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

by Veronica Buckley

  The duc de Saint-Simon, himself of a fairly recent line and a fanatical stickler for the niceties of rank, was very much less relaxed about it all. Steam rises from the pages of his memoirs as he describes being summoned to hear “this news which would not allow a moment’s delay, which couldn’t even be written down, which was of the most extreme importance.” Saint-Simon sneaked out of his own house in the night: “My wife was away…No one saw me get into my carriage, and I made for Paris at top speed…The King had declared his two bastards, and their heirs male in perpetuity, to be true princes of the blood, able to inherit the crown. I had not expected any such news…I was very angry…” He was courtier enough, all the same, to pay swift compliments to the “limping” Monsieur du Maine on his new rank. “And I said the same the next day to Monsieur de Toulouse and to Madame la duchesse d’Orléans. She was already imagining her brothers crowned. She’s a hundred times more of a bastard than they are…Monsieur du Maine cultivated a modest and solemn air for the sake of appearances. Monsieur de Toulouse is a beneficiary of this monstrous affair, though he had nothing to do with it himself. It was all arranged by the duc du Maine and his all-powerful protectress.”

  Saint-Simon, a persistent enemy of Françoise, was no doubt overstating the case. A careful plot, or even an opportunistic plot to raise Mignon to the position of heir to the throne—and in fact only fourth heir, after the dauphin and d’Orléans and the latter’s young son—is less than unlikely. All the same, Françoise was happy to see Mignon so recognized: in dozens of little ways, all bitterly enumerated by Saint-Simon, he would from now on be treated with the deference to which she felt he was entitled. “Look at the King,” she had said to him, almost forty years before. “He never makes a fuss about what’s due to him.” “Ah, but Madame,” Mignon had replied, “the King is sure of his position, while I cannot be sure of mine.” Now, at last, it seemed that he could, and if some in France foresaw the troubles this princely elevation was soon to cause, Françoise does not appear to have been among them.

  Nineteen

  All Passion Spent

  “The King was very well until the 14th of the month of April [1711], when he was overtaken by an inconceivable sadness at the death of Monseigneur…Since that day…his sadness has been ever present…He has headaches…He complains of…tiredness…partly caused by the quantity of peas that he generally eats…”

  Thus Louis le Grand, France’s Sun King, now in his mid-seventies, still hunting and still a crack shot, but these days jumping no ditches, charging across no open ground, just rattling alongside the horses in a little three-wheeled chariot, gritting his remaining teeth against the intractable pain of his gout. His zest for the life of the body was still strong: Françoise can be found in these years of her seventies asking her confessor whether she must carry on accepting the King’s embraces every afternoon. “Yes, my dear daughter, you must,” came the reply. “You must accept this subjection, and view it as the asylum of a weak man who would otherwise be lost in impurity and scandal. It is part of your vocation.” The King’s enormous appetite for food was also intact: Liselotte describes a regular supper as “a whole pheasant and a partridge after four plates of different kinds of soup, a large dish of salad, two great slices of ham, mutton served with gravy and garlic, a plate of sweet cakes and, on top of that, fruit and hard-boiled eggs.”

  The years were telling, all the same. And if the long war had revealed France’s decline, it had revealed as well the decline of France’s King. Louis had not recovered from the strain of it, nor from his grief at the loss of so many of his heirs. Many afternoon and evening hours he now spent alone with Françoise, weeping inconsolably. At night, undressing at his formal bedtime ceremony of coucher, “he looked like a corpse,” said a saddened courtier. By the time the last treaty was signed, in September 1714, brokers in London were taking bets that he would not last the year, and though he did, it was not by much.

  Seven years before, the King had set off on a long, solitary walk in his ever-blooming gardens, to think of la belle Athénaïs, who had died in her Paris convent at the age of sixty-five, “her skin like a bit of screwed-up paper, her whole face red and covered with little wrinkles…and her lovely hair white as snow…”

  “Old age is terribly sad,” said Françoise. “You feel you’re paying for the pleasures of youth.” Most of her old Marais friends were no longer living: her beloved and undeserving brother Charles was gone, and cousin Philippe, a lieutenant-général at the end, and impossible Bonne, and even Ninon de Lenclos, Paris’s most celebrated courtesan, who had “corrupted” Françoise with the marquis de Villarceaux more than fifty years before. In the early years of the war, Françoise had in fact invited Ninon to come and live with her and Bonne at Versailles, but Ninon had declined, preferring to remain at the centre of her still delightful salon in Paris, celebrating her eightieth birthday, or so it was said, by taking a new lover in the person of her abbé. In her charitable will she had left one thousand francs to a clever young friend “to buy books,” and the boy, François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, later relayed the story for posterity with a touch of eighteenth-century ebullience: “I was about thirteen when I saw her,” (he was ten) “and she was eighty-five” (eighty-two). “She left me two thousand francs” (in fact one thousand). “She was dried up like a mummy.” Perhaps.

  “I’m sure you don’t have as many wrinkles as I do,” Liselotte had written to her Aunt Sophie, “but that doesn’t bother me. I’ve never been a beauty, so I haven’t lost much.” The Electress Sophie, in her mid-eighties and herself a great beauty long faded, had in fact narrowly missed becoming Queen of England. Her death in 1714, only weeks before that of Queen Anne, had brought her eldest son, George, to the throne in her stead, to sire a long German dynasty in Defoe’s land of men “a-kin to all the universe.” The arrival of the Hanoverians in London had not seemed without danger for those watching from France, but on the whole they were mistaken. Eighteenth-century Britain was to turn its gaze away from military conquest on the continent and out onto a wider horizon, “to become master of the world’s trade,” as Louis had foreseen.

  But that was all for a new age, which the Sun King himself would not know, an age which, in France, for half a century and more, was to define itself simply as an aftermath of his own. The fates permitted Louis a final burst of splendour in February 1715, with the reception of the ambassador of Persia in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The King himself wore a “heavy and sumptuous suit of black and gold, embroidered in crown diamonds valued at 12,500,000 livres. He appeared at the balcony…before the crowd of curious people who had invaded the courtyards…” The ambassador’s gifts were regarded as shockingly disappointing by contrast: “a hundred and six little pearls, a hundred and eighty turquoises and two jars of embalming ointments. The public were scandalized; they started to speak every infamy under the sun about the ambassador, and most people, even people of the first consideration, decided that the ambassador was an impostor…who had never been to the court of the King of Persia.”

  In the end it was not disappointment at his presents or the strain of government or the desperation of grief that killed Louis, nor was it even simple old age, but his old ailment of the gout, excruciating, debilitating, and half-comical all at once. His premier physician, Fagon, standing by old supposed remedies, kept the King’s throbbing leg wrapped tightly in plasters, sweating, immobile, the blood unable to circulate. Its condition worsened daily. In mid-August, with Louis still working a little and even attending a musical soirée in Françoise’s apartments, Fagon suggested he might be helped by spa water brought from Bourbon. By August 20, he was unable to be moved even to Françoise’s nearby rooms, “so he sent for her,” recorded the duc de Saint-Simon; indeed Louis was never to leave his own chamber again. Françoise’s niece Marthe-Marguerite de Caylus and her friend Madame de Dangeau were admitted shortly afterwards, “to help keep the conversation going.” Fagon “proposed a meeting of the prin
cipal physicians in Paris and at court,” and Saint-Simon’s wife paid a brief, respectful visit to Louis. “She was the last of the court ladies to whom he spoke,” wrote the duc, “since I don’t count…Mesdames…Dangeau and…Caylus…they were only familiars of…Madame de Maintenon.”

  On August 21, a quartet of physicians examined the King, “taking care to pronounce nothing but praises of Fagon,” who then prescribed medicines of quinine water and ass’s milk. The following day, Louis chose some clothes which he intended to wear when he felt better. “It’s because men never want to die,” said Saint-Simon, “so they pretend as much and as long as possible.” But a further examination of the now badly swollen leg, during which Louis fainted, revealed “gangrene through the whole foot and in the knee.”

  The King lived ten more days, during which time, as the duc de Saint-Simon relates, “Monsieur d’Orléans’s apartments, deserted before, were now absolutely crowded” with courtiers making haste to ingratiate themselves with France’s probable new Regent—“and what could the dying Jupiter do?…But the King’s ministers didn’t dare approach Monsieur d’Orléans. Monsieur du Maine was watching everything and they were still afraid of Madame de Maintenon and terrified of the King…There was just enough life left in him to dismiss them from their posts, and then they would have had to go to Orléans on their knees…”

  Apart from his physicians and priests, Louis saw few people during these final days: Mignon was often with him, and Françoise constantly; the duc d’Orléans was admitted once or twice every day, Liselotte hardly at all, and she left the royal apartments “weeping and wailing so loudly that everyone thought the King must have died already.” Mignon’s wife, the duchesse du Maine, turned up—“Until now she hadn’t taken the trouble to move from her château at Sceaux, with all her friends and her amusements…”—but if she was late to arrive at her father-in-law’s bedside, once there she proved kind and helpful. The little dauphin was brought in by his governess, and the King received him very tenderly, with the valets recording his words of counsel, the first and the last that the boy was to receive: “My child,” said Louis, “you are going to be a great king. Do not imitate me in my love of building, nor in my taste for warfare. On the contrary, try to remain at peace with your neighbours. Render to God what you owe Him…and make your subjects honour Him…Try to comfort your people, as, unhappily, I have been unable to do. And don’t forget what you owe to your governess…My dear child, I give you my blessing with all my heart.”

  Most of the courtiers remained milling outside the doors of the King’s apartments, now and then being allowed a brief entry. “The King could swallow nothing but liquids,” said Saint-Simon, and, seeing his now too-evident weakness, “I noticed that he didn’t like being watched. He asked the courtiers to leave the room.”

  The duc himself went in as often as he was permitted, and what he did not observe in person, he gleaned later from the King’s valets, reporting it all with his customary spite where those he disliked were concerned. “The King paid Madame de Maintenon a compliment which didn’t please her at all; she didn’t say a word in reply. He said that his consolation in leaving her was the hope that, given her age, they would soon be joined again.” In fact, Françoise herself repeated this “compliment” proudly to her secretary, seeing in it, as indeed did Mademoiselle d’Aumale, not an insult to her near-eighty years, but an indication of the King’s love for her after almost thirty-three years of marriage. “The King said to Madame de Maintenon that he’d heard it was difficult to accept one’s death, but that…he hadn’t found it so difficult. She replied,” continued Saint-Simon, revealing more of himself than of Françoise in what was very probably a pure fabrication, “that it was much harder when one was attached to people, and had hatred in one’s heart, and still wanted vengeance.”

  Françoise was often to speak of the King’s last days with Mademoiselle d’Aumale, who had been with her for much of the time—“I was a witness of almost everything he said to her,” she confirmed, and indeed Françoise herself was to retell the story as part of her own last will and testament. The King had asked for a room to be made up next to his own, where the two could spend the nights rather than returning to their own apartments. Françoise had not prayed that His Majesty’s life be spared, she said, but rather that his soul should be saved. In his confessor’s presence, “she reminded him of several faults that she had seen him commit, and he confessed these, and thanked her for reminding him.” Together they went through various papers and letters, most of which were burned on the King’s instructions. “We won’t need these lists of guests for weekends at Marly anymore,” he said, “and burn those documents, too, otherwise there’ll be two of my ministers at each other’s throats.” Taking his rosary beads, he gave them to her with a smile: “They’re not a saintly relic,” he said, “just a souvenir.”

  On August 27, the King appeared to rally, eating some soup and even a little biscuit. Courtiers hastened back from the duc d’Orléans’s apartments, ready to acknowledge their revived master. “If the King eats another mouthful,” quipped the astute duc, “I’ll have no servants left.” But it was not to be. On the last day of August, the priests began to recite the prayer for the dying: “Now and at the hour of our death…”

  “The King was constantly putting his hands together, and saying prayers, or beating his breast with a confiteor,” said Saint-Simon. “He noticed his valets weeping, and he said to them, Why are you crying? Did you think I was immortal? I never thought so, and given my age, you should have been prepared to lose me…”

  Françoise, frequently weeping herself, took care nonetheless that the King should not see this, stepping out of the room “whenever she felt she could not hold back her tears.” Three times he seemed to be on the point of death, and three times he bade Françoise farewell. “I have no regrets,” he said the first time, “other than in leaving you, but we’ll soon see each other again.” The second time, he asked her pardon for the difficulties she had endured in living with him. “Forgive me, Madame,” he said. “I know I didn’t make you happy, but I did love you and I did respect you,” revealing that if he had not been able to meet her needs, he had at least understood them. And he began to weep.

  At the third farewell, he asked her anxiously, “But what will become of you, since you have nothing?” “I am nothing,” she replied. “Think only of God.”

  But she had gone “only two steps” from the bed when she turned back, herself stricken by a sudden anxiety “about the uncertain treatment I might expect from the princes, and I asked the King to ask Monsieur le duc d’Orléans to have some consideration for me.”

  It is Françoise’s own admission, affixed to her will, and it is clear testimony that, the brilliance of her position notwithstanding, the fears of her earliest life, fears of exclusion, of humiliation, of poverty, had never really left her. “What will become of you,” Louis had asked, “since you have nothing?” “I am nothing,” she had said—or at least, nothing without you. So she had realized, turning from what she had thought to be Louis’s very last words, and she had turned back in fright.

  Louis lived one more day. On the first morning of September, he heard the bell of his late-finished chapel ring out the hour: a quarter past eight o’clock. Then the great Sun King, ever magnificent, ever glorious, gave a sigh, and two little hiccups, and died.

  “He surrendered his soul without effort,” wrote the marquis de Dangeau, “like a candle going out.”

  Françoise, cloaked and hooded, “and perfectly dry-eyed,” noted Saint-Simon meanly, had already fled Versailles. No longer needed, with the King unconscious and his death imminent, she had driven away in Villeroy’s carriage, escorted by the maréchal-duc’s guards. “She had asked me to make sure to have some other carriage waiting for her, and not her own,” wrote Mademoiselle d’Aumale. “She was afraid of being treated as she had seen other favourites treated, once they’d lost everything. And she was afraid there would be peo
ple shouting insults at her on the road to Saint-Cyr. Monsieur de Villeroy had posted guards along the route to make sure this didn’t happen, but there was really no likelihood of it; he just wanted to reassure her.”

  In the carriage with Mademoiselle d’Aumale, Françoise spoke of her grief, “a calm grief, she said, because the King had made a perfectly Christian death, and if she was weeping, her tears were tears of tenderness, and her heart was tranquil…But when we arrived at Saint-Cyr, she began weeping more than ever. I don’t want anything now, except God and my children, she said…All the girls were waiting for her, and it was the saddest thing in the world. Madame de Maintenon absolutely broke down, and all the girls were sobbing, even the littlest ones…I hope I’ll be able to see you soon without tears, she said to them, but today I just can’t help it.”

  France’s new king, Louis XV, had made his transition from baby gowns to trousers only a year before, pattering in to see his great-grandfather with a tiny sword at his side. He was now five years old, and the kingdom was officially in the hands of his forty-one-year-old cousin Philippe, Liselotte’s son, the duc d’Orléans, now Regent of France. Despite warning his sons and nephews to avoid dangerous disagreement within the royal family such as he had known during the days of the Fronde, the dying Louis had made conflict almost inevitable by the terms of his own last will and testament.

  In the final days of his life, Louis had added to the will a secret codicil, which the duc de Saint-Simon blamed roundly on Françoise and Mignon, acting with the connivance of the maréchal-duc de Villeroy. “The King had paper and ink by him, and since they felt he hadn’t done enough for the duc du Maine in his will, they wanted to fix this with a codicil, which shows how enormously they abused the King’s weakness in this extremity…”