Nanon and young Angola were capable and reliable, but an ambitious dame d’atour needed a different kind of following, too. She needed more highly placed people of her own, people who could protect her against her enemies at court, people who, preferably, owed their positions to her, and whose progress would advance her own reputation. Françoise needed a clan.
Her recent alliance with the court dévots had brought her two promising younger friends, thirty-year-old Jeanne-Marie, duchesse de Chevreuse, and her sister, twenty-three-year-old Henriette-Louise, duchesse de Beauvillier. Daughters of the King’s minister Colbert, the two duchesses shared a keen dislike of Athénaïs and her sultanesque ways, a dislike which the recent marriage of their youngest sister, thirteen-year-old Marie-Anne, to Athénaïs’s fourteen-year-old nephew, had done nothing to lessen. The marriage had cost the King “fourteen hundred thousand livres”: 600,000 for Marie-Anne’s dowry, which Colbert, apparently, was unequal to paying himself, and 800,000 to repay the debts of Athénaïs’s incorrigibly extravagant family. The two elder sisters were only too pleased to attach themselves to Françoise, as Athénaïs’s obvious if undeclared enemy, “and she, for her part, was not at all averse to the King’s seeing persons of such quality choosing her over Madame de Montespan.”
Apart from Colbert’s daughters and their two husbands, there were of course the Montchevreuils, the tall, skinny marquise with her “ghastly long teeth” and the “modest, decent…dense” marquis. Through Françoise’s efforts, they were now well entrenched at court. “Madame de Montchevreuil was a woman of some merit,” wrote Françoise’s niece, “if one accepts the word merit as meaning no more than virtuous. She was a rather pathetic figure, and not very bright at all, but she was most attached to Madame de Maintenon, and it suited Madame to be able to introduce someone unexceptionable at court, someone who had known her in the days of her obscurity.”
Françoise had arranged the marquise’s appointment as governess to the dauphine’s maids-in-waiting. “The position wasn’t so much in itself, but there were great distinctions attached to it: she was regarded as the fourth lady in the dauphine’s household…and the most illustrious names in the kingdom were employed there.”
The marquis had been for four years already governor to fourteen-year-old Mignon, the duc du Maine. Françoise had at first offered this post to another old friend from her salon days, the poet Jean de Segrais, but Segrais had declined, having no longer any need to earn his living. He had recently married “a very rich cousin, who wanted to marry a poor man, so that he wouldn’t be able to look down on her.” “And besides,” as Segrais himself said, “I was getting a bit deaf…Madame de Montespan’s sister said that shouldn’t have deterred me, since I was supposed to be talking to the prince, not listening to him. But I said to her that, in that country, you needed to have good eyes and good ears as well.”
Montchevreuil, not so dense, in fact, was managing the job very well, though Françoise could not prevent herself from giving him periodic advice about it: “You need to reason with him—he’s been used to that since he was in swaddling clothes. Keep all his tutors under control; they don’t care about anything except their own particular subject. Good reasoning will be of more use to him than a bit more Latin. Let him see what happens to the money he gives to charity; that will help him learn to govern…Excuse me for saying all these things—if it’s not good advice, at least it’s well intentioned. You know how extremely fond I am of our duc.”
The long-toothed marquise, by contrast, was not doing so well with the maids-in-waiting. As Françoise’s niece reported the case, they would have been quite a handful for even the shrewdest and firmest governess. “Mademoiselle de Laval—the talk going around about her! Mademoiselle de Biron—she was too plain to get anything in the usual way, so she got it all by intrigue. Mademoiselle de Tonnerre was mad. She was eventually hounded out of court. Mademoiselle de Rambures wasn’t beautiful, but she had the kind of amusing talk that men like. She set her cap at the King, and then afterwards at Monseigneur, and he fell in love with her well and truly. Mademoiselle de Jarnac was plain and in poor health, so there’s not much to say about her.” It was all too much for the simple marquise. “She’s too good for this country,” sighed Françoise, implying, no doubt, that Madame de Montchevreuil was simply too naïve. “She loves these girls as if they were her own daughters, and she gets involved in all their little interests. She thinks they’re all going to behave perfectly. Then of course she’s disappointed when they don’t. I do what I can in the way of moral support…”
Bonne de Pons was back, the marquise d’Heudicourt, now aged thirty-eight, still “a bit mad,” though chastened somewhat by her years of glum provincial exile and, sadly, no longer “as lovely as the day.” “Madame d’Heudicourt is here,” wrote Françoise to Charles. “She’s ill, and more decrepit than an ordinary sixty-year-old.” Following her banishment from court, years before, for leaking the secret of Athénaïs’s illegitimate sons, Bonne had been trying to negotiate a return. Françoise had set things in motion by obtaining the King’s permission to reestablish personal contact with her erring friend. There seems to have been no formal reconciliation, but little by little Bonne had been accepted back into the courtly fold.
Madame de Sévigné had been disapproving, “How ridiculous!” she puffed. “In her state of health! She looks as ugly as the devil, and she can’t even stand up without leaning on a big walking-stick. She’s far too fond of that country.” Bonne had left her uninteresting husband behind in his provincial château, but had brought with her a new little daughter, “as lovely as an angel, and always hanging about the King’s neck.” Her elder girl, Louise, now thirteen years old and still in Françoise’s care after ten years or more, was soon to be married to the marquis de Montgon; she would prove a loyal protégée as a well-placed dame de palais.
Bonne no longer had any influence at court, and indeed was entirely dependent on Françoise’s protection, but she was more than welcome regardless. “She never opens her mouth without making me laugh,” Françoise told her niece, “though it’s true that in all the years I’ve known her, I can’t recall her ever having said anything that I wished I’d said myself.” Bonne was “such good company, so imaginative, so full of jokes, that she and Madame de Maintenon were soon as close as if they’d never been apart.” “I simply can’t resist her,” admitted Françoise.
Irresistible Bonne, young Louise, and the worthy Montchevreuils, however, were not enough in themselves to form the kind of clan that Françoise wanted to establish. She needed more people, and she began to look about her in earnest. Charles d’Aubigné and his wife, Geneviève, were the obvious next candidates, but the pair of them, unfortunately, were out of the question. After three years of marriage, and three years of advice from her sister-in-law, Geneviève was still undressing in front of valets, and had not yet even learned “to stand up straight, and walk like a lady.” Françoise’s efforts to have her taught “proper French” had merely exchanged one defect for another: instead of speaking “like a fishwife,” she was now sounding “like an affected little idiot, with all sorts of silly mannerisms. In the name of God, can’t she speak naturally!” tutted Françoise in exasperation.
As for Charles, a most unflattering account of him was just about to appear in print in the bestselling Caractères of the satirist Jean de La Bruyère:
Here he comes: the closer he gets to you, the louder he shouts. He walks into the room: he’s laughing, he’s yelling, he’s roaring. You block your ears, it’s like thunder. What he says stuns you no less than his voice itself. He never shuts up, and if he ever quietens down it’s only to mumble some smug or idiotic thing. He takes no notice of the time, of the people about him, of the normal proprieties…He’s hardly sat down before he’s annoyed everyone. He’s the first to the table, and he takes the top place, with women on both sides of him. He eats, he drinks, he tells stories and jokes, he interrupts everyone else. He has no discretion whatso
ever…He dictates everything…If there’s gambling, he has to win, and he laughs at everyone who loses…There’s no kind of self-satisfied stupidity he’s not capable of. In the end I give up and go. I just can’t stand him any more.
In short, Charles and Geneviève were much too embarrassing. “No, don’t move to Paris,” an anxious Françoise wrote to her brother. “It would look odd for you to be living nearby and not to have anything much to do with me. Of course, that’s just my advice. It’s not an order…”
There were, of course, Charles’s two illegitimate sons, still apparently in Françoise’s care and, it must be said, doing better than they were likely to have done in the care of their father. Charlot, now about twelve, though looking much younger, was living at Maintenon, “perfectly healthy, shorter than ever, and cleverer than ever as well. He’s delightful, a real character. He hasn’t grown an inch.” Françoise saw him frequently and reported to Charles that in due course, “he’ll have to go to college, and then into the cadets. They’re marvellous, especially the Poitevins [where he’ll go]. They won the prize for military exercises.” In the longer term, Charlot might prove suitable.
And there was Toscan, who had been cared for in Paris together with Athénaïs’s little princes, and who would now have been aged about thirteen. Six or seven years before, when Françoise had first left Paris to reside formally at court, he had been sent, or so it seems, into the care of nurses in the country, and her letters confirm that she had subsequently provided various sums of money for his maintenance. Françoise had been supporting a great many children over the previous decade or so; by 1680, indeed, there were as many as ten boys of Toscan’s age living at her charge in the village of Maintenon. It is not clear whether or not Toscan himself was even still alive, but it is certain that in the spring of 1681, “a boy of twelve or thirteen, of quite a good family” had begun to demand more of her attention than the other nine. “He’s showing every possible sort of bad tendency,” she wrote to Père Gobelin. “He’s a liar, he’s lazy, he gambles, he steals”—in short, a gamut of vices, each already revealed, irredeemably, by brother Charles and father Constant. “Whether I humour him or punish him, I haven’t been able to get anywhere with him…What can I do? Where can I send him?”
Where Toscan was sent, if indeed he was Toscan, is unknown, but in any case the boy had not promised well for Françoise’s clan-building purposes. More acceptable, or better behaved in public at least, were her de Villette cousins from Mursay. The girls were all married, and two of them mères de famille; they could not easily be dislodged from Poitou. Their brother Philippe, however, her childhood favourite, was a definite prospect; he was by now a senior naval officer with an impressive record to his name. In 1676, the King himself had written to congratulate him on his distinguished conduct in battle against the Dutch near Sicily, and Françoise’s own praises had swiftly followed: “I was in transports of joy at the news of your successes…You know how women love brave men…I’ll do all I can to keep your name on people’s lips, but it’s best if you carry on the way you’ve been doing, since I don’t have that much influence, and you’ve done more to recommend yourself than all the ladies in France could do for you…Oh, while you’re in Sicily, could you get me thirty yards of green or crimson damask? I think the green would be better value…”
Two months later, Philippe’s twelve-year-old son had been slightly wounded in battle off the coast of Rome and subsequently promoted to ensign. Françoise wrote an excited letter to his mother: “I’ve told the King…and I’m sure that, once your first moment of concern for the boy has passed, you’ll realize how pleased you are to have brought a little hero into the world.”
Encouraged by his cousin’s enthusiasm, and placing too much confidence in her influence at court, Philippe had begun to rely on her to push his career a few steps higher. Françoise had proved more willing than able to help. In the summer of 1679, she had approached the marquis de Seignelay, Colbert’s son and his deputy at the naval secretariat, to request promotions for Philippe and also for two of his young nephews, already serving in the navy. The Saint-Hermine brothers, in their middle teens, were the sons of Philippe’s eldest sister, Madeleine, who forty years before had taught Françoise to read and write at the big kitchen table at Mursay.
Her efforts on their behalf, as on Philippe’s, had produced only modest results: the younger Saint-Hermine boy might, perhaps, be made an officer; Philippe himself might, perhaps, have command of a vessel, “but Seignelay said…you’ve been treated very well indeed already. He said you’ve already had one command, and you got it before your superiors, and your ship was bigger than theirs, and you’ve also been given a pension sooner than you should have been—in a word, he said you should be perfectly happy with what you’ve got.” As for the elder Saint-Hermine brother, Seignelay had been polite enough “to refrain from informing the King about him, out of consideration for me, but apparently he’s an absolute good-for-nothing, lazy, incompetent, and undisciplined. The officers he’s served with haven’t been satisfied with him at all. After all Seignelay said, I felt quite relieved they hadn’t hanged him…This isn’t much for you,” she had concluded to Philippe, “but we’re not in the strongest position. You have an exaggerated idea of influence in general and of mine in particular. It’s not my fault. I do what I can…”
It was indeed not Françoise’s fault, and her Mursay family were not by any means in the strongest position. No amount of capability or heroism or influence at court was going to be enough from now on to ensure the advancement of Philippe and his brave young son, let alone his two nephews, for they were all Huguenots, disqualification enough to outweigh any other merit. For reasons of national security, Louis had decided that a single religion was henceforth to be observed by all his subjects, and that religion was to be Catholicism. No Protestant town or community or family was to remain to threaten the nation’s political stability with any possible sympathy for France’s Protestant enemies. Absolute loyalty to Louis was to be required, and that loyalty was to include a perfect agreement with all his aims and all his values. Since it was clear that most Protestants would not abjure their faith voluntarily, they were to be pressured into doing so by the narrowing of the professional paths open to them.
In the spring of 1680, the King issued an instruction that “all naval officers professing the so-called Reformed Religion are to be gradually removed from the service.” Those agreeing to convert to Catholicism were to be retained, with the King himself helping to pay for the cost of their conversions, “either by supplying more missionary priests, or by paying the heretics a direct conversion fee.”
It was 1680, a propitious time for a purge of Louis’s navy. The six-year-long Dutch war had been concluded at the end of 1678; for sixteen months France had been at peace. So the anti-Huguenot instruction came as only a partial surprise. Since the beginning of Louis’s personal reign in 1661, the terms of Henri IV’s great 1598 Edict of religious toleration had been subject to ever more stringent interpretation. As in the days of Constant d’Aubigné’s tactical abjurations of faith, Huguenots were once again being excluded from official appointments and from the practice of certain crafts; restrictions were being placed on their transfers of money, on their status in the law courts, even on their rights to marry and to educate their children. Spurred on by his priests, Louis had begun a slow throttling of Protestant life in the kingdom. His Huguenot subjects, a million people or more, were by now “choking in little gulps.”
Fifteen years before, after repeated pressure from the King, the Protestant vicomte de Turenne, one of France’s great generals and a friend of Françoise’s from the days of Scarron’s salon, had finally made his own abjuration, so depriving his Huguenot confrères of their best protector. Though, at the time, Turenne had brushed aside accusations of unprincipled ambition, his conversion to Catholicism had raised him from honourable maréchal de camp to the rare and glorious rank of maréchal de France. Françoise’s amb
itions for her cousin Philippe were not so exalted, but it was clear to her, in any case, that, as a Huguenot, he could not progress much further than he had already done, and that her younger Huguenot cousins, her “nieces and nephews” just starting out in life, were unlikely to be able to advance at all.
In consequence, she had been pressing Philippe towards Catholicism since as early as February 1678, two years after his impressive conduct in the sea battle near Sicily: “There’s no knowing what the King would do for you, if you would convert. He really seems to want to do something for you.” But Philippe’s confessional integrity, or plain stubbornness, had proved unassailable, and the anti-Huguenot instruction of April 1680 seemed to have brought a halt to his professional advancement once and for all.
Frustrated, Françoise made up her mind that if Philippe refused to help himself, she could at least do something for the younger generation of de Villette cousins, her “nieces and nephews” from Poitou. These eight grandchildren of Aunt Louise and Uncle Benjamin were now between nine and sixteen years of age; the four boys were already serving in the navy, with the four girls living quietly with their families in the Poitou region. If Françoise was to “do something” for them, they would have to be nearer at hand, and more importantly, they would have to abandon their Huguenot faith and formally accept Catholicism. In this way, she could ensure good professional prospects for the boys, good marriage prospects for the girls, and, in the longer term, an influential clan of blood relatives for herself.
Philippe had made clear his own refusal to abjure his faith, and it was unlikely that his sisters would be any more willing. Attempts to persuade them would be merely wasted breath. A firmer stratagem was going to be needed. Most of the young cousins were within easy reach. Françoise decided to kidnap them.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 28