The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon

by Veronica Buckley

  This confession of the fictional Madame Jobin is remarkably close to that of the thoroughly real memoirist Primi Visconti, who had been waylaid at Louis’s court by his apparent talent for reading palms and telling fortunes. Though it was all “just a game” to Primi Visconti, it had made him wildly popular among the more frivolous members of the upper crust. Like Madame Jobin, he had done no more than take notice of things and pick up all the gossip. “Though I pretended not to be listening…I’d remember all the whispers,” he wrote, “and I’d mention a few things, really only guessing…[and] they’d all be astonished by my penetration…Before long I was receiving invitations to the most illustrious houses…The whole of Paris was dying to see me.” La Reynie certainly knew of Primi Visconti; in fact he made plans to arrest him, but “the King stood guarantee for me,” and the court’s favourite fortune-teller remained at liberty.

  In fairness to La Reynie, whether or not he had a hand in the play, or indeed even saw it, the affair had long since gone beyond love potions and fortune-telling. The Parisian woman lately arrested, Catherine La Voisin, had been charged not only with the murder of several husbands, but also with attempted murder (by poisoning and bewitchment), and with inducing abortions with potions and “metal implements.” La Voisin was a widely known devineresse, but fortune-telling and casting spells had emerged as the least of her activities, and so it had proved with the many, many others who had been arrested in her train. La Reynie’s investigations were revealing a layer of criminal activity previously unsuspected, at least by his rather earnest self. Among the privileged as among ordinary folk, witchcraft and poisoning—and, above all, abortion—appeared to be entrenched practices of daily life. “Men’s lives are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining,” he relayed in dismay. “Murder is the only remedy when a family is in difficulties. Abominations are being practised everywhere—in Paris, in the suburbs, in the provinces.”

  Even before the La Voisin affair had broken, La Reynie and his police had been actively hunting down the perpetrators of these “abominations,” which included all manner of sacrilege—black masses, casting spells with holy words, attempts to commune with the dead—all punishable by hanging or beheading. Even blasphemy could incur the penalty of a cruel tongue-piercing and condemnation to the galleys for life. All suspects were tortured, not in order to obtain a confession of guilt, which, among the untitled and the poor, was more or less assumed, but in order to extract information about their supposed accomplices. It was a hideous and also largely useless practice, as the president of the Paris parlement himself had observed, noting that it was “rare that it has extracted the truth from the mouth of a condemned man.” Tortures permitted in French prisons included the rack, with arms and limbs stretched to breaking point; the brodequins, a kind of press with screws which gradually crushed the limbs; and the water torture, with gallons of water forced down the victim’s throat, causing terrible pain. On his own tourist visit to the Châtelet prison, the English diarist John Evelyn witnessed a man charged with robbery who was “to have the question, or torture, given to him.” Evelyn describes the torture in detail, adding, “There was another malefactor to succeed, but the spectacle was so uncomfortable, that I was not able to stay the sight of another.”

  La Voisin herself had been subjected to the water torture, and the transcript of her interrogation is “interspersed with her shrieks and pleas” for pity. She had eventually produced the names of thirty-six people apparently in league with her. These thirty-six had been tortured in their turn, producing further, ever less likely names, and so the investigation had spread. In February 1680 La Voisin was condemned to be burnt alive, then tortured further in case she might recall any other accomplices not yet named. In the last week of the month, she was taken by cart to the Place de Grève for execution.

  She did not go quietly. Pushing away both priest and crucifix, she refused to offer the required penitential prayer en route at the cathedral of Nôtre-Dame. Arrived at the foot of the scaffold, she would not get down from the tumbrel, and had to be pulled out by the guards. Chained in irons to the stake, five or six times she kicked the flaming straw away, swearing violently, until at last the fire enveloped her. “They say the repercussions will surprise us all,” Madame de Sévigné remarked.

  The King’s two most powerful ministers, Colbert and the war minister Louvois, may have been less surprised than others. As the tortured prisoners gave up ever more names, Colbert could not help but notice how many of them were connected to his own wide clan of officials and protégés. Undetected by the single-minded La Reynie, Louvois, Colbert’s premier rival, had been manipulating the investigation to ensnare as many as possible of Colbert’s friends and his own enemies. Le clan Louvois had been at odds with le clan Colbert since the beginning of Louis’s personal reign in 1661, and though the Colberts had on the whole had the better of things to date, their lustre was just beginning to dim through the signally underhand efforts of the “fat and sweaty-palmed” Minister of War.

  The most prominent of Louvois’s targets now was François-Henri, duc de Luxembourg, maréchal de France, one of the four Captains of the Royal Bodyguard, “the chiefest places in trust about the King’s person,” and in fact a former favourite of Louvois himself. Despite his high position, Luxembourg was an easy target, being the object of general dislike, at least among the men. “His low stature was not the worst of his defects,” wrote the diplomat Spanheim. “A deceitful little hunchback” was Primi Visconti’s more direct opinion.

  As governor of Holland after the French invasion of the 1670s, Luxembourg had proved himself to be nasty and brutish as well as short, treating the local people with great cruelty and permitting his soldiers to pillage, and worse, as they pleased. But in due course he had tasted defeat as well, and this had wrought vengeance on his own head. In 1676 he had been unable to raise the siege of the beleaguered German city of Philippsburg; he had blamed his long-time ally Louvois for failing to send reinforcements, and from this point the grudge-bearing Louvois had become his determined enemy.

  Early in 1680, following allegations made by a supposed magician by the name of Lesage, Luxembourg was arrested on charges of sacrilege, sodomy, incest, counterfeiting money, and several attempted murders, including that of his rich but otherwise unappealing wife, “the ugliest person alive.” Any one of the charges would have been enough to sentence the duc to death. But, though he was known to be a superstitious man, fond of magic books and fortune-telling, and though there may have been some truth in the talk of homosexual liaisons, his only real mistake was to have fallen out with Louvois, who now proved ready to hound his former friend to disgrace, into exile, or even to the block.

  Luxembourg did not wait for the guards to come for him, but defiantly set off for the Bastille in his own carriage. En route he encountered Athénaïs, and both stepped down to confer in private. The duc’s bravado had not lasted long, for he was by now weeping “very hard.” A second time he broke his journey, to pass a few moments in prayer, but, unable to decide which saint might most suitably intercede for him, he left the church, still weeping. Eventually confined in a “most disagreeable” cell overlooking the prison’s stinking moat, he was briefly interrogated by La Reynie, before demanding to see a priest. The priest was denied him, though, in compensation, La Reynie sent him a copy of The Lives of the Saints.

  For two days Luxembourg attempted a hunger strike, sitting sullenly in his cell, but on the third day he changed tack and began a constant snapping at his jailer to “Shut that window! Light the fire! Get me some chocolate!” Madame de Sévigné, well informed as always, and disgusted with the duc’s petulant behaviour, relayed the whole story to her friends in the country. “He’s not a man,” she wrote, “not even a little man; he’s not even a woman; he’s just a little womelette.” But when his trial finally came about more than three months later, Luxembourg behaved with exemplary dignity. His defence clear and his personal innocence evident, he was quickly
acquitted, though his manservant, more muddled in his testimony, was condemned to the galleys, and his jolly personal astrologer, apparently in need of a chastisement that would wipe the smile from his face, spent the rest of his life shackled to the wall of a dungeon. Once released, the duc took care to ally himself as closely as possible with Louvois’s rival, Colbert, in fact turning to Françoise to help him arrange a marriage within the Colbert family.

  Luxembourg had been too proud, or too determined to prove his case, to take advantage of a hint from the King to leave France before he could be arrested, but other highly placed persons, similarly warned, decided not to wait at home for the inevitable knock at the door. The comtesse de Soissons, née Olympe Mancini, a niece of the late Cardinal Mazarin and one of Louis’s occasional mistresses, enthralled all of Paris with her dashing midnight escape, leaping up from her gaming table to grab a few large and beautiful jewels and the marquise d’Alluye, her large and beautiful best friend, before galloping off to Brussels, pursued by armed horsemen sent by Louvois.

  Bereft of his quarry, the minister was obliged to content himself with trying to create a sinister reputation for the comtesse in Brussels, whose “naturally superstitious” people were alarmed to see a bevy of “devils” (black cats released by one of Louvois’s men) surround her as she knelt at mass. The comtesse was about to be accused of the murder of her husband, though no one actually believed in her guilt. She had gained nothing financially from the comte’s death, and in every other respect, as was widely known, he had been a more than accommodating husband, at one point even taking pains to reconcile his wife with a lover, one of many, with whom she had quarrelled.

  Within a week, the comtesse’s sister, Marie-Anne, duchesse de Bouillon, found herself facing a similar charge: she had supposedly attempted to procure the murder of her own husband, the duc de Bouillon, in order to marry her current lover, the duc de Vendôme. Adored by her indulgent husband, who raised no objection to her many affairs “provided he got his share,” the rich, liberal, and “singularly seductive” duchesse was equally adored in Parisian society, where worldly heads nodded approvingly at her restrained practice of receiving only one lover at a time.

  An inveterate unblusher of this mettle was not likely to be intimidated by the upstart policeman La Reynie, with his fantastical ideas of conspiracy against the King’s life; far from taking flight as her sister had done, La Bouillon stood trial with fabulous defiance, turning up at the Chambre ardente with husband on one arm and lover on the other. As anticipated by the riveted Parisians, she proved more than a match for the commissioners. Had she offered a sack of gold to the magician Lesage to get rid of her husband? She had not, and there was her husband now, waiting for her with a train of carriages outside this very door. Had she tried to poison her servants, who knew too much about her amatory affairs? She had not, and in any case all of Paris knew about her affairs. Had she ever seen the devil? La Reynie asked her. “Yes, I have,” she retorted, “and he looked just like you.” With no evidence, the case against the duchesse collapsed within the day. The multiply cuckolded duc was so proud of his wife’s triumph that he begged permission of the King to publish an account of it for all the courts of Europe. Permission was not forthcoming.

  The duc de Luxembourg and the two Mancini sisters had provided good entertainment for the gossips, and throughout the first months of 1680 many other noble names were pronounced, enlivening the proceedings further. Though alarmed at first, the King was not convinced of any real crime in the highest circles, but he was dismayed all the same by the uncovering of so many occult practices at his own court, indeed very close to himself. According to La Reynie, some of the accused had spoken a good deal about Madame de Montespan. “All those involved in this must be brought to task, whatever their rank,” wrote Louis to Colbert sternly.

  The extent of the affair and the involvement of so many rich and powerful people seemed almost impossible, and had La Reynie been able to view it all with less horror and more perspicacity, he might have seen that in fact it was. Colbert, no doubt concerned to protect his allies, protested that those giving testimony had been facing “all the terrors of torture and death,” adding sensibly, “One is naturally ingenious in these extremities.” But the police commissioner did not hear, or did not heed, the minister’s warning. A supporter of the monarchy during the civil wars of the Fronde, La Reynie had retained a strong, not to say fervid devotion to the King, and this, combined with a consciousness of his own family’s long tradition of civic service, gave him an exaggerated diligence in his task now. In his determination to leave no stone unturned, he pushed the investigation to its limits, and then beyond.

  Primi Visconti describes the court in 1680 as being in a state of terror. “You couldn’t trust your friends any more,” he relayed. “All it took was a letter to La Reynie, from anyone at all, and at once you were thrown into prison. Lots of innocent people spent months locked up before being interrogated.” And, injustices aside, police efforts were in some cases positively counterproductive. “Lots of people who knew nothing about poisoning started to learn all about it,” continued Primi Visconti, “and it’s different here in France: elsewhere people use it to take revenge on their enemies, but here they use it against their father or mother…or to arrange a new marriage for themselves. There have been more poisonings since the Chambre was set up than there were before. As soon as anyone gets a stomach-ache, he says he’s been poisoned, and they arrest all the cooks and servants.”

  Poisoning and witchcraft fever swiftly spread outside of Paris, startling many innocent provincials. The marquis de Jorné was arrested after sending a servant to buy bookworm powder for his library. The duc de Nevers was locked up by his own anxious family after cheekily baptizing a pig. Madame de Sévigné’s family in Provence came down with a collective dose of gastric trouble: “Where on earth did you get the idea that you’ve all been poisoned?” wrote the marquise. “How ridiculous!” As her witty cousin remarked, “If all the bad cooks in Paris were seized, the prisons would soon be overflowing.”

  By the end of August 1680, the King’s concern about Athénaïs had developed into a real fear, “and I can assure you,” added Primi Visconti, “that a great many ladies spent sleepless nights, and a lot of men were even more worried, since it now seemed they were going to go after the homosexuals. Colbert didn’t approve of the tribunal. He thought it was…bringing the nation into disrepute.” Perhaps it was Colbert who persuaded Louis now to order the transcripts of certain interrogations—notably those mentioning Athénaïs’s name—to be left as loose sheets rather than being bound together in volumes. These were delivered into his own hands, the same hands which, almost thirty years later, would destroy them.

  Athénaïs was by now entangled in a series of accusations against members of her own Mortemart family. Under torture, La Voisin had confessed that she had been approached by the duchesse de Vivonne, Athénaïs’s sister-in-law, for help in poisoning her husband—the duc de Vivonne, doomed by his family’s bodily heritage, had in recent years grown grotesquely fat and, presumably, less attractive to his wife. At the same time, Athénaïs’s cousin, the marquis de Termes, a fanatical seeker of the legendary philosopher’s stone, had abducted an alchemist lover of La Voisin, keeping him prisoner for months in a fiery laboratory in the tower of his château.

  The name of Madame de Montespan had elicited riveted attention from La Voisin’s torturers. Their determination to know more had, in some measure, kept La Voisin alive, and she had seized the advantage by spinning out her story as long and as vividly as she could. After her death, her daughter had carried it further still, and though Colbert gauged her a “cunning and ingenious” girl, and even the credulous La Reynie admitted her to be of “a strange cast of mind,” her testimony was accepted as the truth. Madame de Montespan, she said, had been visiting her mother for five or six years, seeking her help to retain the King’s affections. La Voisin had provided her with love potions, and these M
adame de Montespan had mixed with the medicines for the King’s regular clystère purges.

  When the power of these appeared to weaken, La Voisin had taken to casting spells on the King, and had then paid a priest to celebrate a series of black masses sacrificing babies to the devil, in which a naked Madame de Montespan herself had supposedly participated. When all proved vain, and Athénaïs had resigned herself to losing her position as maîtresse déclarée, she had decided to take her revenge on the King, and La Voisin had supplied the means in phials of poisoned love powders.

  The King had been away in Flanders, on a summer tour of his newly gained provinces, when the first of La Reynie’s letters concerning Athénaïs arrived. By Christmas 1680 there was no more to be extracted from La Voisin’s ingenious daughter, but another woman, screaming as her legs were crushed in the brodequins, cried out that she had given love potions to Madame de Montespan to give the King. To her priest she later confessed that it had all been a lie, “to free herself from the pain…and out of fear of the torture being reapplied.” “The Chambre ardente,” wrote Primi Visconti, “was like an inquisition…of people’s consciences.” Though only La Reynie really believed the women, behind all the overblown accusations there was a grain of truth just large enough to undo Athénaïs once and for all.