Equally preposterous were the allegations that the maîtresse en titre had also procured poisons ‘to accomplish things beyond the force of nature', in Furetiere's phrase – that is, with the intention of killing the King. How on earth would the death of Louis have benefited his long-term mistress? Her entire position in material terms depended on his favour, her lavish lifestyle, including her splendid apartments, her gems, her money, her house at Clagny; furthermore, status was equally important to her self-esteem, and the King was showing every sign of respecting that, even if the sexual bond had been broken. There was no question that the accession of the Dauphin to the throne (with her abiding adversary Marie-Thérèse as Queen Mother) would have led to disgrace and probably banishment from court.
As to allegations of other poisonings – did Angélique receive a bowl of poisoned milk? – these were so endemic to the French court, and indeed the society of that time, that any hostility expressed, followed by some kind of illness or death, was all too easily transformed into an accusation of poisoning.7 (Remember how the Chevalier de Lorraine had been falsely accused of poisoning Henriette-Anne simply because they were on bad terms at the time of her death.) Liselotte for example, who had a vindictive streak in her apparently jolly, extrovert nature, accused Madame de Maintenon of poisoning both the minister Colbert and the architect Mansart. Athénaïs was of a far higher rank than the wretched old women who got into quarrels with their neighbours and were duly burned as witches when the same neighbours collapsed from some common malady of the time. But her situation was essentially the same. Her unsurprising jealousy of Angélique, her role as furious Juno to Angelique's innocently lovely Io in the opera Isis, was all too easily transformed into an accusation of poisoning when the lethal ashes of the Marquise de Brinvilliers were blowing in the wind.
Where Athénaïs, like many of her friends, was probably guilty, if that is the right word, was in seeking aphrodisiacs from La Voisin: ‘powders for love’.8 The mention of her waiting-women in this connection, the saucy Demoiselle des Oeillets, who had probably had a child by the King in 1676, and another known as Catau, is perfectly plausible. No doubt they visited La Voisin on behalf of their mistress (and perhaps Oeillets on her own account too), especially since one date cited was 1678, when Athénaïs was losing her sexual hold over the King. Catau was said to have had her palm read: another fairly innocent pursuit despite the Church's prohibition. The name of Athénaïs's sister-in-law the Marquise de Vivonne was also cited. This behaviour might be louche but it was hardly heinous.
Aphrodisiacs were a subject of prodigious interest in the seventeenth century, as indeed they have been in every century down to the present one: like contraception, the need brought the solution, or hopefully the solution. (The same is true about recourse to horoscopes in time of personal anguish.) Cantharides – taken from the wing covers of the ‘Spanish fly' beetle – and other ground-up substances were advocated, including extract of toad and snake. When Margaret Lucas, one of Queen Henrietta Maria's maids-of-honour, was married off to the future Duke of Newcastle, thirty years her senior, she found him in the unfortunate position of being both impotent and in need of an heir. Since the popular remedy of ‘heating [i.e. spicy] foods' failed to do the trick, the Newcastles turned to Europe. From Rome Sir Kenelm Digby reported a cure by an apothecary who regularly killed three thousand adders to make his medicine: ‘By long use of such flesh of vipers,' he wrote, men who had turned eunuchs through age ‘become Priapus again'. (It did not work with the Duke; there was no male heir; the Duchess of Newcastle turned to writing.)9
There was an underworld market for such things in Paris. Nor was it only the great ladies or their maids who ventured there. All his life the King had plenty of discreet access to it. One of the most important men in the intimate life of Louis XIV was his chief valet, Alexandre Bontemps, whose reticence was so famous that keeping silent on a subject was proverbially known as ‘doing a Bontemps'. A huge fat man, nearly twenty years the King's senior, Bontemps was adored by Louis for his total loyalty, also his adept way of carrying out private missions for which he used a special royal coach without armorial bearings. Bontemps was without malice. After his death, it was said of him that he had never spoken an ill word of anyone and, even more remarkably at Versailles, had never let a day pass without speaking well ‘of someone to his master'.10 But for all his good nature, Bontemps was not without his contacts in the underworld.
Another of the King's devoted valets, François Quintin de La Vienne, had been a celebrated swimmer and became a baigneur, something between a bath attendant and a barber. He conducted an étuve or bath-house where the King had been in the past to be bathed and perfumed. (Being rubbed down with eau de toilette was the most fashionable form of hygiene in an age when water was widely distrusted, with good reason.)
These etuves had many of the same assets as a modern health club with their facilities for bathing and massage. But under the alibi of being bath-houses, they also performed – discreetly – some of the same functions as a brothel. Everyone knew what was meant by the discreet phrase coucher cheZ le baigneur (sleeping at the bathhouse). The women in attendance might be available for further services. Young men used them as places of rendezvous, especially with married women whose husbands had to be kept in ignorance. There was also a medicinal aspect to such establishments: people went to be cured of the problems brought about by ‘great pleasures', that is, venereal diseases. They were certainly places where aphrodisiacs might be obtained. It was La Vienne who was credited with supplying the King with ‘fortifiers' when Louis found he could no longer achieve ‘all he wished' in his love affair with Angélique. The genial La Vienne, always elegantly turned out, was a popular member of Louis's inner household.11
All this is to say that the King, a man of terrific sexual energy in youth, encouraged to further heights in his thirties by the inspirational Athénaïs, was beginning to fall back just a little from the high standards he had come to expect as he approached forty. He therefore had recourse to stimulants. Athénaïs may have provided some of these ‘powders of love' from La Voisin via her maids or in her own right. (The point has been made that former maîtresse en titre Athénaïs had bodyguards installed by the King who would certainly have monitored such discreditable visits and reported them.) But Louis also had his own network of discreet servants when such things were required.
There is certainly no evidence to link the King's periodic fits of ‘vapeurs' with the potions supplied, let alone with poisons. The English word ‘vapours', with its hysterical female connotation, does not cover these royal attacks: they were more like mini-collapses. For example, Louis had an attack when his mother first fell really ill in the summer of 1664 (he cured it by going swimming). And he would have an attack in April 1684, long after Athénaïs had either opportunity or motive to administer a drug. These fits were perhaps nervous in origin, a periodic short-lived weakness Duc principally to his extraordinary daily schedule, which certainly included love-making (latterly with stimulants), but also hours in Council planning policy at home and military strategy abroad. As we shall see in the next chapter, other illnesses were on their way, including the dreaded gout to which both his father and grandfather had been subject. In the meantime the doctors' frequent purges and lavements (enemas), recounted in fearful detail in their industrious journals, were enough to weaken the strongest man and cause him collapses.
The reaction of Louis XIV to the ‘revelations' of La Voisin's daughter, and her unsavoury accomplices, also under arrest, was immediate. A freeze was put on all the papers relevant to the Marquise de Montespan. At the orders of the Council, all documents relevant to Athénaïs, her sister-in-law Madame de Vivonne and her maid Oeillets were to be taken out of the dossier. The criminals themselves were separated and put into dungeons where their voices could not and would not be heard. The King kept the papers himself for twenty-five years and then burned them. His conduct towards Athénaïs did not alter – the daily visit
s – and that alone is the most convincing proof that he believed in her innocence.
Louis XIV was a fanatic for order and a good public show, but he was also human. Had these charges of poisoning and the Black Mass been believed, the former maîtresse en titre would certainly have been told to retire from court, either to the country or abroad like Olympe Comtesse de Soissons. There is another proof, quite apart from the psychological implausibility of it all already stated. Colbert, the King's chief minister for his whole personal reign so far, the wise and prudent Colbert who had in the past handled the question of the bastards, did not believe in the charges either. He quoted the Latin tag that a single (unsupported) accusation meant no accusation: Testis unus, testis nullus. And he had examined all the evidence.12*
There was also a political dimension to the Affair of the Poisons which Colbert thoroughly understood. He had a long-standing rivalry with Louvois, Louis XIV's Minister of War. Athénaïs had always belonged to the Colbert camp, being connected to him by marriage; she disliked Louvois, who in turn resented her influence with the King. Colbert, absolving Athénaïs for good reason, was also protecting his own interests.
So, where Athénaïs was concerned, ‘all the external signs of friendship and consideration were maintained', wrote Voltaire in his history of the King's reign. He added: ‘although it offered her no consolation'.13 It was true. Athénaïs's long reign was at last well and truly over, not because of the Affair of the Poisons, which was a deeply unpleasant but temporary embarrassment, but because Françoise was now established in her place. The Affair of the Poisons did not help Athénaïs's position but it was a position lost in any case. It could even be argued that the King's resolute defence of his former mistress indicated the continuing depth of his feelings for her – affection if no longer passion.
Athénaïs de Montespan was of course the mother of Louis's children, and the court of France was increasingly dominated by the presence of the younger generation. Or, to put it another way, since this was a King-centred court, the King's role as patriarch was beginning to be glorified. In January 1681 a ballet was danced at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in honour of the Dauphine. If officially dedicated to Marianne-Victoire, it has been described as ‘a sort of celebration of the royal paternity'. Devised by the familiar team of Quinault and Lully, it is seen as the first true Opera-Ballet, and was later, slightly altered, performed in Paris at the Academy Royal. Love was the ostensible theme but the triumph of youth was also proclaimed. Louise-Françoise, the nine-year-old daughter of Louis and Athénaïs, played Youth itself. At the end of the performance she sang sweetly: ‘Reserve your criticisms for old age / All our days are charming / Everyone laughs at our desires.’14
Louise-Françoise was already a mischievous little creature: ‘a pretty cat, while you play with it, it lets you feel its claws.' In a few years' time – two months before her twelfth birthday* – she would be married off to a Prince of the Blood, the Duc de Bourbon, heir to the Prince de Condé and at court known as Monsieur le Duc. Her official title therefore, by which she was always addressed, was Madame la Duchesse.† The Duc de Bourbon was extremely small and his head was very large; he was singularly charmless, and arrogant on the subject of the rank which was his sole claim to distinction. At the time the Marquis de Sourches exclaimed that ‘it was a ridiculous thing to see these two young puppets’ getting married.15 The bride did not however long remain a puppet. The wilful Madame la Duchesse, irreverent and rather lazy, would come to exhibit the new values of Versailles, where everyone laughed at the behaviour of the young, or so the young thought.
It was however her half-sister Marie-Anne, daughter of La Vallière, who was the star of this particular ballet. She was newly married to another Prince of the Blood, the Prince de Conti,‡ a match that excited courtiers had predicted for ‘the little fiancés' when they first danced together. Marie-Anne's ravishing looks fully justified the promise of her childhood: her perfect heart-shaped face and huge wide-set eyes were celebrated at every ball, including the masked balls when Marie-Anne often declined to cover the famous eyes, lest their ‘fire' should be doused. (Like many beauties, Marie-Anne was extremely short-sighted: the kind of beguiling person who ‘lost' her magnifying glasses because she had pushed them on top of her head.) ‘The goddess Conti' was how she was often described, and was she not after all ‘descended from Olympus', ‘the Daughter of Jupiter', as La Fontaine apostrophised her? Her scented chamber was known as ‘the shrine of Venus'. Perhaps her bastard birth was even responsible for her allure. When Marie-Anne unwisely commented on the reclining Dauphine: ‘Look at her, just as ugly asleep as awake,' Marianne-Victoire opened her eyes and said: ‘Were I a love-child I would be as beautiful as you.’16
This paragon of grace, with no reason to be tormented by the spiritual anguish of her mother, was rated the best dancer at court; according to one contemporary she eclipsed the dancers of the Paris opera. In this ballet Marie-Anne danced the nymph Ariane in the plumes and luxurious embroidered costume which were considered suitable nymph-wear at the time. The poet Benserade described her as ‘effacing all the other flowers / Even to the lily of her origin'.17
The lily in question was her mother Louise, now in her convent, who had duly received a visit from Marie-Anne on the occasion of her marriage, as well as congratulations from the court. (Madame de Sévigné found Sister Louise as lovely as ever, if even thinner; her grace was unimpaired, as well as ‘the way she looked at you'.) Although her daughter was making a prestigious match, Louise's attitude to her ‘children of shame' remained ambivalent. A few years later Bishop Bossuet had to break to Louise the news of the death of her son, Vermandois, at the age of sixteen, under unsavoury circumstances: there had been some kind of homosexual scandal. Louise responded chillingly: ‘I ought to weep for his birth far more than I weep for his death.' Both children were to the nun, in her own words in her book, reminders of her ‘deplorable [former] life, all the more deplorable because it caused me no horror'.18
Like Madame la Duchesse, Marie-Anne belonged to a very different generation; after all she could not remember the distressing circumstances of her birth, her mother having to make an appearance in chapel only a few hours later. Marie-Anne set the tone for a new kind of emancipated princess when she complained on her wedding night that her husband ‘lacked force' and she preferred his brother. Courtiers wondered how, exactly, at the age of thirteen, she was able to compare the two; but Marie-Anne had begun as she meant to go on. During a short-lived marriage (the Prince de Conti died in 1685) Marie-Anne troubled him constantly with her wayward behaviour, according to Primi Visconti, who seldom heard a rumour he wouldn't pass on. The Prince de Conti complained to her father. But Marie-Anne would fling her arms around the King's neck and be forgiven for her prettiness, her charm and above all for amusing him with her adorable if naughty ways.19 As the King marched steadily, if at times laggardly, in the direction of virtue, there was a lesson here. The hard-working potentate still had to be amused.
After the death of her young husband, the eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne showed no signs of marrying again. Secure in her position, she was prepared to live a life of pleasure at court, enjoying the special friendship and favour of her half-brother the Dauphin. And there was one asset Marie-Anne enjoyed that was denied to Madame la Duchesse (Louise-Françoise). Although both were married to Princes of the Blood, Marie-Anne's mother had not been the wife of another man at the time of her birth; Madame la Duchesse on the other hand, for all her hauteur, was for ever stigmatised as the fruit of Double Adultery.
There were other princesses born in the seventies waiting in the wings: none of them showed signs of being docile. The King's younger surviving daughter by Athénaïs, Françoise-Marie, the fruit of their reconciliation, was a little tearaway. Liselotte's daughter Elisabeth-Charlotte, a Granddaughter of France, was described by her mother as ‘so terribly wild' and ‘rough as a boy'. There was something like pride in the way in which Liselotte added: ‘I think it mus
t be the nature of all Liselottes to be so wayward in childhood.’.20 (Her half-sister Anne-Marie, child ot Irlenriette-Anne, a gentler and sweeter character, was married off to the Duke of Savoy in 1684 and left France.) Then there were the Princesses of the Blood, the tiny daughters of the Prince de Condé and a Bavarian princess – nicknamed ‘the Dolls of the Blood' – such as Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, sister of Monsieur le Duc. Bénédicte made up for her lack of size with a sharp wit and a ranging intelligence which was quite prepared to challenge the orthodoxies of the court of Louis XIV.
All this was for the future, when the girls one might term the dragons' teeth of Louis XIV, with all their rivalries of birth and position, grew up.* In 1682 however the important family event was seen with reason to be the accouchement of the Dauphine. To Marianne-Victoire was entrusted the responsibility of producing a male heir in the direct line (if the Dauphin had no son, the succession went to the Orléans branch: his uncle Monsieur and so to the latter's only son Philippe Duc de Chartres), and she had already suffered two miscarriages.
On 6 August 1682, therefore, the tension was considerable as she went into labour, using the famous royal plank between two mattresses on which both Louis XIV and the Dauphin had been born. Louis was in attendance, taking his turn in promenading the Dauphine round the room as the hours passed. Also present among the host of courtiers exerting their rights to be in on important occasions of state were both Athénaïs and Françoise: the former as Superintendent of the Queen's Household, the latter as Second Mistress of the Wardrobe of the Dauphine herself. It was ordered however that no one wearing perfume should be admitted to the birthing-chamber: overwhelming scents were thought dangerous in this situation. Sniffer-dogs were posted at the door to make sure there were no back-slidings.
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King Page 24