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

by Antonia Fraser

  Meanwhile Bossuet was not finding it altogether easy dealing with that other Magdalen whose penitence, it seemed, was incomplete. Was the Bishop the right man for the task? ‘He has plenty of intelligence,’ wrote Françoise, ‘but it is not the worldly wisdom of the court.’ Nor did he quite appreciate that Athénaïs might be a hard habit to break. There is an indication in his correspondence in the summer of 1675 that even the forty-eight-year-old prelate, a man of exemplary piety, felt her physical attraction. In an ambiguous letter on the subject of his heavy burden, he asked the Marquis de Bellefonds to ‘pray for me’ and ‘may God make all the man in me die’.9 To Louis, Bossuet reported that Athénaïs was calm enough, occupying herself with good works (as time would show, another aspect of her undoubted energy was an appetite for philanthropy). But he had come to understand that ending the liaison – stamping out ‘a flame so violent’ – was not the work of a day. The King returned from campaigning in August, but surely there was no danger: Madame de Montespan, no longer at court, resided at Clagny. It was Bossuet who observed with some foreboding: ‘Yes, Sire, but God would be more satisfied if Clagny was seventy leagues from Versailles.’

  Bossuet was right. The thought of poor Athénaïs languishing was too much for the King; she was allowed back to court, but with some touching if slightly ludicrous caveats. The couple would never be alone together, or if they were, it would be in a room with glass windows so that the court could supervise their conduct and make sure it was sufficiently proper.

  But perhaps the caveat was not so ludicrous after all. In May 1676 Athénaïs went on a restorative trip to the thermal baths at Bourbon, for the sake of her health (and figure). Bourbon, near Moulins in the Bourbonnais province south-east of Paris, was a spa which had been known since Roman times when its waters – aquae Borvonis – were praised by Vitruvius. There were other spas such as Vichy and Baréges, but this was the most fashionable one.* And Athénaïs was duly given an extremely lavish welcome, with loyal addresses in every town through which she passed. The status of the King's maîtresse en titre surely demanded it. Ironically enough the local governor was Louise's brother, the Marquis de La Vallière. Athénaïs herself however was more interested in her new outlet, good works: she endowed twelve beds at the local poor-house and gave a considerable amount of money to local charities.10

  In July however a scene took place at Clagny worthy of the most successful playwright at court, Racine. Great care was taken that ‘respectable ladies’ should be present as chaperones, and at first Louis spoke to his former mistress in grave tones as though he was some kind of cleric – a Bossuet. Athénaïs interrupted him: ‘It's useless to read me a sermon: I understand that my time is over.’ Then gradually the pair – who had not been alone together for fifteen months – withdrew to a windowed alcove, while the courtiers, including the respectable ladies, remained at a respectful distance. The conversation grew more intense, and later still more tender. ‘You're mad,’ said Athénaïs. ‘Yes, I am mad,' replied Louis ardently, ‘since I still love you.’ After this avowal, both King and Athénaïs made together a profound reverence to these venerable matrons’.11 Then they withdrew to her bedroom … This was the moment feared by Bossuet and Madame de Maintenon alike.

  Athénaïs proceeded to make short work of some of the objects of the King's gallantry during his absence from her bed. The Princesse de Soubise proved not to be quite so virtuous a mature married woman as she had been as a teenager: there was a rumour that one of her children was the King's. Her husband however was remarkably complaisant about the association. After all, in the words of Saint-Simon: the family's rise was all Duc to the beauty of the Princesse de Soubise ‘and the use to which she put it’.

  Isabelle de Ludres with her statuesque body and striking red-gold hair was a more serious contender. This royal affair began in the course of a minuet. The King gazed rapturously into Isabelle's beautiful blue eyes: ‘I am sure, Madame, that these fripons [rascals] have caused plenty of damage in their time’. Isabelle was ready with the appropriate gallant response: ‘Not as much as I would wish, Sire, for I know someone who still defends himself too strongly against their force’.12 Sure enough the King proceeded to lower his defences. What the Princesse de Soubise and Isabelle de Ludres lacked, it seemed, was the intelligence or wit to hold the King even if they had the spirit to capture him. Nevertheless, before Isabelle de Ludres could be thoroughly defeated, the court drama of her rivalry with Athénaïs had to take expression on the stage, in true Versailles fashion. Isis, an opera by Quinault and Lully, made a clear allusion to Isabelle as Io, who aroused the rage of Juno for daring to seduce Jupiter; Athénaïs was obviously caricatured as the jealous Juno to whom in the end Jupiter promised to be faithful. The whole court sang Io's lovely song from Act III: ‘It is a cruel offence / To appear beautiful / To jealous eyes,’ and Madame de Sévigné knew it by heart.13*

  There were two visible mementos of the King's rapprochement with Athénaïs. As one observer summed it up in fairly crude terms: ‘And along came the second Mademoiselle de Blois and the Comte de Toulouse’.15 It was true. Athénaïs was very soon pregnant again, and her daughter Françoise-Marie, conceived in August, was born on 10 March 1677. She was created Mademoiselle de Blois like Marie-Anne. It was an example of the intimacy of Athénaïs and Françoise, as well as the delicacy of the renewed relationship with the King, that the little girl was actually born at Maintenon (although Françoise was by now too grand to look after these latter children). Athénaïs's sixth child by the King, Louis-Alexandre, created Comte de Toulouse, was born on 6 June 1678. ‘You have had Augustus [Maine] and you have had Caesar [Vexin],' said Athénaïs to her lover. ‘Now of course you have to have Alexander.’

  No more martial heroes were however to be commemorated in the names of Louis's children. There is good reason to believe that the King ceased to have sexual relations with Athénaïs after the birth of Toulouse. Ungallantly, but realistically, the cessation may have had something to do with Athénaïs's increasing weight in her thirty-eighth year, on which the courtiers were beginning to comment. The kindly Madame de Sévigné noted that her ‘angelic’ face was as beautiful as ever, with the delicious blonde ringlets, ‘a thousand of them’, which were made to frame it in a style called hurluberlu, so flattering that even the Queen copied it (maybe the blondness now owed something to art but the effect was still stunning). Malicious Primi Visconti on the other hand described one of her legs as being as big as his own thigh, although he added, as though to soften the insult: ‘I have lost weight lately.’16 Athénaïs's physical family inheritance, remembering the notorious girth of her brother Vivonne, had proved a fatal combination when her large appetite and repeated pregnancies were added to it. She was endlessly massaged and perfumed: it made no difference against these more potent factors.

  Louis still visited Athénaïs in his orderly way for the regulation two hours daily and she continued to enjoy her sumptuous apartments at Versailles. But his passion had passed on.

  The Dutch War was concluded at last in 1678. By the Peace of Nijmegen of 1678–9, Franche-Comte, originally conquered ten years earlier, was formally annexed to France from Spain. Louis XIV now had leisure for two new enthusiasms. In the first place he concentrated once more on Versailles. His new official architect Mansart was given sums to spend which rose sharply over the next few years, reaching 512 million livres in 1680 from a mere three-quarters of a million in 1676 (eighteen million and 212 million pounds respectively in modern money). The aim in all cases of modifications and additions was grandeur, grandeur in the eyes of all Europe, the continent where the Peace of Nijmegen had made him the visibly preeminent monarch. Liselotte as a resident of the palace had another take on the subject: ‘There is nowhere that hasn't been altered ten times,’ she wrote of Versailles. The unpleasant smell of wet plaster was something with which all the grand ladies of Versailles had to contend, to say nothing of the inevitable dirt and noise of perpetual building works.17

&
nbsp; The second enthusiasm was of the familiar sort. The King fell in love. Her name was Angélique. But since this was the love of a forty-year-old man for a girl of eighteen there was a new aspect to it: sheer infatuation with her youth, her blonde, ethereal, unsullied looks; wit or intelligence was no longer demanded. There was even an embarrassing aspect to it all, as the courtiers watched the Sun King, who passed his fortieth birthday on 5 September 1678, become a fool for love, devoting himself to a girl who was the same age as his son the Dauphin and twenty years younger than his maîtresse en titre Athénaïs.

  Perhaps the warrior in him deserved this delightful reward: this was certainly the line taken, albeit satirically, by Bussy-Rabutin. As Louis seduced the virginal Angelique against a background of Le Brun's tapestries depicting his military victories, he could regard her as his latest conquest. Naturally Angelique fell madly in love with the King: in this, wrote Liselotte, she was more like the heroine of a novel. And if she was also stupid – Louis ‘seemed ashamed every time she opened her mouth in the presence of a third party’ – her sweetness was a pleasant contrast with the tartness of Athénaïs, by no means decreasing with age.18

  Angelique de Scorailles de Roussille, Demoiselle de Fontanges, came of an ancient family in the Auvergne region where her father, the Comte de Roussille, was the King's Lieutenant. She was indeed very pretty, something of the same type as the young Louise de La Vallière although her features were more classically perfect: she looked ‘like a statue’, said the scornful Athénaïs. Others said more flatteringly that she was the most beautiful woman ever to appear at Versailles. Angélique arrived at court in October 1678 as a maid-of-honour to Liselotte. According to Liselotte later, the girl had had a prescient dream about her own fate which she duly recounted to her mistress: how she had found herself ascending a lofty mountain, but on reaching the peak, she was suddenly enveloped in an enormous cloud and plunged into total obscurity … Angélique awoke from this vision in terror and consulted a local monk. His interpretation was scarcely reassuring: the mountain was the court, where she was destined to achieve great fame, but this fame would be of short duration. In short, said the monk, ‘if you abandon God, He will abandon you, and you will fall into eternal darkness’.19

  Although Liselotte's recounting of the dream surely owed something to hindsight, it was true enough that Angelique ascended the ‘mountain’ remarkably quickly: by February Bussy-Rabutin, a gossip but an accurate one, predicted ‘changes of love at court'. Madame de Maintenon was of course horrified. She contributed her own analogy, also taken from dramatic scenery. ‘The King,’ she told Gobelin on 17 March 1679, ‘is on the edge of a great precipice.’

  What was happening now to his famous salvation, on which she, Bossuet and Bourdaloue were working so hard in their different ways? Happily indifferent to this important subject, intoxicated with the air at the peak of the mountain, Angélique flaunted her success. Her carriage was drawn by eight horses, two more than Athénaïs had ever commanded. Her servants wore grey livery to match the celebrated grey of her sea-nymph eyes. La Fontaine had paid tribute to her in verse with the permission of Athénaïs (who saw in Angélique less of a threat to her personally than Françoise). She was installed first of all in a pavilion of the château Neuf at Saint-Germain and then in an apartment close to Louis's own. Undoubtedly the exquisite Demoiselle de Fontanges briefly aroused the King's flagging sexual powers in a way that Athénaïs, with all her arts, had failed to do in recent years. The men of letters knew all about that kind of excitement. It was a case of ‘the charm of novelty … the bloom on the fruit’, in the words of La Rochefoucauld. Saint-Évremond discoursed on the difference: ‘In a new Amour you will find delights in every hour of the day,’ whereas in a passion of long standing ‘our time lingers very uneasily’.20

  In striking contrast to the King's pampering of his youthful mistress was his cruel imposition of dynastic duty upon another girl of roughly the same age. This was Marie-Louise, Mademoiselle d'Orléans, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the late Henriette-Anne and Monsieur. In the absence of war, Louis XIV turned to that other convenient method of boosting a nation's power, the strategic marriage alliance. In 1679 an impartial observer would not have considered King Carlos of Spain promising bridegroom material. At the age of eighteen Carlos was notorious for his gross, even brutal behaviour to his courtiers. He had a high eunuch's voice and disgusting eating habits, with an over-long tongue which lolled from his mouth and loose lips above a receding chin; his thick fair hair, his best point, was generally left matted and dirty. To marry such a man was a ghastly prospect for any girl – unless one took the line that he was the greatest parti in Europe and that could never be a ghastly prospect for any girl who was a princess.

  The obvious bride in dynastic terms would have been Louis's daughter, the Petite Madame, but after her death in 1672, Louis turned his attention to the senior Princess at the French Bourbon court, his niece Marie-Louise. He was especially anxious, as ever, to win the race against any Habsburg candidate. Frankly, all the doubts about Carlos's physical ability to beget an heir remained unresolved; however, in the autumn of 1678 the Spanish court announced that he was in fact eager to be married.

  In his capricious way, Carlos took a violent fancy to his pretty cousin's portrait. (Both were descended from Philip III.) And Marie-Louise was pretty. With her large sloe-black eyes and black hair, she had inherited the Médicis looks of her grandmother Henrietta Maria; in other ways she resembled her famously charming mother, if a darker version. Her bearing was superb: ‘She deserves a throne,’ whispered the French courtiers. A formal proposal came in January, followed by a proxy marriage and the planned departure of Marie-Louise for her new kingdom.

  Marie-Louise was devastated. She too had envisaged a royal destiny to which as a Granddaughter of France she considered herself entitled. But her preferred bridegroom, the one she had believed since infancy would be hers, was her first cousin, the Dauphin Louis. A robust fellow, whose fair looks favoured his mother, the Dauphin was more interested in hunting than anything else except possibly his food. He was capable of much ingenuity in pursuit of his passion, only failing when he tried to hunt a weasel in a granary with basset hounds. He had however no intellectual tastes, and a brutal governor in childhood had left him terrified of authority in the shape of his father. But the Dauphin was essentially good-natured and popular with the people as well as the court.

  In the royal lottery any princess could do a lot worse than drawing him for her mate, quite apart from the prospect of being Queen of France in the future. Like any French princess, Marie-Louise considered this the highest possible destiny. Her mother Henriette-Anne, although fobbed off with Monsieur, had certainly believed it; it was the same view that the French-born Queen of Spain had inculcated in Marie-Thérèse. Unfortunately, in his ruthless way where such matters were concerned, Louis XIV intended his son for a German princess to secure his position in the east still further.* To the weeping Princess, Louis remarked that he could not have done more for his own daughter. ‘Yes, Sire,’ replied Marie-Louise, in sad reference to her dashed hopes of marrying the Dauphin. ‘But you could have done more for your niece.’21

  Marie-Louise paid a series of farewell state visits, including to the convent of Val-de-Grâce where the heart of her mother was interred; she was perpetually in tears. She even flung herself at the feet of the King, who was on his way to Mass, crying: ‘Don't make me go!’

  ‘Madame,’ joked Louis, ‘it would be a fine thing if the Most Catholic Queen [of Spain] prevented the Most Christian King from going to Mass.’ His true indifference to her suffering in the interests of ‘glory’ was made clear when Marie-Louise said her last goodbyes. It was the case of the Grande Mademoiselle and Lauzun all over again: the dynasty must come first, whatever its demands. ‘Farewell,’ said the King, firmly. ‘For ever. It would be your greatest misfortune to see France again.’ He referred to the tradition by which a princess married to a foreign sovereign
never returned to her native country except in circumstances of disgrace or failure. Yet Louis was extremely fond of this unhappy young woman, originally for her mother's sake and now for her own. He simply put duty as he saw it – her duty to uphold the interests of France in Spain – above human feelings. And expected others to do so.

  So Marie-Louise departed to a life quite as miserable as she had anticipated. By the rules of the repressive Spanish court she was so confined that she could not even look out of the window. She was obliged to spend at least four hours a day in private prayer, quite apart from the prolonged rituals of the services. As for the local entertainment of watching heretics being burned by the Inquisition, that, as the French Ambassador in Madrid drily observed, ‘gives horror to those not accustomed to it’. At first Carlos himself was obsessed with his young wife and highly jealous of her; then he started to dislike her for her (unsurprising) inability to conceive. He took to kicking the pets with which she tried to console herself: ‘Get out, get out, French dogs.’ By coincidence, another victim of Louis XIV's sense of duty had fetched up in Spain in a convent in Madrid: Marie Mancini, still warring with her husband. Queen Marie-Louise took her for rides in her carriage: two women, one of forty, one of seventeen, who pined for France.22