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

by Antonia Fraser

  The King gained no kudos from the match, which in the eyes of his subjects awarded him neither the prestige of a royal bride nor the virility signified by a glamorous mistress. A popular rhyme indicated this: ‘I sinned many times with Montespan / I sinned with that good wench / And with this one here / I do my penance.'18 What he gained was what he wanted to gain: a new puritanism at court. O tempora! O mores! There were gallants of both sexes at the court who must have reflected with Cicero upon the change of morals brought by time when at Easter 1684 the King criticised sternly those who had not performed their religious duties.

  A certain gallant lady who must have looked quizzically upon the change was Athénaïs, still present at court, still receiving her ritual daily visits from the King. Her sumptuous New Year present to the King in 1685 was much admired: it consisted of a book inlaid with gold and miniatures depicting all the towns in Holland which Louis had captured in 1672; the text was partly supplied by Racine. The Marquis de Dangeau reported on its exquisite appearance and good taste in his Journal19* (though there was surely an element of nostalgia in recalling those vanished campaign days – and nights). A triple outing for the hunt in the autumn of 1685 in a carriage containing Françoise, Athénaïs and the King also recalled the pairing of Louise and Athénaïs fifteen years earlier. But power had shifted for ever.

  Already Athénaïs had been moved out of her gorgeous apartments to dwell solely in the Appartement des Bains on the ground floor. The inlaid marble floor had to be replaced with parquet to make it habitable in winter. In December it was Françoise to whom Athénaïs applied to get a position with the Dauphin for her son by her first marriage, the twenty-year-old Marquis, later Duc, d'Antin. (She had hardly seen him in childhood after her husband took him away, and her daughter Marie-Christine had died in her early teens.) At Françoise's instance, the King agreed. D'Antin, handsome and lively, with his mother's good looks and her wit, went on to have a distinguished career at court and in the army.

  Françoise's power was however circumscribed both by her own inclination – she had her particular notion of what she should do – and by the King's disinclination to suffer feminine interference in what he saw as the male sphere. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was a case in point. In 1598 a law promulgated by Henri IV had granted civil and religious liberties to his Huguenot subjects. Although Cardinal Richelieu had annulled its political clauses in 1629, it was Louis XIV's Revocation which put into effect forced conversions, with other Huguenots fleeing abroad. All this had everything to do with the direction of Louis XIV's ecclesiastical policy since the beginning of his reign, and nothing to do with Françoise.20

  The only people who blamed her for it were the spiteful Liselotte, who tried to pretend that ‘the old whore' and Father La Chaise together had imposed this penance on the King for sleeping with the Montespan, and Saint-Simon, only nine years old at the time. Distasteful as the Revocation is to modern hearts and minds, still more so the horrifying sufferings of the Huguenots left in France which followed, the Revocation was popular among Louis's predominantly Catholic subjects.21

  Tolerance at this time was widely seen as leading to social disorder – Charles II had met with no success in attempting to establish ‘freedom for tender consciences'. The principal first proposed in 1526 at the Diet of Speyer of cujus regio ejus religio (the religion of the territory was to be that of its ruler) was widely approved. The persecution of the ‘pretended Reformers', that is the Protestants, was seen as adding to the King's glory rather than detracting from it. Louis was praised as extirpating the monster of heresy: ‘this hydra that your hand has strangled’.22

  For reasons to do with her mixed Protestant–Catholic background, Françoise had a far more pragmatic attitude to religion than many of her contemporaries. She was not a persecutor by nature but a persuader. As a young woman, she had come to appreciate the truth of the Catholic religion in which she now profoundly believed. But she also had come to understand that in Catholicism, the state religion, lay the key to the better life, and she expected others to come to the same conclusion. As she wrote in 1681 to her cousin's wife, the Marquise de Villette, who was a Protestant: ‘I hope that God who has given you so many good qualities will withdraw you from a state which makes you useless for this world and the next.'23 One notes the order in which the two worlds are placed.

  Starting in about 1684, Françoise kept a series of little leather-bound ‘Secret Notebooks' in which she noted religious texts, biblical quotations and sayings of the Saints that appealed to her such as St Francis de Sales and St Augustine, along with her own annotations.24* The result is a holy rag-bag with some anodyne pious sentiments: ‘Keep a rule and it will keep you,' for example, and the frequently repeated text from the New Testament: ‘He who does not become as a little child will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' At the same time it does provide a clue as to how Françoise saw herself and her destiny. She must be as submissive towards the King as Sarah was towards Abraham (who were of course husband and wife). Nevertheless, Françoise resolves: ‘that I may not keep from him anything of the things he needs to know from me and that nobody else has the courage to tell him'. Where kings in general are concerned, there is considerable emphasis, in the manner of Bossuet and Bourdaloue, on the reign of God: ‘It is from me, God, that wisdom comes …', ‘Kings reign thanks to me.' And there is a critical reference to the hedonistic court behaviour Françoise had witnessed from the outside: ‘Jesus Christ is offended above all by the lovers of pleasure' (amateurs de plaisirs).

  It was in her work for education, particularly the education of the sort of poor girl she had once been, that Françoise found her true vocation; for it could be argued that guiding the King was a vocation which had been thrust upon her by a combination of circumstances. For all her professed aversion to court life (an aversion which was expressed more strongly as the years passed) Françoise had not been able to resist the challenge and the triumph. But the education of the young was something she had always cared about, even before she was appointed governess to Maine and his siblings. By the means of two ‘adoptions' Françoise honed her skills in this respect.

  Marthe-Marguerite de Villette, known as Mademoiselle de Mursay after the château, was the daughter of the first cousin Françoise had loved in youth, Philippe de Villette. Born in 1671, Marguerite was an intelligent and lively girl, but her relationship with the famous lady she always called her aunt was not to be without its ups and downs. Marguerite also had a rebellious streak. She did not at first appreciate being turned into a little Catholic, although it was to her worldly advantage, any more than Françoise herself had done. By her own account, ‘at first I cried a good deal, but next day I thought the King's Mass was so beautiful that I agreed to become a Catholic, on condition that I could hear it every day – and that I would not be whipped!'25

  Something in Marguerite seems to have irritated Françoise: why could she not accept her place in society and see how lucky she was to have been advanced so far? But not too far. Françoise found her lazy, despite her natural gifts at singing and dancing, and suspected her of frivolity when Marguerite came to prefer the amusing Mortemart-style circle of Madame la Duchesse (Louise-Françoise, the King's daughter by Athénaïs) to the severe circle of her ‘aunt'. Early on, Marguerite, who was pretty enough in her own right to attract suitors, had a putative romance with a member of the King's guard. Madame de Maintenon seems to have taken a kind of grim pleasure in Marguerite's failure to capitalise on her chances, as she saw it. ‘She won't do as well as she might have,' Françoise reported in September 1684, ‘but she will always be better matched than she could have expected naturally.'

  However, when it came to a question of Marguerite's marriage, Françoise actually turned down one suitor, the Duc de Boufflers, saying: ‘My niece is not a good enough match for you.' Yet her eventual choice of the Comte de Caylus, to whom Marguerite was married off at fifteen, was disastrous. Despite his good court connections as a membe
r of the Dauphin's household, despite his military talents, Caylus turned out to be a drunk, who wanted to eat apart from his wife in order to indulge in alcohol unobserved.

  Françoise's second ‘adoption’, that of her actual niece, Françoise-Charlotte d'Aubigné, went much better. Françoise-Charlotte, born on 5 May 1684, the year after the secret royal marriage, was the child of Charles d'Aubigné and Geneviève Piètre, the bourgeoise he had insisted on marrying to his sister's disgust. Against Françoise's persistent benevolence towards the ungrateful Charles should be weighed her equally persistent scorn for Geneviève. Here was a woman who not only ate butter and jam at the wrong time of day but also had a terrible accent ‘as from Les Halles' (the Parisian market). In fact the best and worst of Françoise's character was displayed in her twin reactions to the d'Aubignés as a couple.

  Almost immediately after the little girl's birth, Françoise decided that this child should be her heiress, that is, to the Maintenon estate. Her letter to her brother on the subject was brisk: she would ‘marry [Françoise-Charlotte] according to my taste, since you gave her to me'. He must not expect too much. However, little Françoise-Charlotte turned out to be the most delightful child,* pretty and obedient, young enough to be the grandchild of the King and his secret wife, a foretaste of the pleasures of such a relationship, where sheer youth amuses an older man. However, the admirable Françoise-Charlotte did not escape her aunt's strictures altogether: at one point she was warned not to regard herself as ‘a person of importance' since she was totally dependent on Madame de Maintenon for her prospects and might be fobbed off with ‘some miserable country gentleman if her aunt died.26

  It was a piece of good fortune that Madame de Maintenon's interest in the education of girls, especially girls like herself, of gentle birth but lacking a dowry, coincided with the King's increasing need to be amused by younger women (hence his indulgence to his illegitimate daughters). The result was the establishment known as the Foundation of Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr in 1686: it was for the free education of daughters of the impoverished gentry. Only royal donations were permitted to support the Foundation; the teachers were to be known as the Dames and the girls as the Demoiselles of Saint-Louis. Twelve ladies were invited from the charitable school Saint-Maur to instruct the Dames how to do their work.27

  This was a subject on which there was perfect unison between the King and his secret wife. Neither Françoise nor Louis wanted Saint-Cyr to be a convent. Françoise herself had resisted going into a convent; Louis had not totally appreciated those endless convent visits accompanying his mother as a young boy. Sentimentally interested in young women and their welfare, Louis gave his characteristic attention to detail to matters such as their bonnets. Where once the royal virility had been celebrated by the spectacle of his numerous mistresses, Louis XIV was happy now to be regarded in a patriarchal role: guardian of ‘the pearls of the kingdom'. And he was particularly happy that the daughters of soldiers who had fallen in war – in royal service – should be looked after.

  A satirical pamphlet printed in Holland referred to Saint-Cyr as ‘a seraglio which the old Sultana prepared for the modern Ahasuerus' (Louis XIV).28 This was true only in so far as Louis gloried in the all-female atmosphere of the charming children and girls, aged between seven and twenty, who came to fill the establishment. He loved their modesty: the way that they never permitted themselves to stare outright at the august figure of their sovereign, although they were obviously longing to do so. Louis paid frequent visits, sometimes on foot (Saint-Cyr was conveniently close to Versailles), and enjoyed the excellent music of the scholars. They were divided by age into the youngest Reds, early teenage Greens, Yellows and finally more or less adult Blues. At one point a Mademoiselle de Beaulieu, a Green, with a particularly lovely voice, decided to organise an impromptu song in the King's honour as he was departing on foot after Vespers. So the sweet sound came to him: ‘Let him live and triumph for ever, our hero.' It was just what the King wanted; it was indeed what any celebrated older man might want.

  Madame de Maintenon, for her part, found here the perfect opportunity to control and mould according to her own values. It should also be remarked in her favour that just as Françoise was ahead of her time in her genuine affection for children and their company, she was also modern in her belief in the need for female education to make society work properly (she had already tried one experiment at Noisy in the grounds of Versailles). Françoise spent a great deal of time at Saint-Cyr, sometimes arriving at six o'clock in the morning. On occasion events there produced that rather dry sense of humour which was another aspect of Françoise's character. There was the eager question from a Demoiselle: what should they look out for ‘on entering the world'? Instead of a solemn admonition, Françoise replied lightly: ‘Don't get dirty in the mud of the courtyard.' On another occasion she had spent a long time chatting in the kitchen when the need arose to attend some formal ceremony. ‘But Madame,' cried one of those present, ‘you smell just a little of cooking fat!' ‘True,’ replied Françoise, ‘but no one will ever believe it's me.’29

  No detail was too small for her to notice (acute attention to detail was something that Louis and Françoise had in common). Good teeth for example were a subject that obsessed her, and dentistry was provided for these provincial girls: the wilful Marguerite had been forced to have her inadequate teeth seen to. The girls were impressed that Françoise interested herself in details of their lingerie, and even more so when she ordained that the portions of food should not be too small, tasting the food herself to make sure of the quality.

  The aim was to turn out good Christian women rather than nuns: in fact the emphasis was on the teaching which would enable them to take their place in the world as respectable and useful wives to gentlemen. Thus cheerfulness – always helpful in a wife – was a recommended virtue. French was to be spoken with a proper accent. Sacred writings were obvious materials for study, and some classical texts. It was notable that the theatre was considered a proper area of study where novels were not; but then Louis XIV was and remained a passionate lover of the theatre and the girls could hardly go wrong, could they, in pursuing an art which gave their ‘hero' such pleasure. In January 1689 the King lent jewellery, some ‘brilliant stones' from his collection, as well as suitably rich tapestries, for a performance of Esther by Racine with music by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, a disciple of Lully.

  The playwright was by now a friend and ally of Françoise, and may even have helped her with her ‘Secret Notebooks' as well as the Constitution of Saint-Cyr. He was also a frequent visitor to her château of Maintenon. He went there for example, together with his fellow writer and Royal Historiographer Nicolas Boileau, for rest and recreation in August 1687, when Racine found Madame de Maintenon ‘full of wit and good sense'.

  The simple and delightful dwelling of Maintenon was, as ever where the presence of Louis XIV was concerned, undergoing alterations and additions: these included two new wings designed by Mansart, cobblestones outside where his guards could strike their bayonets with a noise like thunder to greet their King, and a passage for him to reach a special tribune or gallery from which he could overlook the village church and partake in Mass, unseen. It was shortly after a royal visit that Louis granted his secret wife the Marquisate of Maintenon in June 1688: though ironically, Françoise's dream of a peaceful life there, never really fulfilled, was by now coming to an end altogether owing to the increasing demands of the King's militaristic ambitions.30*

  Then there was the aqueduct which had been intended to reach the height of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and which Charles d'Aubigné found ‘grotesque'.† It was part of an ambitious plan on the part of the King to divert the waters of the river Eure to feed the fountains of Versailles. Soldiers toiled and workmen died of fever from the marshes; in the end the project was abandoned.

  Where the themes of plays at Saint-Cyr were concerned, ‘holy theatre' was the desired note. Almost immediately however Racine ran into a problem
with Esther. His play was taken straight from the biblical story of the virtuous Israelite Esther preferred by King Ahasuerus over the ‘arrogant' and contemptuous Vashti, who had ‘reigned a long time over his offended soul'. It was hardly difficult for the gossipmongers to equate Esther with Françoise and Athénaïs with Vashti. The emphasis was all on the renewal of Ahasuerus's life, thanks to the serenity of Esther: ‘The darkest shade of care she wafts away / And turns my gloomiest days to gleaming day,' and again: ‘Everything in Esther breathes innocence and peace.' By the end of the play the chorus of Israelites was saluting Ahasuerus's own virtue: ‘The roaring lion is a peaceful lamb,' and thanking God for the outcome: ‘In Thy hand is the heart of Kings.' To avoid the embarrassment of the amusing parallel to the King's love life, Racine hurriedly wrote a Prologue making it clear that Ahasuerus was nothing but a stage King … This Prologue was spoken by Piety, played by Marguerite, Françoise's protégée and the star performer at Saint-Cyr, who declaimed it by heart.32

  The King adored Esther and saw it at least five times. It confirmed him in his opinion of Saint-Cyr as ‘a dwelling inhabited by Grace', in the words put into the mouth of Piety by Racine.33 He loved the sight and sound of the young girls playing the chorus of Israelites: ‘A swarm of innocent beauties / What amiable modesty is painted on their faces.' The court too was only too happy to find an enjoyable entertainment of which their newly puritanical master actually approved. Madame de Sévigné had wondered how a young girl could encompass the part of Ahasuerus. A little later she was able to see for herself, sitting behind the row of superior duchesses at the front. Afterwards she had one of those banal dialogues with royalty which nevertheless give pleasure to the most intelligent of their subjects.