Perhaps she should have known better. But even intelligence to burn, and a wide experience of the ways of the world, had so far proved too little for real self-knowledge on her part. Françoise’s own relationship with the King was an intractable flaw at the heart of her noble project. She was aware of this, uncomfortably, but she lacked the moral strength, or more probably the religious faith, to take the necessary steps for change.
Far from being a dévote in the hard-line Bossuet manner, Françoise was no more than a believing Christian at a time when all but the rarest folk were believing Christians. Her mixed upbringing and her preference for the pragmatic over the mystical had made of her a formal Catholic with definite Protestant tendencies, but she took no interest in the ongoing religious battles of the day between Catholic France and the interfering Pope, or Catholic France and its own grim Jansenist sect, or Catholic France and the Huguenots. Though she certainly possessed some “Christian” virtues—self-control, a keen sympathy for the suffering, and a distaste for frivolity and extravagance—these were more aspects of her character than the hard-won results of any religious endeavour. Françoise’s faith had never been a matter of great importance to her personally. The confessor she had chosen for herself, Père Gobelin, a sincere but manipulable man, had always been an inadequate spiritual guide for her, and he was quite out of his depth with regard to her extraordinary position now.
A letter of this time to Père Gobelin reveals the singularly unexcited beat of Françoise’s religious heart:
I pray for a moment when I get up; I go to mass every ordinary day, and twice on holy days of obligation; I recite the office every day, and read a chapter of some good book; I say a prayer when I go to bed, and if I wake in the night, I say a Laudate or a Gloria Patri. I think of God often during the day, and offer my acts to Him; I ask Him to take me away from court if I can’t make my salvation here, and for the rest, I don’t know what sins I can be committing. My temperament and my good intentions prevent me from doing anything really bad; I like to please people and to be well regarded, and that puts me on my guard against my other passions—and anyway, they’re not really faults, just normal human traits: I’m very vain, and frivolous and lazy, and I’m very free in my thoughts and judgements, and I’m cautious in what I say, out of ordinary prudence. So, that’s how it is with me; send me whatever instructions you think most suitable for my improvement.
It is hardly the letter of a dévote in the Bossuet mould, or of a sinner determined to repent and save her immortal soul. It is in fact the letter of a woman who is scarcely taking the thing seriously at all. Françoise’s behaviour, as she outlines it herself, is completely unobjectionable. She has no faults, “just normal human traits” she is incapable of doing anything “really bad.” She says her morning and evening prayers, and goes to mass like everyone else; the very foibles of which she accuses herself, with cheeky irony—vanity, frivolity, laziness—are precisely those she is well known never to have had. In the religious terms of the day, it is a shocking letter, revealing either an utter unawareness of the then supposed natural human tendency towards sin and the constant need for humility and repentance, or, more probably, an alarming spiritual pride. In psychological terms, it reveals Françoise’s condescension towards her chosen confessor, and her boredom with the petty restraints being placed in the name of salvation on ordinary, decent people going about their ordinary, decent lives. “As for my clothes, I’ll change them,” she adds. “I’ll stop wearing gold. I don’t care one way or the other. It won’t bother me. I’m spending too much anyway…”
A deeply religious Françoise, abandoning her sinful relationship with the King, might have taken the veil, like Louise de la Vallière, or at the very least retired to the life of a virtuous chatelaine at Maintenon, succouring the poor and promoting good works, the proverbial lady bountiful in the comfort of her own demesne. But it was not religious conviction that motivated her now. What she wanted above all was what she had always wanted: lasting respect, what she herself called bonne gloire. As the saviour of the King’s immortal soul, she would possess something that not even the highest in the kingdom had ever possessed, not Athénaïs, not Colbert, not even Bossuet. Louis’s path to salvation would be Françoise’s path to glory, and on the way, conveniently, she could save her own soul as well. If luck or providence had brought her thus far, so very, very far from where she had begun, only a glint of real ambition could take her any further.
Françoise was not a natural strategist—her rise from unwanted prisoner’s child to “the machine directing everything” could never have been planned, in any case—but she knew how to take advantage of the opportunities that came her way. And the winds at court were changing; Bossuet and his dévots had been gaining ground. The King needed to capture the moral high ground from the pleasure-phobic Jansenists and the politically suspect Huguenots; the extravagant costumes of debauchery, once worn with pride and flair, had begun to look rather tawdry. The shock of the Poisons Affair had prompted a return to more conventional intercourse with the supernatural. The retreat into good behaviour was not uniform—“The duc de Vendôme has lost 10,000 écus at billiards against a prelate (a leading light of the Church!),” announced Madame de Sévigné, with feigned horror—but the general trend was indisputable. Piety was becoming fashionable.
Françoise seized the chance to place herself at the forefront of the new trend. With a new determination, and arguably some hypocrisy, she took a first step to align herself publicly with the dévots. Under the apparent patronage of “a lady of great virtue,” recognized immediately as herself, she published a little penitent tract supposedly written by Louise de la Vallière on the occasion of her entering the convent. It was in fact the work of the duc de Beauvillier, son-in-law of the minister Colbert and a known follower of Bossuet, but for Françoise’s purposes now that made no difference—indeed, she consulted neither Beauvillier, the actual author, nor Louise, now Sister Louise of Mercy, under whose name the tract was being published. Bossuet added an introduction to these Reflections on the Mercy of God, advising his readers that the “lady of great virtue” would have thought it an injustice “to deprive the faithful of a work so useful to sinners wishing to convert.”
Père Gobelin, earnest and simple, had proved unable to guide his self-satisfied lamb into a properly penitent fold. But clever Bossuet had miscalculated, too. Surprised and impressed by her difference from the flaunting, grasping Athénaïs, he had accepted Françoise on her own public terms. Her undoubted intelligence, her dignity of manner, her discreet behaviour, the modesty of her dress, her apparent lack of interest in honours and riches, all gave to the outsider—to Bossuet, bound up in his own vast ambition and confident of his personal judgement—the appearance of a natural piety, and he began to consider Françoise, with her evident influence over Louis, as a perfect pawn in his own strategic game of converting the nation through the conversion of the King. The Queen herself, “a saint, but not very bright,” was useless for his purposes. Françoise, though less of a saint than Bossuet suspected, was likely by contrast to prove very useful indeed.
For all his brilliance, he failed to understand Françoise, mistaking the persona she had constructed for herself, out of social necessity and personal preference, for the face of a profound religious faith. And she, less brilliant but more perceptive, saw his mistake, and quietly decided to make use of it for herself. In her terms, Bossuet and his dévots would serve as an advance guard for her own eventual securing of the King’s salvation—an advance guard, and a protective guard, too, for in the jealous, intriguing environment of the court, Françoise needed allies. “Did she think the first volume of her life was always going to remain unread?” wrote Madame de Sévigné. “And the story’s been retold so maliciously, doesn’t she realize how that must have harmed her?”
Françoise realized very well, and warned her talkative brother to “be careful what you say about me…Don’t talk about my good fortune; don’t say an
ything about it, good or bad. They’re enraged against me, and as you say, they’ll do anything to do me harm.” Regardless of her present standing with the King, she remained vulnerable to those who were whittling away at her pedestal now with the sharp little knives of her humble birth, her poverty, her marriage to the cripple Scarron, her entry to the court as a paid servant. Athénaïs, luckless catalyst of her own downfall, stood first and most furious among Françoise’s detractors. “She was almost unhinged by the King’s preference for Madame de Maintenon,” wrote the abbé de Choisy. “She regarded her as so far beneath her.”
Louis had added cowardly insult to injury by sending Françoise herself to convey to Athénaïs the news of her demotion: “She told her, in the clearest terms,” the abbé de Choisy recorded, “that the King no longer wished to have any particular liaison with her, and that he advised her for her part to think of her salvation, as he intended to think of his own. It was such a harsh thing to say that Madame de Maintenon had several times begged the King to reconsider, and even suggested that he might have difficulty holding to his decision, but he pressed her so firmly that in the end she did it.” As the abbé had observed, “the King never could stand up to Madame de Montespan in person…He certainly feared her more than he loved her.”
The discarded Athénaïs, “suffocating in black bile,” had both the means and the motive to act against Françoise. She had staunch support from the duchesse de Richelieu, an apparent friend from Paris salon days who, however, “was only fond of Madame de Maintenon as long as she was poor and unknown. She resented her current good fortune. As far as she was concerned, Madame had stolen her own rightful place as confidante to the King.” But if Françoise was anxious, she was not cowed. “If my enemies fail, we’ll laugh at them, and if they succeed, we’ll endure it with courage,” she insisted to Charles. “We’re in a good situation, after all,” she added, revealing a sound gift of perspective, “when you think of how we used to live.”
And in the meantime, she was not without defence. She herself was vulnerable, but Bossuet—unless the King were to dismiss him outright—was virtually unassailable, and from now on she drew closer to the preacher and his dévots. They would encircle her pedestal, and she would do whatever she herself could do to keep her place on top of it, and reach up even higher.
The King wasn’t ashamed to make her [second] dame d’atour to the new dauphine, but, not daring to go all the way, he…put the maréchale de Rochefort in the first [dame d’atour’s] place. She didn’t mind being in such unequal company…” Thus the duc de Saint-Simon, writing of the first days of 1680.
Until that point, the post of deuxième dame d’atour had not even existed. It had been created especially for Françoise, giving her not only a formal justification for remaining at court, but also a certain authority there. Like most such posts, there was little real work attached to it: Françoise was to supervise the dauphine’s hairdressing and part of her wardrobe, not with any effort of her own hands, but through the selection of maids and, now and then, the placing of orders for furs or silks. Within the dauphine’s household, she would be subordinate to the unproblematic Madame de Rochefort, first lady-in-waiting, and also, less happily, to the dauphine’s dame d’honneur, the malicious duchesse de Richelieu. Rumour of Françoise’s new post had evidently been about for some time. Six weeks before the announcement, perhaps concerned that an apparent overconfidence on her part would displease the King, or perhaps not yet convinced about the post herself, Françoise had cautioned her brother not to believe it. “I am not a dame d’atour,” she insisted. “When the dauphine’s household is announced, I’ll let you know. Until then, take everything you hear about it with a pinch of salt. This rumour is being spread by people ill-intentioned towards me.”
The dauphine was the wife of the King’s only surviving legitimate child, nineteen-year-old Louis de France, known to the court as “Monseigneur.” His marriage to the twenty-year-old Marie-Anne-Christine-Victoria of Bavaria, sister of one of the seven Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, reflected the growing power of the Austro-German Habsburgs at the expense of their Spanish cousins. “The light of her intelligence and her charming manners…compensated amply for the lack of a certain, shall we say…beauty,” reported the diplomat Spanheim, “and facilitated her entry into the dauphin’s good graces.” “The dauphin accepted his wife the way he’d accepted his lessons as a boy,” remarked Primi Visconti, with wry perspicacity. “He was brought up in fear.”
His expected throne aside, however, the dauphin, dim-witted and with no personality to speak of, was not well placed to expect more in a wife. Even Liselotte, by her own admission no oil painting herself, had told him that “even if I saw him naked from head to foot, he couldn’t lead me into temptation.” “He was a terrific eater,” reported the duc de Saint-Simon. “One day he spent the whole day eating, and…after supper he went up to change, but he didn’t come down…In the end they found him half-naked and unconscious in his room…They forced an enema into him. It took a long time to work, but after two hours there was a prodigious evacuation—up and down.” The bride was clearly going to need all the resources of her charming manners.
The dauphine had been accompanied on the last stage of her journey from Bavaria by Françoise and Bossuet, “and if she thinks all the men and women at court are as bright as those examples, she’ll be very disappointed,” remarked Madame de Sévigné, with painful truth, at least as far as the girl’s mother-in-law was concerned. “They were all talking about the new dauphine one day in the Queen’s apartment,” said Primi Visconti, “and the duc de Montausier said to the Queen, What a mind! It will take a good deal of time to take the measure of her. Though of course in the beginning, people said the same even about Your Majesty. And he stopped suddenly, realizing what he’d said. The courtiers started to laugh. Of course the Queen didn’t understand a thing.”
And if the young dauphine had cause to be disappointed in her husband and her mother-in-law, her celebrated father-in-law quickly disappointed her, too. “After a bit,” Primi continued, “the dauphine changed her manner with the princesses and duchesses who formed her circle. She began to praise their gowns and to talk of nothing but fabrics. She’d been warned not to talk about anything else. The King’s attentions to her had been diminishing because she had begun to inform herself about court affairs.” To his own displeasure, Louis had found that he had underestimated the new dauphine’s intelligence, though his low opinion of her feminine charms may have been more generally shared. “She is a brunette, of middle height and a noble demeanour,” added Primi with determined gallantry. “She has good skin, pretty hands, and pretty eyes, and that makes the rest of her features bearable.”
At first the young dauphine had been pleased to find Françoise a member of her household, regarding her with friendliness and interest. But through the insinuations of Madame de Richelieu, her dame d’honneur, and the malice of Liselotte and her husband, Monsieur, she had gradually grown mistrustful of Françoise, and even perhaps to fear her somewhat. Françoise managed to have her protégé, the physician Fagon, appointed to the dauphine’s household, but the dauphine herself began to keep increasingly to herself, with only her Bavarian maid for company. Toothache, then fever, then a possible pregnancy, soon confirmed, then fever again, all provided more than enough in the way of excuse to allow her withdrawal from court life, to the extent of absenting herself almost completely from court activities. Eventually, the King’s intervention put a stop to the little cabal. “Madame la dauphine has come out of her rooms and goes about in public…The Court is very gay…the King is very pleased, and the royal family is very close,” wrote Françoise to Charles, omitting to mention that she herself was feeling satisfyingly vindicated, and that Madame de Richelieu and her “little cabal” were not feeling very satisfied at all.
Françoise was now a person of some importance at court, her new standing declared to all by the sombre black gowns she was obliged to wear a
s deuxième dame d’atour to the dauphine. She had been sorry to abandon the greens and blues and other, brighter colours she had long preferred, but she was happy enough with her new manner of dress, in that it gave her an added distinction at court, and indeed wherever she went. To dress entirely in black indicated sobriety, certainly, and in this case, a measure of formal authority, but at the same time it implied wealth: black cloth was expensive, the necessary dyes being difficult to produce and to apply. In her rich new rustling gowns, Françoise presented an impressive figure to the world, and to this she added her own touch of quiet elegance in the form of a diamond cross at her neck; for the time being, this was to be her only jewellery.
No impressive figure in black gown and diamond cross was likely to wander the court alone. Françoise possessed her own retinue of servants, including two longer-term favourites, her maid Nanon Balbien and an African page named Angola, on whose behalf Françoise was currently engaged in speculation in commodities—namely, oats. “I asked you to buy the oats as an investment of Angola’s money,” she wrote to her estate manager at Maintenon. “I’m told there’s nothing safer than buying oats now, and selling them later. It’s a large-scale plan. Do help me with it.”
As for Nanon, she had by now been with Françoise for almost twenty years. “And she thought just as much of herself as her mistress did,” snapped the snobbish duc de Saint-Simon, resentful of the overlooking of his own, bluer blood. “She dressed just like her, and did her hair in the same way, and imitated her affected speech and her manners and her piety. She was a sort of little fairy godmother, and all the princesses were delighted if they had the chance to speak with her or give her a kiss, even though they were the King’s own daughters. And all the ministers working in Madame de Maintenon’s apartment always bowed to her, very low.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 27