Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

by Antonia Fraser

  It was the encounter with the King himself which was however the high point of the drama, at once pitiful and embarrassing. Louise flung herself trembling on the ground before him. Only then did his glacial reception – she had defied his explicit orders to stay at Versailles – convince her of her terrible mistake. ‘How much inquietude you might have spared me, had you been as tepid in the first days of our acquaintance as you have seemed for some time past! You gave me evidence of a great passion: I was enchanted and I abandoned myself to loving you to distraction.’ The poignant words were those of a young woman in a convent, seduced and abandoned by a French officer, in the celebrated best-seller of the time, Letters of a Portuguese Nun.20* They might have been spoken word for word by Louise.

  Louis XIV was a philanderer, but he was not a monster. He disliked disobedience but he did not like cruelty and humiliation either.† The next day it was he, not the recriminatory and in many cases hypocritical ladies, who invited Louise to join the Queen and her ladies in her carriage. His gesture was so imperious that Marie-Thérèse dared not say a word. That night Louise was invited to take supper at the royal table. None of this stopped Louis's assiduous attentions to Athénaïs, so that the Queen observed out loud that he sometimes only came to bed at four o'clock in the morning. ‘Working on dispatches,’ replied the King smoothly, but the Grande Mademoiselle noted that he had to turn away to hide a smile.22

  The King returned to his armies, which took the major Flemish fortress of Lille after a nine-day siege; the Spanish troops fell back on Brussels and Mons. The Queen and her strange entourage returned via Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, where Marie-Thérèse wished to pray. Nothing demonstrated the extraordinary interweaving of Queen, paramours – two of them – religion and intrigue more than the fact that Athénaïs and Louise now both went to confession at the same place to the same priest. Presumably they confessed the same sin, of sleeping with the King, though of course it was still true that Athénaïs had committed adultery and Louise had not.

  Louise gave birth to her fourth child, a boy, at Saint-Germain on 17 November 1667. He was legitimised in February 1669 and the title of Comte de Vermandois was to be his. Later that year he was created Admiral of France under the conveniently bland name of ‘Louis, Comte de Vermandois’, the King having rejected anything more explicit such as ‘Bastard of France’, ‘Louis, natural son of the King' or even ‘Louis, Légitimé of France’.23 Honours could not conceal the fact that emotionally the King had moved on. Even poor Marie-Thérèse was found in floods of tears after receiving an anonymous letter informing her of the shift in her husband's affections; perhaps she had entertained a wistful hope that the demotion of Louise would have meant the return of Louis permanently to her side.

  By the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle between France and Spain in May 1668, Louis acquired various towns in Flanders which he had recently conquered, including Oudenarde and Lille. But Franche-Comté, lying further south on the borders of Switzerland, which had been overrun by French troops under Condé, was for the time being handed back. The Peace also brought King and court back to Saint-Germain. Louis renewed his frenzied enthusiasm for the elaborate rebuilding of a new Versailles. There in July he staged another vast celebration known as the Grand Royal Entertainment, ostensibly to celebrate the Peace, but in court opinion actually to honour the new favourite. Over three thousand people were present, including the Papal Nuncio and numerous ambassadors. One of these, the Savoyard Comte de Saint-Maurice, described the chaos: even the Queen was forced to wait for half an hour for her entry, while some ambassadors never got in at all. The lucky entrants marvelled happily at the enormous artificial ‘rooms’ made of foliage and hung with tapestries; thirty-two crystal chandeliers illuminated them.24 Many trees were hung with fruits including oranges from Portugal; a huge palace of marzipan and sugar looked so tasty that the crowd subsequently tore it to bits and ate it.

  Molière's offering on this occasion was a merry tale of a cuckolding: George Dandin or the Astonished Husband. Generally pronounced ‘the height of comedy’, it told the story of a peasant who married above himself and found it a strange experience, including the fact that his ‘lady’ wife betrayed him. At first the peasant wanted to drown himself in one of the numerous handy fountains at Versailles; in the end however he was persuaded to drown his sorrows instead of himself – in drink. The line ‘You asked for it, George Dandin’ became a catchphrase.25

  Peacetime also brought an unwelcome visitor to court in the person of another, if nobler, ‘astonished husband’, the Marquis de Montespan, who came from the lesser war on the borders of Spain itself. It was now that Louise, Duchesse de La Vallière, tasted the full measure of her invidious position, something that her religious nature began to construe as a fit punishment for her sinfulness. Where once Louis had courted her to conceal his feelings for his sister-in-law, he now used her continued visible presence to distract public attention from his relationship with Athénaïs. Thus Louise was once again cast in the role of decoy, a penance to be weighed in the balance against six years of sinning.

  The trouble was the matter of Double Adultery, and the arrival of the disagreeable Montespan only emphasised the fact. Double Adultery was odious to the Church. Adultery was after all specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments, unlike fornication, which was not mentioned; quite apart from the fact that adultery itself was a criminal offence for which a woman could be locked into a convent for life. Montespan's uncle, the Archbishop of Sens, for example, had preached an angry sermon on the subject and made a woman in the same circumstances as Athénaïs do penance. What could just be pardoned in a King with a pretty young girlfriend – with suitable recourse to a Jesuit confessor tolerant of man's failings along the road to salvation – could not be pardoned in a married woman involved with a married man, even if he was a King. (This was one of the reasons Louise had rejected the offer of a smokescreen marriage.) The practical if not doctrinal solution was a complaisant husband.

  Unfortunately nothing about Montespan was in the slightest bit complaisant. Not for him the sophisticated attitude suggested by some highly topical lines of Molière in an entertainment of January 1668. This featured the story of Jupiter and Amphitryon, husband of the beautiful Alcimène. While Amphitryon was away at the war, Jupiter had assumed the husband's shape in order to sleep with Alcimene. He then proceeded to console Amphitryon as follows: ‘Sharing with Jupiter / Has nothing dishonourable about it. /

  Certainly it can be nothing but glorious / To find oneself the rival of the king of the gods.' To Montespan, sharing with Jupiter was anything but glorious.26

  Charles II, who had his own troubles with Barbara Villiers' husband, wrote teasingly on the subject to Henriette-Anne: ‘I am so sorry to find that cuckolds in France grow so troublesome. They have been very inconvenient in all countries this last year.27 And troublesome was a light word for Montespan's behaviour once he realised what had been going on, and was still going on with his Alcimène. Where members of both the Montespan and Rochechouart families shrugged their shoulders, ready to enjoy the good fortune which Jupiter's attentions would surely bring them, Montespan raged loudly and publicly.

  The comparison of Louis XIV to King David in the Bible was one which had already been covertly made by Bossuet, on the grounds of David's pursuing another man's wife, Bathsheba. It was now openly proclaimed from Montespan's lips. Well-wishers such as the Grande Mademoiselle tried to calm and divert him. But Montespan was not to be calmed or diverted. Denouncing Jupiter in Jupiter's own kingdom was so evidently self-destructive that there would even have been something quite magnificent about his behaviour; except for the fact that Montespan in his own private life showed an unpleasant contempt for the female sex, mixed with bouts of physical violence.

  Montespan now announced in a two-part plan that he was regularly using whores in the filthiest brothels in order to become infected and thus pass on the disease to the King via his wife. Part one of this plan was easy enough; part two inv
olved forcing himself upon Athénaïs (although a husband was entitled by law to compel his wife to have sex, the violation of Athénaïs would by any decent standards have been nothing less than rape). Athénaïs managed to elude this fate but could not avoid various scenes when the grossest insults were hurled at her. In the meantime Montespan's wrath also fell upon the Duc de Montausier, recently appointed governor to the young Dauphin because of his wife's friendship with Athénaïs. The Duchesse de Montausier – long ago ‘la belle Julie’, protected daughter of the celebrated PrÉcieuse the Marquise de Rambouillet – also found herself involved in Montespan's outrageous denunciations. Nor had the Marquis lost his propensity for physical threat: at one point this sensitive, sixty-year-old woman thought she was going to be thrown out of her own window. Her nerves never really recovered from the ordeal.

  But at this point the angry Amphitryon had gone too far. Embarrassing as the whole situation certainly was for Jupiter, no subject could criticise the sovereign's decrees and get away with it. The abuse loaded on Montausier's appointment to the Dauphin gave Louis his opportunity. He sent Montespan to prison to cool his heels (or stop his mouth) by a lettre de cachet – that is to say, the simple order of the King, no duration of stay indicated and no judicial process involved. After a week Montespan was let out (a longer stay would have become increasingly awkward) on condition that he went into effective exile on his estates in the south. So Montespan departed, taking his son Louis-Alexandre to join his daughter Marie-Christine at Bonnefont, where his own mother cared for them.

  There were rumours, not proved, that he was helped on his way by a sum of money to pay his prodigious debts. If so, Montespan still did not quieten down even in his own home. He had the gates to the château taken down on the grounds that his cuckold's horns were too high to let him pass through. And Marie-Christine, Louis-Antoine, the old Marquise and all the servants were treated to the spectacle of a full funeral with black-draped carriages where Montespan declared that his wife was henceforward dead to him.

  Back at court, Athénaïs was very far from being dead or even – unlike poor Julie de Montausier – permanently shattered. But she was extremely anxious. The real reason for her anxiety, visible in a momentary dimming of her generally triumphant beauty, was the fact that she was pregnant. Athénaïs must have conceived the child at the end of June, and been aware of her pregnancy during the ghastly period of Montespan's imprecations. Obviously her state had to be kept a complete secret, since Montespan was and remained her lawful husband. This meant that there was an ugly possibility that, to spite the lovers, he would claim the baby as legally his. Fashion and her own enterprise came to her aid. Athénaïs developed a method of concealment as her figure bloomed: wearing looser and looser dresses known, not altogether appropriately, as ‘the Innocent Déshabille’. The baby was born at the end of March: probably but not certainly a girl.28 Arrangements were made for the birth to take place in the same obscure fashion as had been used for Louise. Athénaïs was installed in a little house in the rue de l'Échelle, near the Tuileries. Three months later the mistress was pregnant again. As Saint-Maurice drily observed: ‘The lady is extremely fertile and her powder lights very quickly.’29

  This routine – as it became – of pregnancy did not prevent the development of a magnificent lifestyle for the Marquise. She also took her chances of providing for her own Rochechouart family. Athénaïs, unlike Louise, was greedy for everything that life or rather the King could grant her. She owed it to herself and the King owed it to her. Like Versailles, she was expensive – and glorious. It was characteristic of Athénaïs's exuberance that her apartments were full of animals, not only birds but more surprising pets for indoors such as goats, lambs, pigs and even mice, which she allowed to run about all round her and displayed on her navel. Flowers she adored, and found a perfect outlet for her natural extravagance. She employed twelve hundred gardeners at Clagny and in one season had eight thousand daffodils planted, not a cheap enterprise. Part of her greed also, or at least her extravagance, was an enjoyment of food and drink, perhaps unwisely so for a member of a family which included such an overweight phenomenon as the Marquis de Vivonne.

  Another area of pleasure for Athénaïs was sex or commerce (literally ‘having dealings’), which was the contemporary phrase for intercourse. This was not how women were supposed to feel. For once it was not the Catholic Church which was responsible. It was true that in theory laid down by St Paul, conjugal sex was intended purely for the procreation of children, and the fathers of the Church had further denounced over-amorous conjugal exertions. Between them St Jerome and St Thomas Aquinas managed to designate roughly a hundred days in any given year, including the whole of Lent, when sex between married people was not allowed. But by the fifteenth century, sex for pleasure between husband and wife was tolerated so long as there was no question of birth control. And there was a theory at least that the female orgasm helped on conception, being expressed in the language of male desire: ‘Je coule, je coule’ (‘I flow, I flow’).

  It was the women of the tribe, those who endured it or who were enduring it, who spoke of having commerce as a burden. It was generally thought of as the ‘conjugal debt’, or in the words of Madame de Sévigné (constantly advocating separate rooms to her daughter) a duty that her daughter owed her husband, not something from which she could expect pleasure. Of course not all women disliked having commerce. An anonymous seventeenth-century verse in English, ‘Sylvia's Complaint’, drew attention to the fact that females did feel sexual desire but ‘Custom and modesty / Strictly forbid our passion to declare.’ A future Duchesse d'Orléans would write in some surprise of her daughter's recent marriage: ‘She is already quite used to the thing and does not dislike it as much as I did …'31 Athénaïs went further and was an enthusiast.

  There was a danger in all this, the height of sexual enterprise which Louis and Athénaïs indulged in together, sometimes three times a day for long sessions. Louis was now verging on his thirtieth birthday (5 September 1668). He certainly showed no sign of that reform promised four years earlier, rather the contrary. There might come a time when such excess, by normal standards, was not so easy. The temptation might arise to provide or indulge in artificial stimulants.

  That lay ahead. The public face of Athénaïs was now as the dazzling creature, the brightest star in the galaxy which surrounded the Sun King, the one for whom, without knowing it, he had always craved to complete his image in the world at large (if not the world of the Catholic Church). Her second child by the King, a boy named Louis-Auguste, was born at the end of March 1670. He turned out to be clever, sharp, and amusing like his mother; unlike Athénaïs he was not physically perfect, being born with one deformed leg which made it very difficult for him to learn to walk.

  Obviously proper attention had to be paid to these secretly housed children even if they could not for the time being figure at court – Montespan's behaviour was still raw in everyone's mind and the legal situation unchanged. The solution was surely a governess, someone of good but not grand birth, someone known for her virtue rather than her glamour, intelligent and attractive nevertheless, someone who would be able to inspire children; and someone discreet. In this casual way Athénaïs's choice fell upon her friend Françoise d'Aubigné, the Widow Scarron. She could have no idea – nobody could, least of all Françoise herself – where the new path of this modest thirty-five-year-old widow would lead her.

  The little crippled boy, Louis-Auguste, was handed to Madame Scarron shortly after birth. She stood in a waiting coach and received in her arms a sacred trust.

  * She was baptised Françoise but became known as Athénaïs, from Athena the Goddess of Wisdom, while moving in the sophisticated Parisian circle of the Précieuses, and never looked back.3

  * Duelling, the curse of a noble society, was strictly illegal in France at this point, successive kings making their disapproval felt in terms of strong punishment. Nevertheless it took place.

  * D
'Artagnan, a real-life character immortalised in Dumas's Three Musketeers, exemplified this kind of Gascon arrogance and awkwardness.

  * Allegedly written in Portuguese in 1667–8 by Mariana Alcoforado, and translated into French, Letters of a Portuguese Nun was actually composed in French by Gabriel-Joseph de Guilleragues.21

  † It is for this reason that one should reject the apocryphal story of Louis rushing through Louise's room to reach Athénaïs, hurling the latter's spaniel, called Malice, for Louise to tend as he went. The manners of the Sun King were something on which he prided himself; the story is only important for calling attention to the physical intimacy in which they all lived.

  CHAPTER 7

  Marriages Like Death

  Marriages are like death. The time and season are marked, you can't escape.

  – Liselotte, Duchesse d'Orléans

  Neptune, God of the Sea, and Apollo, God of the Sun, were the last two roles Louis XIV danced in a Court Ballet. The occasion, once again a joint effort of Molière and Lully, was entitled The Magnificent Lovers; it was held at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 7 February 1670. Appropriately enough, in view of the ballet's title, it was Athénaïs who had made the choice of Molière; she could not however dance herself, given that she was nearly eight months pregnant. Two men were needed to take over Louis's parts: a week later Neptune was danced by the Comte d'Armagnac and Apollo by the Marquis de Villeroi.1

  The King had been dancing with much-praised skill for twenty-odd years. What prompted his decision? There was a rumour that some lines in Racine's Britannicus, first staged a few months earlier, had irked him. In the play the Emperor Nero, in a hostile portrait, was accused of ‘wasting his life on the theatre’. But Racine was a jovial courtier in his approach to the King, rather than a critical artist; it was a distinction made with approval by Saint-Simon: ‘There was nothing of the poet in his conversation and all of the civilised man’.2 He remained popular with Louis, who made him one of his two Historiographers Royal.