City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  In an early sign of the king’s fickle nature when it came to women, he quickly tired of Olympe, whom he found delightful but not especially pretty, and focused his efforts on her younger sister Marie. Olympe did not take the rejection well and threw frequent tear-filled temper tantrums in the hope that he might change his mind. It did not work. Her uncle soon set to work finding her a suitable spouse. Mazarin turned first to the prince of Conti, who rejected Olympe in favor of her cousin Anne-Marie Marinozzi. He then tried to unite Olympe with the duke de la Meilleraye, the grand master of the French artillery. Meilleraye also refused, preferring to marry her other sister Hortense instead. When a prince from Savoy offered to marry Olympe, Mazarin readily agreed because the alliance would strengthen the French in the contested region. To soften the blow to his niece, he gave her and her husband the new titles of count and countess of Soissons.

  While Olympe grieved the end of her affair with the king, Louis fell in love with Marie. To the king’s heartbreak, Anne of Austria again refused to entertain any talk of a royal marriage to a girl from a modest family of Italian nobles. It would do nothing to strengthen France politically. Marie returned to Italy and was promised in marriage to Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, an Italian prince.

  After several false starts the young king soon showed himself more receptive to his mother’s suggestions. The Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed by France and Spain in 1659, divided up a number of contested territories along France’s southern and northern borders. As part of the treaty, it was understood that Louis XIV would marry the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa. The princess was immediately smitten with her first cousin after seeing his portrait. Seeing her from a distance during the first formal meeting of the future couple’s parents, the young French king declared simply that she would be “easy to love.”

  Even though the marriage between the gallant Louis and the frumpy Maria Teresa in 1660 was one of political convenience, the king wasted no time in bedding his new wife following the wedding ceremony. He urged the court to speed through the normal pomp and circumstance that usually preceded the consummation of a royal marriage: undressings, bathings, and blessings. Not long after, he was in bed making love to a shy but willing Maria Theresa, now known by her French name, Marie-Thérèse.

  Yet it would not take long for Louis’s romantic interests in his new queen to dwindle. He found wordplay and suggestive repartee thrilling, especially when followed by physical conquest. The quiet and devout Marie-Thérèse, who spoke little French, offered none of that. All the same, Louis demonstrated a deep respect for his queen throughout their marriage. Despite his dalliances and affairs, he could be brutal to anyone who did not show his queen the proper deference. He also made it a point of pride to sleep each night next to his wife—even if it meant slipping into bed at a very late hour after having enjoyed the company of one of his lovers.

  As for Marie-Thérèse, she preferred to live with willful blindness toward her husband’s infidelities. In return Louis made it a priority to spend intimate time with his wife on a regular, even scheduled, basis. Lovemaking was usually followed by a very public demonstration by the queen the next morning. Blushing with pride, she took Communion in view of the entire court and prayed that a royal child would soon be on its way. By the time of the trip through the Low Countries after seven years of marriage, she had given birth to four children.

  Philippe and his wife Henrietta Anne sat across from the royal couple in the coach as it rumbled through the countryside. The two brothers were a study in contrasts. The king radiated handsome confidence and control. Philippe, on the other hand, wore his frustration and insecurities for the world to see.

  As the second child, Philippe had little choice but to live in the shadow of his elder brother. After Louis made a public refusal of Henrietta Anne, she was paired with Philippe as a way to solidify strategic alliances between England and France. The marriage had gone badly from the start. The king taunted his brother about wedding “the bones of the Holy Innocent,” as he had called Henrietta Anne when she was still a thin and awkward young girl. The couple had also been unable to consummate their marriage immediately because “Monsieur le Cardinal” (a contemporary term for menstruation) made an appearance on their wedding night. When the couple finally did have a chance for intimacy, Philippe failed to “entertain” his new wife. Although Henrietta Anne gave birth to their first child almost exactly one year after their marriage, rumors swirled that Monsieur, as Philippe was known, preferred men.

  All the same, Philippe had been unable to hide his frustration and anger when, only months after his marriage, Louis developed a sudden interest in Philippe’s wife. “All of France,” wrote one commentator at the time, “find themselves with her [chez elle].” Having successfully morphed from an awkward eleven-year-old to a beautiful young woman, Henrietta Anne charmed everyone around her. Her eyes brightened when she laughed, which she did often. Sharing the king’s devotion to dance and the arts, Madame—as she was known—turned the Château of Fontainebleau into a haven to which the nobility eagerly flocked. Upbeat and lively, she had “something about her that made one love her.” Henrietta Anne further earned the adoration of one of the period’s greatest playwrights. “The court regards you,” wrote Jean Racine, “as the arbiter of all that is delightful.”

  Philippe witnessed with irritation a close friendship, one that seemed to teeter toward love, slowly developing between his brother and his wife. Still, there was little he could do; his royal brother’s wishes had always come first. He watched resentfully as brother- and sister-in-law, both talented equestrians, galloped through the countryside together in the forests of Fontainebleau. He sat quietly seething among the other spectators when the two danced together, as principal performers, in open-air ballets. And it was hard to miss his disapproving glare when they chatted gaily together over luxuriously prepared meals followed by quiet strolls around the château’s reflecting pools, as music by court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully filled the air.

  While the affection shared between the two appeared chaste, it did not take long for the king’s wife, pregnant with their first child, and his deeply religious mother to join Monsieur in his concerns about the impropriety of the situation. Recognizing the need to avoid scandal but unwilling to stop spending time with Louis, Henrietta Anne proposed that the king make a show of courting one of her ladies-in-waiting. This would allow him to spend as much time as he liked at Fontainebleau with her.

  6

  The Dew and the Torrent

  The woman whom Henrietta Anne had chosen as Louis’s next mistress sat uncomfortably in the coach on a narrow bench between the king and his wife on one side and Philippe and Henrietta Anne on the other. Louise de La Vallière had first been introduced to the king when she was a naive and religious-minded seventeen-year-old. With long blond hair that cascaded in loose curls over her shoulders, Mademoiselle de La Vallière possessed a graceful beauty that was reminiscent of a “Greek statue.” Other young women at court were all too aware of the usefulness of their good looks. In contrast Louise appeared pure and fresh—which earned her the nickname “the Dew” among court insiders.

  Although she did not know it at the time, her arrival at Henrietta Anne’s court as a maid of honor had been part of the carefully orchestrated plan to detract attention from the rumors swirling around Louis and his sister-in-law. Skilled in the art of seduction, the young king played the role of gallant admirer well. He smiled nervously when Louise entered the room; he listened with rapt attention as she spoke to the other ladies-in-waiting; he found opportunities to stroll, alone, with the young woman in the lush gardens of Fontainebleau and at his sister-in-law’s home at Saint-Cloud—making sure the ostensibly private, stolen moments played out in full view of the court.

  A graceful tomboy, Louise only had one fault, according to late-seventeenth-century standards—she was flat-chested. Fooling no one, the young woman often wore long, floppy cravats that she tied loosely into two bows to hide t
his fact. But what she lacked in physical endowment she overcame in sharing the king’s passion for dance and horseback riding. Soon Louise took the place of Henrietta Anne on the king’s long rides in the countryside.

  The ruse worked all too well. The king fell in love with Louise and set about attempting to bed her, but the young woman did not yield easily. Chaste and inexperienced, she rebuffed his advances; she wanted to save herself for marriage. Undeterred, Louis was said to have enlisted the help of the court poet, Isaac de Benserade, who, in his telling, wrote three letters to La Vallière on behalf of the king. She refused the first letter. She hid the second in her dress—where there was, as one snide court observer remarked, “more than enough space.” After she received the third letter, she begged the poet to reply in her place: “You have the art of saying no, as if you were saying yes,” she explained.

  Despite her best efforts Louise soon lost her virginity to the king. The king claimed to be genuinely in love with her. Soon La Vallière fell in love with him. Yet this did little to assuage her guilt for her sins.

  For her part Mademoiselle de La Vallière tried to remain discreet and careful when it came to her intimacy with the king, but in 1663, two years after Louis had first set eyes on her, she discovered that she was pregnant. With the help of his minister Colbert, both the king and Louise did everything they could to keep the birth of the child a secret. The greater the attempts to hide the impending birth of the king’s first illegitimate child—there were soon to be many others—the more speculative the court grew. On Christmas Eve the court buzzed with stories that a blindfolded doctor had been taken to the bedside of a masked woman. No doubt it was Mademoiselle de La Vallière, the gossips speculated. In a heroic yet futile effort to defuse rumors, a “pale and very changed” Louise rose from bed just a few hours later and attended midnight mass in full view of the court. Colbert had already tendered the child to a family to raise as their own, a service he repeated for Louise in 1665 and again in 1666.

  As the coach rumbled across the fields of northern France, Marie-Thérèse and Henrietta Anne looked upon Louise with loathing. Pale faced and exhausted, Louise was four months pregnant with her third child. While she was still in love with the king, he had made it clear that he was done with her. Louis had recently named her a duchess and also legitimized their youngest child. But his generosity had been little more than a public parting gift, Louise was sure. If there were any doubt, that the king had not initially invited her on the journey was proof enough. He instructed her to remain at Versailles instead.

  In fact the only reason she was in the carriage at all was that she had ignored the king’s orders and followed the royal cortege to Flanders anyway to beg for his attentions. On news of the mistress’s imminent arrival, the queen sobbed so violently that she became ill.

  Although both the king and his wife refused La Vallière an audience, she insisted—going as far as to ride on horseback at a full gallop alongside the royal carriage. Whether out of sympathy for his former lover or in an attempt to take control of the situation, Louis ordered her into the carriage. But his cold demeanor told Louise everything she needed to know. As if she had not been sufficiently humiliated, she now found herself sitting uncomfortably next to Athénaïs de Montespan, a woman who wanted nothing more than to become the king’s next mistress, if she was not sleeping with him already.

  In sharp contrast to the slender and reserved Mademoiselle de La Vallière, Montespan was outgoing, curvaceous, unapologetically sensual, and above all ambitious. Married and the mother of two children, Montespan had been serving as lady-in-waiting to the queen for three years, since early 1664. Louis made such household appointments, not Marie-Thérèse, and he surrounded the queen with some of the most beautiful women at court.

  Blonde with azure blue eyes and unblemished skin, the twenty-seven-year-old Athénaïs was stunningly gorgeous by most contemporary accounts. Yet Louis nearly passed her over for the position. Montespan tried very hard to sway the king. “She does what she can,” Louis complained to his brother Philippe, “but I myself am not interested.” Unable to leverage her beauty, she found a way to use to her advantage the good name of her sister, the marquise of Thianges, who had a close friendship with Philippe. Philippe facilitated the appointment, looking for affirmation of his influence on his brother while also taking perverse pleasure in the drama to come of it.

  The position came with lodging and a salary—a most welcome benefit, as the marquise was in desperate need of money. The year before her appointment, Athénaïs had married the marquis of Montespan. From the start things had been difficult. Athénaïs came to the marriage with a respectable dowry agreement, but her father, the duke of Mortemart, promised much more than he could pay up front in order to assure a good marriage for his daughter. He agreed to pay a portion at the time of the marriage, the remainder to be distributed from her father’s estate after his death.

  Still, her husband was hardly ideal. The marquis of Montespan had the same trouble managing his money as Athénaïs’s father did. A large portion of the dowry was put to use to pay the marquis’s debts, leaving little in the way of assistance as the couple set up their home on the Left Bank of Paris. Further, there was little hope that the outstanding dowry amount would find its way to them. The dowry agreement stipulated that payment would be paid directly from the bride’s father to the groom’s parents, and they had made it clear to the couple not to count on ever seeing one denier.

  Debts accrued. Eighteen hundred livres for carriage-seat repairs, another eighteen hundred for silk sheets, plus 2,150 livres for dress lace: The couple lived a life they could not afford. Creditors knocked on their door. In an act of desperation the marquis de Montespan borrowed money to pay off the most urgent debts. Slowly household items disappeared—including the marquise’s most precious and expensive pair of earrings. Athénaïs was hurt and humiliated, doubly so when her husband decided to join the army and leave her holding their debts.

  Madame de Montespan had been among the first to ridicule Louise for her shameless show of desperation. The other ladies-in-waiting followed in their derision: “Heavens keep me from ever being one of the king’s mistresses!” Montespan exclaimed with no small amount of feigned righteousness. “Because if I were, I would be embarrassed to present myself in front of the queen.”

  Truth be told, however, there was nothing that Athénaïs wanted more. In her cleverness and ambition, the marquise had already turned her sights on the one man who could change her situation in an instant: the king. As lady-in-waiting to Marie-Thérèse, she found herself in an ideal position to seduce him. It was just a matter of waiting for the right time.

  Few believed the king’s claim to be focused solely on matters of war rather than those of the heart. With the court watching his every move, the fact that La Vallière had not been initially included in the travel party left many to wager that the king intended to take a new lover. All bets were clearly on Montespan, and for good reason. A full six months earlier the Duke of Enghien announced to the queen of Poland that “the king is dreaming a bit about Madame de Montespan, and to tell you the truth, she deserves it. No one has as much wit or beauty as she does.”

  As the coach pushed its way through the fields of the Low Countries, Athénaïs was inclined to believe the rumors she knew were now swirling around her. Just days earlier Louis had invited her to take a carriage ride alone. It would not be long before they arrived at their encampment; and if things went as she hoped, the king would soon be hers. The Torrent, as the court later named her, had every intention of trumping the Dew. She would do whatever it took to make sure of it.

  7

  The Door Marked 1

  It is not known when the king and Madame de Montespan consummated their affair, but it most likely happened during the trip to the Low Countries. Each evening a legion of soldiers and servants set up camp, creating in just a few hours a bustling village larger than most towns in France. At the center of the enca
mpment sat the king’s enormous quarters, composed of a network of interconnected tents, each subdivided into separate rooms. A gold-leafed chandelier hung from the center of every room, illuminating armoires detailed with brilliant gold leaf, as well as silk-upholstered beds and chairs.

  The fact that the king now traveled not only with his wife but also two of her ladies-in-waiting, both Louis’s mistresses, brought headaches for Louis’s minister of war, Louvois, who had to find ways to accommodate the “three Queens” in the royal tents. The arrangements proved as complex as the most detailed battlefield mission. “You should accommodate the room marked V for Madame de Montespan,” Louvois explained to his head officer in Dunkirk, “and make a door in the place marked with a number 1. There should be a hallway from her room into the room marked 2. This will serve as her garderobe.” Lest La Vallière be forgotten—or more likely, get in the way—Louvois went on to say that “Madame la Duchesse de La Vallière will be housed in the room marked Y, from which you need to make a door, marked here as 3 . . . and another marked 4, which will serve as her closet.”

  As passionate dramas played out both privately and publicly, the women had little choice but to pretend to enjoy one another’s company as they spent their days moving from village to village together in the coach and their evenings indulging at banquets. After dinner the king went for a ride on horseback in the fields of Northern Europe. Depending on the weather, the women rode alongside him, mounted or in a coach. “If all wars were done like this,” wrote one observer, “there would not be as much to complain about.”