The fate of that other young woman, Angelique, whose duty was no more than to divert the King of France, was in the end not much better, if less protracted than that of Marie-Louise. In this case Louis XIV cannot be blamed entirely, since Angelique was essentially a willing victim who had used her charms to aim at a high position. She duly became pregnant, like all the other mistresses, but not for her the triumphant fertility of Athénaïs. On the contrary, her baby boy died at birth, and in the process of the confinement Angelique herself received injuries which made her, as the cruel courtiers said, ‘wounded in the King's service’. As sex faded, so did the King's love, and the imprudence of the whole episode became apparent. Religion was playing an increasingly prominent part in the scenario of the court. The celebration of the Mass would find both women with a claim on the King, Athénaïs and Angelique, praying hard on their knees and jangling their rosaries. Athénaïs and her children would be on the right, Angélique on the left. ‘Truly,’ wrote Primi Visconti, ‘court life provides the funniest scenes imaginable.’23
In the end Angélique was made a duchess: the traditional farewell gift of the sovereign. She also received a visit from Madame de Maintenon, who argued with her for two hours about the need to give up the guilty relationship. At one point the wretched Angélique exclaimed: ‘You speak of throwing off a passion as if it was as easy as changing a chemise!’24 A romantic if foolish character herself, who loved to dress in colours which matched the King's clothes, she could not understand the pious practicality of someone like Françoise. Angélique's ill health increased, and she began to show signs of lung disease. She retired to the convent of Port-Royal and endured a protracted death, probably caused in the end by a pulmonary abscess.
Louis's general policy was to ignore those mistresses who left the court: he never, for example, visited Sister Louise de La Miséricorde in her convent. (That was left to Athénaïs, who on one famous occasion made the sauce for the convent meal, food, as has been noted, being one of her interests in life.) But Louis, either out of tenderness or a bad conscience, did pay a visit to Angélique in extremis on his way from hunting. She saw the tears in his eyes – how could anyone, let alone Louis, fail to cry at the sight of a girl of twenty about to die? – and according to one story, reconciled herself to death as a result: ‘I die happy since I have seen my King weep.’ It was guilt, perhaps, that made Louis give money for an annual service in Angélique's memory, something once again he would do for no other mistress. Sic transit gloria mundi, commented Madame de Sévigné: it was the same allusion to the transitory nature of worldly glory which Louise had had inscribed on the pillar of her farewell picture by Mignard.25
The withdrawal of Angelique, and the effective ousting of Athénaïs from the King's intimate affections, paved the way for the more public ascendancy of Françoise. Athénaïs received the rank and rights of a duchess (she could not receive the actual title because her separated husband refused to be elevated from his Marquisate). She was also given the post of Superintendent of the Queen's Household, the most prestigious female office at court, something Louis had always declined to accord her. But the public role which pointed to the future was that given to Madame de Maintenon.
January 1680 saw the arrival in France of the Dauphin's bride, the Bavarian princess who had taken the place so much coveted by Marie-Louise. A new royal meant a new household: it was Madame de Maintenon who was made the Dauphine's Second Dame d'Atour (Mistress of the Robes). She now had in public estimation that respectability and status which by her own admission meant so much to her. This appointment was a tribute to those conversations, perhaps two hours a day, which the King was beginning to have with her. This man who had experienced most forms of heterosexual relationship was, wrote Madame de Sévigné, tasting for the first time the delights of friendship. In consequence of her appointment Françoise had to adopt the grave costume which went with the post: ‘Now I belong to a princess I shall always wear black,’ she told Gobelin.26*
Marianne-Victoire, Princess of Bavaria and now Dauphine of France, was a year older than her bridegroom. She had little to commend her by the standards of the French court except French blood: her grandmother had been Christine de France, Duchess of Savoy. She was on her way to being an intellectual, speaking German, French and Italian with some knowledge of Latin. Marianne-Victoire was uninterested in the hunting which was her new husband's passion (she disliked exercise of any sort), nor in the gambling which the court loved; she preferred poetry and music. The trouble was that she was distinctly plain: Liselotte called her ‘horribly ugly’, an exaggeration perhaps, but then Liselotte was now displaced from being the Second Lady at Versailles to being the Third. Madame de Sévigné wrote more detachedly that it was odd how Marianne-Victoire's various features did not combine to make an attractive whole, her forehead being too high, her nose a little bulbous, even if she did have lively and penetrating dark eyes. But the fact that Marianne-Victoire was interested in the new art of conversation endeared her to the King, who not only respected her rank (the Second Lady would always have been sacred to him), but positively enjoyed her staid but intelligent company.28 And she was devout too, something that was becoming more and more important to him, as in his conversations with Françoise.
There is a comparison to be made at this date with another gallant King who was at last settling down – with his mistress. Charles II was eight years older than his first cousin, and thus celebrated his fiftieth birthday in May 1680. He too had led a life of extreme profligacy, in which one maîtresse en titre was surrounded by a changing cast of lesser mistresses. For many years the resplendent foremost position had been occupied by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, whose sensual beauty in youth, ‘the sleepy eye that spoke the melting soul’, made her one of Lely's favourite subjects. She had much in common with Athénaïs, including high fertility, an awkward husband and a tempestuous nature which alternated torrents of jealousy and high-spirited laughter.
But Charles, with the growing indolence of age, had settled for a quieter life. His current maîtresse en titre, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was a highly domesticated little French-woman, nicknamed ‘Fubbs’ (Chubby) by the King for her plump figure and childish face; he even named one of his ships the Fubbs in her honour. Charles's unhappily barren Portuguese Queen, Catherine of Braganza, found Fubbs a great deal more congenial than the insolent Barbara: she even protected her when Fubbs was attacked publicly for her Catholicism. There was therefore something like a contented domestic triangle in what proved to be the last years of Charles II's life. In France a contented domestic triangle was also in the making.
Louise Portsmouth's relationship with King Charles had been sexual in origin, however cosy it had become. To return to Louis XIV in 1680 and his demure conversationalist Françoise (who was incidentally fifteen years older than the French mistress across the Channel): was he by this time sleeping with her? In short, was the role of Mistress of the Robes to the Dauphine, accorded to her at this date, a reward or a recognition of a new role? Or was it perhaps neither of these things, but an inducement to adopt a new role in the future? There is considerable difference of opinion among biographers over the date on which the pair first became lovers, and a ten-year range of suggested timings, starting as early as 1673.29* In the absence of any absolute certainty, two things become crucial: Françoise's known character, developed over the forty-five years of an often troubled life, and her correspondence with her confessor.
Taking her character first, Françoise was certainly capable of feminine jealousy as we have seen, including rivalry for the attentions of the King with her erstwhile employer Athénaïs. But she was no female Tartuffe, a scheming hypocrite who outwardly preached one thing and lived another. Her piety was sincere and her concern for the King's salvation was genuine. So was the friendship she offered him. At the same time life had made of her a realist. If occasionally priggish, she was not a prude, as her down-to-earth advice to girls in her c
are would show. She mocked one who was horrified when her father used the word ‘culotte’: as if a mere ‘arrangement of letters’ made something immodest. And she laughed at those who could only bring themselves to discuss pregnancy in whispers – despite it being mentioned in the Bible.30 In any case, six years at court, if nothing else, had surely convinced her that the King would be with difficulty weaned away from the pleasures of illicit sex altogether.
In a significant step the new Mistress of the Robes actually persuaded the King to ‘return’ to his wife in the summer of 1680 and sleep with her again from time to time: something which made Marie-Thérèse intensely happy.† This good deed was all part of Françoise's picture to herself (and her confessor) of the work-for-salvation policy she was committed to at court. Gradually it became evident that there might be some kind of price to pay for all this good work. Angélique might fade and lose her charms but it was by no means out of the question that the King's eye would fall upon another pretty moppet at court. There might be further bastards (how providential that Angélique's son had died!): after all, as the cheerful Gascon proverb had it, ‘A man can beget as long as he can lift a sheaf of straw.’31 Perhaps friendship – that hitherto unknown territory to the King, was not quite enough to keep the King safe.
The evidence of Françoise's correspondence with Gobelin points delicately to the possibility of compromise some time in the future. In a letter of 27 September 1679 for example she wrote that she was determined to profit from the instructions he had sent to her ‘and make up by charities for the bad things I am doing’.32 This is of course the conventional language of a penitent to her confessor, but it also points to the bargain Françoise was beginning to make with herself (and hopefully God, via her confessor). Good deeds could atone for other deeds which were not quite so good; in short the motto of the Jesuits might be discreetly applied, that the end justified the means.
All this was not immediate. It is surely inconceivable that Françoise was sleeping with the King at the time when she was lecturing Angelique on the need to throw away her passion in March 1680. The appointment to be the Second Mistresss of the Robes was therefore a reward for her services and a recognition of her value to the King – that value not yet, if it ever would be in the true sense of the word, sexual. Significantly, Louis made a public communion at Pentecost 1680, which coupled with the decline of Angélique's charms and his staged return to the Queen's bed, seems to indicate at least a partial repentance for past misdeeds.
At the same time Madame de Sévigné reported in early June that Madame de Maintenon's long interviews with the King were ‘making everyone wonder’; her favour was growing all the time, and that of Madame de Montespan was diminishing.33 It was true. At the start of 1680, that inviolable position Athénaïs had attained for herself, with her apartments, her children, her regulation hours of talk with the King every evening, was apparently under threat. But the danger in this case did not come from the Catholic Church. It came from the heart of seventeenth-century evil: allegations of poison.
* Madame de Sévigné, attending for rheumatism, described a regime of thermal baths interspersed with painful jets of boiling hot or icy water, which was much like that of modern hydros. The little underground ‘theatre’ where this took place made her think of Purgatory.
* The librettist Quinault was briefly sacked for the satire, giving the Mortemarts an opportunity to push forward their favourite La Fontaine, but Lully did not suffer, Louis acting as godfather to his son shortly afterwards.14
* Louis XIV had once considered Mary, elder daughter of James Duke of York, for his son, although (like Liselotte) she was a Protestant; it is an interesting speculation what the consequences of this union would have been. Mary's actual marriage to William of Orange led to the Protestant takeover and the rule of King William and Queen Mary.
* From this regulation court dress, which she had to wear for ten years, sprang the many slurs on Madame de Maintenon as a crone forever clothed in black. Françoise in fact preferred brightness to black, and when young loved blue above all other colours.27
* The main theories and their supporters are listed in the Notes.
† Marie-Thérèse, at nearly forty-two, had last given birth eight years previously; one supposes that the King had ceased his marital attentions when the fact that she was past childbearing became evident.
CHAPTER 10
Madame Now
Madame de Maintenon is now Madame de Maintenant.
– Madame de Sévigné, September 1681
The Marquise de Brinvilliers, a notorious poisoner, was tortured and executed in July 1676; her tiny body was then burnt in a colossal fire, and her ashes scattered to the winds. It says something for the customs of the time that Madame de Sévigné, the most civilised woman of her age, took great pains to watch the process and was disappointed that the packed crowds meant that ‘I only saw a mob-cap'. Madame de Sévigné went on to fantasise about the effect of the dispersal of the murderess's ashes: ‘so we shall inhale her, and by absorbing the little vital spirits we shall become subject to some poisoning humour, which will surprise us all.’1
Whatever the mythical potency of the guilty Marquise's remains, it was certainly true that during 1679 a first-class crisis brewed on the subject of poisonings and poisoners, in which some celebrated names were mentioned by notorious criminals already under threat of death. And for one moment the ashes blew close to the King with the invocation of the name of the Marquise de Montespan. So began the temporary implication of Athénaïs, banished from royal favour but not the royal presence, in that brutal labyrinth of an episode known as the Affair of the Poisons.*
The arrest of Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, on suspicion of witchcraft (a capital offence) in March 1679 was the effective start of it all. La Voisin was a supplier of potions of many different sorts to the great ladies of the court, and has as a result been felicitously described as ‘a duchess among witches’.3 La Fontaine airily summed up her various talents: whether you wanted to keep your lover or lose your husband, straightaway you went off to La Voisin for assistance. The solution to both these annoying problems might be powders, aphrodisiac or the reverse, and certainly La Voisin supplied a great many powders in her time. There was also the question of horoscopes, spells, black magic and even that blasphemous use of inverted ceremonial known as a Black Mass. The contemporary view of black magic in any aspect was expressed by Furetière in his Dictionnaire Universel as follows: ‘A detestable art which employs the invocation of devils and uses them to accomplish things beyond the force of nature.’4
Here a distinction must be drawn between the various functions La Voisin was supposed to perform. Supplying aphrodisiacs, which might or might not work, was a very different matter from providing poisons. Similarly, a visit to La Voisin to enquire about the future – of a love affair, for example – was a harmless activity; consultation about a horoscope might have something naïve about it but it was hardly evil (otherwise a great many people down the ages to the present day would have to be Condémned). To take part in a Black Mass on the other hand, with its use of the human body as an altar, with a murdered child's body and blood as sacraments, was something so blasphemous by the standards of the seventeenth century (to say nothing of its horror by any standards) that no Catholic could have done it without the deliberate intention of rejecting conventional religion.
La Voisin described herself as ‘a practitioner of chiromancy, a student of physiognomy', arts she said she had learned at the knee of her mother, also a sorceress. She named an enormous number of suspects on her arrest and was finally executed a year later. As a result of her revelations a tribunal unofficially but graphically known as the Chambre Ardente (Burning Chamber) was set up under La Reynie, the Chief of Police. It sat until July 1682. Over four hundred cases were heard, over three hundred arrests were ordered, thirty-four people were executed, nearly thirty more sent to the galleys or banished. Crimes varied, like the penalties, fro
m poisonings to the use of horoscopes: it was, quite literally, a witch-hunt.
The court began to feel the heat when the name of Marie Mancini's elder sister Olympe, Comtesse de Soissons, was mentioned as having poisoned her husband, who died in 1673. Although the latest research on the subject suggests that Olympe was not guilty, she fled to Flanders in January 1680 and later on to Spain, leaving her large family of children behind. She had long lost the favour of the King – memories of the amorous past they had shared had faded, while her mischief-making caused Louis intense irritation. Olympe had lost her position as Superintendent of the Household and Louis was surely relieved to see her go. Another Mancini sister, Marianne, the ‘spontaneous and bold' Duchesse de Bouillon, was ‘unperturbed' by similar charges of planning to harm her husband: she appeared in front of the tribunal accompanied by the aforesaid husband as well as the lover who was supposed to benefit. It was a gesture of high style which succeeded. The Duchesse did not flee.5
The name of Athénaïs was not introduced until comparatively late in the proceedings, by which time La Voisin was dead. Crucially, La Voisin had never mentioned the favourite under torture, although she implicated twenty other people. Another conspirator named Falastre, who did name Athénaïs (under torture), withdrew the allegation on the eve of his death. La Voisin's evidence on the subject of the favourite came second-hand via her daughter Marie-Marguerite. This was not a very convincing route, since Marie-Marguerite was desperate to do something, anything, which would spare her torture and execution.
The suggestion that Athénaïs had taken part in a Black Mass, her voluptuous naked body stretched out as an altar, with a rogue priest performing the ‘ceremony', was frankly preposterous. Athénaïs's piety was genuine, as much part of her character as the radiant sexuality which had charmed the King for so long. She once gave a memorable dismissal to the Duchesse d'Uzès, who queried her sedulous church-going in view of her immoral life: ‘Because I commit one sin [i.e. adultery] it does not mean that I commit them all.'6 This declaration should always be borne in mind where Athénaïs is concerned. In the years to come she would show herself almost as devout as Louise de La Vallière, although her expression of her piety was less extreme. If employing black magic – ‘the invocation of devils' – put a seventeenth-century Catholic in danger of hell, participation in the murderous blasphemy of the Black Mass would have Condémned anyone beyond a doubt – not only in the eyes of the Church but in the fearful imagination of Athénaïs, the Catholic in question.*
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Page 23