probable relief on Françoise’s part: the secret was clearly out, and the burden of concealment now weighed less heavily on her own shoulders. It is not likely in any case that she had ever managed to carry out her charge in perfect secrecy. Though the real nature of the household could not be publicly admitted, the truth cannot have been kept for long from all the curious inhabitants of so closely linked a world. Most probably, the “secret” was an open secret, unrecognized because unspoken. Provided it was not officially known, it was accepted as being not known at all; there would be no public scandal, and Athénaïs’s husband could take no formal steps to reclaim her children, who were, in legal terms, his own.
Françoise herself related that, during these governess years in Paris, she would frequently have herself bled by a physician in an attempt to reduce her blushing whenever friends questioned her—or teased her, perhaps—about her whereabouts and how she was spending her days, indicating that they knew very well what was going on. She did her best to keep up her usual social rounds, but the to-ing and fro-ing, and the work itself, were gradually wearing her down. “It’s quite hard to get to see you,” the chevalier de Méré wrote to her. “We’re beginning to think you’re neglecting your old friends…”
The beau monde may have known the truth of the matter, but the public at large did not, and Françoise found herself “climbing up ladders to hang curtains and do all sorts of other things, because I didn’t want workmen coming into the house. I did everything myself; the wet-nurses did nothing whatsoever, for fear they’d spoil their milk…I spent whole nights up with the children when they were sick…and then I’d get dressed up and go out visiting…I grew thinner and thinner…”
And her house grew fuller and fuller. With Françoise herself, and Nanon and three small children and the nurses and the rest of the servants, and a vastly increased amount of cooking and laundering, it had become a hive of busy, blustering, squalling humanity, never still, never quiet, never quite under control, but kept going nonetheless with money from the King and constant effort from Françoise. In June 1672, Queen Marie-Thérèse bore the King a third son, who was named Louis-François; this child, of course, remained at court. But six days later, Athénaïs also bore Louis a son; this newborn, Louis-César, by contrast, had to be deposited elsewhere.
Athénaïs’s husband had long since been released from the Bastille; at his château in Gascony he had held a mock funeral ceremony for his departed wife, put his children and servants in mourning, and declared his permanent outrage at the King’s theft of Athénaïs by adding a set of cuckold’s horns to the Montespan family crest. He was clearly not going to accept the state of affairs in the spirit of a dutiful subject. Athénaïs’s two sons by Louis could not yet be publicly recognized. Little Louis-César was going to have to be added to the four children already in the rue des Tournelles, and Françoise was going to have to move to a bigger house.
In the autumn of 1672, a suitable place in the rue Vaugirard was duly purchased by the King, and for the first time in all the twenty-two years of her Paris life, Françoise found herself living outside the Marais. The rue Vaugirard was on the edge of the district of Saint-Germain, the grandest of Colbert’s grand new residential developments and, usefully, a district which housed most of the city’s foreign visitors; there were thus fewer locals to observe the comings and goings in Françoise’s own household. One visitor especially was anxious to remain unidentified: in 1671 the King had lost his second legitimate son, Philippe, not even three years old; the following year, baby Louis-François had died, aged only four months, along with his five-year-old sister, Marie-Thérèse, and their unknown half-sibling, who had in the meantime joined Françoise’s little brood. Françoise had been deeply moved by the death of this child in her care, “far more than the real mother,” who had apparently never troubled to visit at all. But if Athénaïs was little affected, the King had found his paternal feelings belatedly roused by the deaths of so many of his children, so quickly. He began to take an interest in his two illegitimate sons at the house in the rue Vaugirard, and at the end of 1672 he took to visiting them there.
The younger boy, Louis-César, was still an infant in swaddling clothes, but Louis-Auguste was three years old, an attractive, curly-haired child, affectionate and precociously intelligent. Though hidden away from the lustre of the court, he far outshone his twelve-year-old half-brother at Saint-Germain. Young Louis, the unprepossessing dauphin, was only too clearly his mother’s son, fattish, timid, and slow to learn. The King, determined to respect and love him as heir to the Bourbon throne, had hampered him all the same with two ill-chosen governors, brutal even by contemporary standards, who had flogged and ranted the boy into a hatred of all learning and a reluctance to take a stand on anything but the value of a good hunting dog. “The dauphin became like an idiot,” wrote Primi Visconti. “No one could make any conversation with him. People even said that the little marquis de Créquy had secretly introduced him to a certain immoral practice, and when the dauphin’s deputy-governor realized this, he hid himself with a big stick behind the dauphin’s bed, and when he saw his hands moving under the covers, he jumped out and started beating him…The dauphin was only young, but he offered money to any army officer if he’d get rid of his governor for him.”
By contrast, the innocent, three-year-old Louis-Auguste promised to be everything a prince should be. With the dauphin retreating into a sullen silence, his little half-brother swiftly became the King’s favourite son. As for Françoise, she adored the child. He became her little “Mignon,” her sweetheart; so she was to call him for the rest of her life.
Surrounded by children, naturally responsive to them, yet with no child of her own, into this little boy she poured all the love and longing of a mother in all but name. To each of the children she was warm and attentive, but there is no doubt of her special tenderness for him, a tenderness conjured, perhaps, out of her own mother’s long-ago lack of tenderness for her. The child responded with an equal love, and his love, too, was to be lasting. At the age of thirteen he is found writing to her enthusiastically “in between mathematics and some Bible reading. I’ve just been to the château of Glatigny and I was thrilled to see my dogs: Roland, Commère, Rodrigue, Medea, Jason, Hebe, Cyrus, Nigaud, Nanon, Finette, Morette, Charmant, and Belle-Face. Now you know more about my hunting pack than my schooling.” Three years later, from a first army post, he would write tha
t he felt towards her as a son towards his mother, adding, “I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t love me…”
The King saw it all on Françoise’s discreet visits with the children to the Louvre and Saint-Germain, and also during his own increasing hours at the rue Vaugirard. At first he had not much liked Françoise—“He couldn’t stand her,” said the abbé de Choisy bluntly—regarding her as too clever, too contained, and, worst of all things, a possible prude. But having seen her affectionate manner with the children, he had gradually warmed to her. “She knows how to love,” he remarked one day. “It would be something to be loved by a woman like that.”
Whether or not he was already thinking of making her one of his many casual mistresses, he was prepared to make public his new esteem for her: in March 1673 Françoise saw her pension increased from two to six thousand livres. “A king must distinguish persons of quality and merit,” wrote the King, and perhaps he had as yet acknowledged to himself no deeper reason for his sudden tripling of Françoise’s pension. Perhaps, but already it was whispered at court that the King was finding the governess “so delightful and such good company that he can hardly bear to be away from her…It’s true that two thousand livres wasn’t much of a pension, but still, this sudden increase does seem to raise the hope of other blessings…”
Françoise was beginning to be known at court, not just by reputation, through her well-born Marais friends, but in herself, as a regular visitor. Bringing the children to visit their parents, no matter how discreetly, she had been seen, and discussed, by the courtiers as well as the servants. She was also beginning to be known as something of an authority on court affairs, all the various and vital activities and personalities of “that country,” as it was known to its habitués. Over supper in her magnificent house in the Marais, Madame de Sévigné lapped up all the gossip to record for her daughter in Provence: “Madame Scarron is charming,” she wrote, “and her mind is marvellously penetrating. It’s a pleasure to hear her talking about all these dreadful goings-on in that country, which she knows well—how desperate Madame [Bonne] d’Heudicourt felt…the trials and tribulations of all the ladies at Saint-Germain, not excluding the most envied of them all [Athénaïs]. It’s delightful to hear her chatting about all that. Sometimes the conversations go much further, into religion or politics.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 18