Françoise’s star had evidently begun to rise. She had made the acquaintance of the King, she had tripled her earnings, and through her efforts, in 1672, her undeserving brother Charles had been appointed governor of the Dutch city of Amersfoort, captured by the French during the promenade militaire of 1667. “But I don’t regard this as a permanent establishment,” she wrote to him. “It’s a step towards something else. So make of it what you can, for the service of a man who must have charmed you even more than he’s charmed me, since you’ve seen him in military mode. It seems to me it’s a pleasure to serve a hero, especially a hero we see at first hand…Out of this honour, my dear brother, you must work miracles. Apply yourself, be careful and precise in your work,” she urged, well knowing Charles’s tendency to be nothing of the kind. “Don’t be harsh with the Huguenots there,” she warned, unwittingly prescient of troubles to come. “It’s gentleness that draws people. Jesus Christ gave us that example…And remember, if you’re not devout enough to become a monk, there’s nothing better on this earth than to make people think well of you.”
Ten
L‘Arrivée
With the King giving the example of galanterie, it’s easy for the young courtiers to become his devoted disciples. The court loves love: gay, delightful, unconstrained love. Any man unhappy in love is ridiculous. The fashion is for conquests and intrigues, not sighs and gloomy resignation…A young lord carries on several affairs at once. Fidelity to one’s beloved is rare, inconstancy the rule…But to cross the accepted limits, to go to excess…this His Majesty does not permit. He wants to keep the court half-way between the austere piety of his mother’s day and the licentiousness of the more intemperate courtiers. When occasion requires, the King knows how to be dignified and respect the conventions, but at Saint-Germain…life has a certain freshness, a spontaneity, a natural elegance…The fashionable word now is flexible, marvellously appropriate to describe the young courtiers’ behaviour. It evokes an ease of manner, and a touch of informality, too. It’s the opposite of pompous ceremony and rigid etiquette.
Thus the mode de vie at the court of the thirty-four-year-old Louis XIV in the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, twelve miles to the west of Paris. This had been the court’s principal residence since 1666, when Louis had turned his back for good on the unfinished Louvre.
Saint-Germain’s Gothic origins had long since been obscured by sacking English armies and the gentler legions of architects from Italy, and it now stood as a graceful Renaissance edifice set in splendid formal gardens in the new French style, designed by the great André Le Nôtre for the King’s then favourite, Louise de la Vallière, and completed in this very year of 1673. Running through the parterres and copses, a stone terrace, nearly two miles long, gave views of the beautiful valley of the Seine and, away in the distance, the great city of light. Impressive though the palace was, the King had been unable to resist remaking it to his own, more ebullient taste. To that end, teams of builders and craftsmen were now at work inside and out, directed by the famous pair of Louis Le Vau, designer of Fouquet’s Vaux-le-Vicomte, and Jules Hardouin-Mansart—and, whenever he cared to interfere, by the King himself.
Françoise knew Saint-Germain well. It was from beneath its windows, in the middle of a March night in 1670, that she had spirited away the newborn Louis-Auguste, her “Mignon” since then she had returned many times with the boy and his brother, to allow them to be petted by their father, and sighted by their mother, who otherwise made no effort to see them.
In June 1673 Athénaïs had borne the King a daughter, named Louise-Françoise, though the King called her Poupotte (Dolly) or Maflée (Chubby), signs of an indulgence of which she would be quick to take advantage. Athénaïs was still aged only thirty; in the last three years she had borne three children. Now, her latest little arrival persuaded the King that he could not keep his unacknowledged offspring in hiding indefinitely; he decided to have them legitimized and brought to court to live openly as his own.
A legal precedent existed already in the person of the comte de Vermandois, the King’s illegitimate son by Louise de la Vallière, so that in December 1673 Louis-Auguste, now aged almost four, became the duc du Maine, eighteen-month-old Louis-César the comte de Vexin, and newborn Louise-Françoise Mademoiselle de Nantes. But, though declared the King’s legitimate sons, the boys were to have no claim to the Bourbon throne. All three children were to remain in the official care of Madame Scarron; she was to give up the house in the rue Vaugirard, and come to live with them at the palace of Saint-Germain.
She was not particularly inclined to go. No doubt she had been feeling pangs of homesickness for the happy time of theatres and dinners with her friends in the Marais, coming and going as she pleased, before her life had been taken over by curtain-hanging and wet-nurse supervision and tending sick toddlers all through the night. She was now aged thirty-eight: youth had disappeared, and a long life could not be guaranteed. She had a good pension of 6,000 livres, enough for quite an elegant life in a good house of her own, entertaining friends, dressing in gowns of Dutch velvet—“I saw some samples the other day; it’s on sale in Amsterdam; if it’s not too much trouble, perhaps you could bring me some…”—with money left over for the inevitable debts of brother Charles, and for “our relatives constantly asking me for help.” She had made a start already on what was to prove a long career of financial assistance to d’Aubignés, Scarrons, de Villettes, and assorted other cousins any number of times removed.
But then there was Mignon, the little duc du Maine, still her darling, still precocious, still delightful, but now suffering cruelly with a deformed leg, twisted and shortened in the spasms of a serious fever. If she declined to move to Saint-Germain, she would possibly never see him again, and she loved the boy, with a deep need of his presence, as if he were her own son.
As for him, unable to walk, enduring constant pain, he had grown more dependent on her, rather than less, as the months since his illness had gone by. In the spring of 1673, with Bonne’s Louise in tow as well, she had taken him on a strenuous two-hundred-mile journey to Antwerp to consult a physician there; it seemed he might be able to help the child by straightening his leg and enabling him to walk. Since the King’s Louis-Auguste did not yet officially exist, he and Françoise had travelled in disguise, she as the unknown marquise de Surgères and he as her son.
The journey had proved to worse than no avail. The treatment had been disastrous. Mignon had been several times placed in a stretching contraption, “like a prison rack,” and his leg pulled and twisted, while Françoise sat beside him, mopping the perspiration from his forehead, her own heart rent by his screams. At the end of it all, his shorter leg had become longer than the other, and far from being able to walk, he could barely stand upright. Though it had not been her sole decision to take Mignon to Antwerp, she was partly responsible for the journey and, arguably, for its dreadful outcome and the child’s continuing suffering. Guilt, then, and perhaps a determination to cure him yet, were added into the balance as she considered what to do.
In the end it was Père Gobelin who convinced her. Beneath its sparkling surface, he said, the court was a dark den of iniquity; the children would have a much better chance of growing up good Christians if their debauched mother’s influence could be kept to a minimum, and his own, through Françoise, increased. In fact, Athénaïs had little influence over the children, never having taken much interest in them. On the other hand, if Françoise were to leave, there was no telling what unthinking or uncaring person might be installed as their new governess. Moreover, thought Françoise, like her marriage to Scarron, her duties at court would not be likely to last long. It was the custom of the day for well-born boys to remain with their governess only until the age of seven, when they were transferred to the care of a male tutor for their formal education. Mignon was already almost four. Whether Françoise liked it or not, he would be removed from her care in three short years. But by then, perhaps, his leg would be healed
, and in any case she would have done all she could for him. As for the non-royal children, Charles’s five-year-old boy, Toscan, could be sent to the country, while Bonne’s Louise, the same age, could go with her to Saint-Germain. Françoise spoke again to Père Gobelin. He urged her to go, and at the end of 1673, she did.
Despite being the premier royal residence and the official seat of government, Saint-Germain was not large. The many visiting counsellors and diplomats who came to see the King could not be housed there overnight, and were obliged instead to make the daily journey from Paris in their velvet-lined but unsprung coaches. There was not even room at Saint-Germain for the courtiers, who compensated for this by building themselves elegant houses nearby, so that by the time of Françoise’s arrival, in January 1674, a fine new town was springing up beside the palace. Even the King’s apartments, though recently remodelled, were admitted to be small. Only Athénaïs had space enough, with a magnificent suite decorated by the celebrated François d’Orbay. Here, in her boudoir, she would lie for two or three hours every day, “stretched out naked on the bed, to be massaged with pomades and perfumes.” The balconies surrounding her apartments overlooked the beautiful gardens designed for the discarded Louise de la Vallière, which might have given the confident Athénaïs occasional pause for thought. No longer loved by Louis, Louise nonetheless remained at court, a useful diversionary tactic for a King who preferred his private life to remain something of a mystery as far as his courtiers were concerned.
La belle Montespan was seldom alone in her spacious suite. Apart from the King and her children, when Françoise brought them visiting, she shared it with a literal menagerie of other creatures: exotic birds of all kinds and colours, some of them flying around freely, goats and lambs with ribbons about their necks, piglets in costumes, mice scurrying about pulling tiny brass carriages, one screeching monkey, and even a small bear. At “dinner,” an early afternoon repast, Athénaïs presided at a table for ladies only, normally a prerogative of the Queen. Afterwards, she would hold court seated in a proper chair, “with a back and arms,” while the princesses and duchesses perched on lowly stools around her.
Athénaïs was intelligent, generous, and sincerely religious, but her ascent to the absolute summit had brought out the less attractive aspects of her character. Wallowing in a bizarre luxury, she had become indulgent and petulant by turns, with her pets, her servants, her children, her friends, and even with the King himself. All day and half the night, her loud voice could be heard, screaming with laughter if it suited her mood, otherwise arguing with the King or shouting at her servants, as often as not with a clout for good measure. Despite her noble Mortemart ancestry, Athénaïs’s passions were those of the newly rich: gorgeous dresses, huge jewels, sumptuous carriages, and the constant, flagrant waste of money—all sustained by the King, whose passion for her, after seven years, showed no sign of flagging.
The uncrowned Queen, it seemed, needed a palace of her own, and construction had duly begun on her fabulous château at Clagny near Versailles, which was now costing the King, or rather, the public purse, 300,000 livres every year, to say nothing of the “excessive expense” of her apartments at Saint-Germain. Even the prince de Condé, le Grand Condé, the King’s own cousin, whose royal pension soared above all others, received only 150,000 livres, though admittedly he had a million or so from his estates as well. Françoise’s proudly earned 6,000 livres was a pittance by comparison, and most courtiers could barely have imagined how a country priest could keep body and soul together on four or five hundred a year, or a labouring townsman feed his family on half that sum. Athénaïs did not forget the obligations of charity, but she was not above betting half a million livres on the turn of a card; it was too daring, too dazzling, too much plain fun, and if she should lose, the coffers could always be refilled. “She’d play the entire evening…throwing the price of a ship or a château onto the table without a second thought,” while the King watched ambivalently, justifying the greed and extravagance of his irresistible mistress with a political gamble of his own—that his courtiers’ addicition to dice and cards was an antidote to plotting and Frondes.
The worst game, or the best of all, was le hocca, a high-stakes lottery introduced from Italy, where it had long been outlawed. The Parlement of Paris had prohibited it, too, though the parlementaires themselves, on their visits to court, were not always immune to the temptation of playing. “Le hocca is forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, but still they play it in the King’s own house!” Madame de Sévigné declared. “It’s nothing to lose five thousand pistoles before dinner; it’s absolutely cut-throat.” In an effort to stamp the game out, police commissioner La Reynie added to the prison term a fine of 3,000 livres, then 6,000, but the potential winnings were simply too high, and apart from anything else, le hocca had simply become “the fashion at court,” as La Reynie complained to his master, Colbert. “This means it will certainly spread to the bourgeois in Paris, and then the tradesmen and artisans. It will create more disorder than ever.” Touchingly, the commissioner employed a local mathematician to create a series of geometry games to replace the desperate fashion for gambling. They do not seem to have achieved quite the same popularity.
Françoise was not a gambler—the stakes would have been much too high for her, even if she had been inclined to join in—but she did take part in the other amusements of Athénaïs’s alternative court. Typically, the King and his mistress, with a select group of courtiers, would pass the early hours of the evening at board games or cards (Françoise’s favourite was the two-handed piquet), or listening to some new poem or play. Their maestro, Molière, had departed for good only months before, spitting out his last words with bright consumptive blood during a performance in the title role of, perversely, La Malade imaginaire (The Hypochondriac). But other writers had emerged, and Lully was still there, inventing dances and composing songs, begetting children and seducing young men, all with the same obsessive energy, a wonderful source of gossip and entertainment for opera-lovers and everyone else. There was a great deal of talk, of course, especially over supper at the end of the evening, and here Françoise shone, as she had done on so many evenings in the salons of the Marais. The King observed her admiringly, but also with a touch of anxiety; Athénaïs so clearly enjoyed batting words back and forth with the governess that at times he felt almost redundant. In the end he asked her not to continue talking to “your clever friend” after he had gone, fearing, no doubt, that the conversation might turn, unflatteringly, towards himself.
It turned often enough from the amusing to the merely tiresome, and this Françoise enjoyed much less, though court protocol demanded a high degree of tolerance for plain silliness. One game played among the duchesses and princesses was a version of musical chairs, with the gentlemen trying to push the ladies off their seats. Françoise’s lack of enthusiasm must have been evident, or her reputation for good sense too intimidating, for the courtier elected to dethrone her drew back with an exaggerated cry. “Ah, no! Not Madame Scarron!” he exclaimed. “I’d sooner try to pinch the Queen’s bottom.”
There was not much likelihood of it. Having lost, as she did routinely, at her own favourite card game of hombre—“Half the court was living off her losses”—Marie-Thérèse would have spent the rest of the evening within her own apartments, kneeling sadly in silent prayer. In the early days of their marriage, Louis had wished her to hold a ladies’ court of her own, as his mother had done, but “her stupidity and her bizarre French soon put an end to that idea.” The court was now wherever the King was, and the King was invariably with his mistress, until he came to the Queen to say goodnight—“the King never stopped going to bed with the Queen, often late, but without fail”—but this cannot have been much consolation to the lonely Marie-Thérèse, who had not even her children to comfort her—five of the six were by now dead. Overly pious even as a girl, in the fourteen years of her marriage she had sunk ever more deeply into an extreme, very Spanish Cathol
icism. The King’s many infidelities had grieved and humiliated her. Louise de la Vallière had at least been discreet, but Athénaïs was flaunting her favoured status openly. “That whora will kill me!” wailed Marie-Thérèse.
The King observed the forms, and for him the forms were sufficient: in public, the Queen took first place. But Marie-Thérèse, thirty-six years old, wanted more than formality. Far from her homeland, still struggling with the capricious French language, disdained or ignored by all the courtiers, she had been sufficiently naïve to hope for love, and in her unreasoning heart she hoped for it still.
Extraordinarily, the same hope was being nursed, and for the same man, in the heart of another foreign princess, more recently arrived at court. Towards the end of 1671, the King’s widowed brother, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, “Monsieur,” had married for the second time, his bride the nineteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, known to her own, much missed Rhineland family as “Liselotte.” To the snobbish French courtiers, Liselotte was all that a German princess ought to be: a hefty, badly dressed lover of chocolate and sausages. “She’s no beauty,” wrote Primi Visconti, “and in fact, when Monsieur saw her for the first time, he turned to his courtiers…and muttered, Oh! how can I go to bed with her? For the first three days she ate nothing but an olive and didn’t say a word…But she was soon talking…even more than necessary.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 19