Athenais: The Life of Louis XIV's Mistress, the Real Queen of France

by Hilton, Lisa

  In public, at least, Louis was determined to show that he had the resolution to carry out his policy of autocratic government and to keep the aristocracy firmly in their place. He enacted this resolve symbolically in the Carrousel du Louvre, three days of equestrian sports performed in the gardens between the Tuileries palace and the Louvre in 1662. Over 600 riders took part, divided into five companies, and Louis, demonstrating the talent for spectacle which was to become the signature of his reign, headed the first company himself, dressed as a Roman emperor in a gold and diamond tunic with a plumed silver helmet. Louis’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, led the second, the “Persians,” in satin and white plumes; a former Frondeur, the Prince de Condé, the “Turks,” in silver, blue and black; his son the “Indians,” in yellow, and the Duc de Guise, wearing a green velvet suit, blazed the trail of the “American Savages,” riding a horse draped in tigerskin. In a strategy he was to perfect at the divertissements of Versailles, Louis dazzled the audience with a dragon, pages dressed as monkeys, satyrs on unicorns and with his motto, Ut vidi vici (“I saw, I conquered”). As he was to do throughout his life, he manipulated the vanity of the aristocracy to create a self-regulating order of subjection. Symbolically, the Carrousel enacted the submission of the arrogant feudal privilege which was the source of the Fronde to a new monarchical power that would reside exclusively in the person of the king. It was also, of course, a chance to display himself to advantage to his subjects, and no one in Paris stayed at home. The ladies of the royal household watched from a stand, the colors of the five companies pinned to their fluttering dresses. Would the King notice a shy smile behind a fan, a flirtatiously lowered gaze?

  For the present, it was Louise de La Vallière who had the King’s attention. In the summer of 1661, the court was at Fontainebleau, the exquisitely decorated palace where François I had launched the renaissance of French art. Amid the elegant Mannerist eroticism of Fiorentino and Primatice, the young court gleefully swept away the cobwebs of the troubled past. The former Queen Regent, Louis’s severe, dominant mother, found herself increasingly marginalized, while the dour pieties of dull, dumpy Marie-Thérèse were confined to her circle of Spanish attendants. The King’s set was made up of bright young things: the Duc d’Orléans, Louis’s attractive, effeminate younger brother (known as Monsieur) and his glamorous wife, Henriette d’Angleterre, the sister of Charles II (known as Madame); the King’s cousin by his wicked uncle, Gaston, the Duchesse de Mont-pensier (Mademoiselle); the Comte de Guiche, who was in love with Madame, and the Marquis de Vivonne, the brother of the unkind poetess Athénaïs de Montespan. None of them was older than twenty-five; Madame, the youngest, was seventeen. Her ladies-in-waiting, known as the “flower garden,” were the most beautiful and well-born girls in France, all of them vying to catch the King’s eye. Oblivious of political realities, this jeunesse dorée abandoned themselves to balls, concerts, moonlight promenades — and to love.

  “Behold the reign of love,”4 wrote the Parisian intellectual Madeleine de Scudéry. Love was everywhere, in the ballets, La Puissance d’Amour, Le Triomphe d’Amour, L’Amour Malade, and in the operas and poetry written for the court. The cult of love was conflated with the cult of the monarch, and since there was no more delicate way of flattering the King than by celebrating his prowess as a lover, gallantry, flirtation and intrigue ruled the day. In July, Louis took the role of Spring in the ballet Seasons, symbolizing in his person the emergence of new life. Now that the King had revoked Mazarin’s law against the use of lace, fashion delighted in gaudy excess, and the courtiers draped themselves gorgeously with gold ornaments, lace collars and shimmering pastel ribbons known, of course, as galants. Molière, who had already scandalized the old guard with Les Précieuses Ridicules, a send-up of the rarefied manners of Parisian society, gave a new play, L’Ecole des Maris. Marie-Thérèse watched the performance in her old-fashioned Spanish farthingale, but she was not amused. Louis had married her dutifully, as an appropriate state alliance, but he needed another queen for his court of love.

  “There can be no court without love as there can be no opera without love,” proclaimed the gossip newspaper the Mercure Galant, so no one considered this odd. Traditionally, French kings had had two wives, one for reasons of state, for duty and procreation; the other for pleasure. Charles VII (1403–61) had inaugurated the “position’ of titular mistress with the elevation of his lover, Agnès Sorel, and it was to some extent honorable, after the fashion of a biblical concubine. “Many ladies,” wrote Primi Visconti, an Italian adventurer whose memoirs recount his life at court, “have told me it is no offense either to husband, father or God to succeed in being loved by one’s prince.” In fact, Their Most Christian Majesties were frequently polygamous. Although the position of official mistress was not a formal post, maîtresse declarée was a title recognized within and without the King’s circle, designating the royal favorite. While some queens, such as Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Antoinette, used their beauty, intelligence or the monarch’s youth to their advantage, this was not the case with Marie-Thérèse. Despite her dowry, her dynastic alliances and her dutiful pregnancies, Marie-Thérèse was never to have more influence over Louis than a woman who could offer only her chemise.

  Moreover, adultery was a way of life at court, and as the writer Diderot was to remark in the next century, the French have always been terribly good at it.5 In aristocratic circles, love in marriage was merely a polite formality that glossed over what was essentially a business arrangement, and so, as the playwright Racine observed, it was only possible to believe oneself unfaithful if one believed oneself to be loved. Loving one’s husband was in fact considered positively déclassée. One priest, Abbé Coyer, reprimanded one of his penitents who confessed to lusting after her husband with the words: “It is only six months since the sacrament joined you, and you still love your husband. I dare say your dressmaker has the same weakness for her own, but you, Madame, are a marquise.”6 Another writer, La Bruyère, later remarked that it was as easy to identify the women of Louis’s court by the names of their lovers as those of their husbands. It could only be a matter of time before Louis followed the example of his famously philandering grandfather, Henri IV, and plucked a pretty flower from Madame’s garden to reign as his mistress.

  Since she had neither beauty nor wit, Marie-Thérèse had no wiles to keep her husband faithful. The Queen’s upbringing had been shamefully inadequate for her future role. For a century and a half, Spain had been the most important power in Europe, dominating the continent with the support of the plunder of her enormous colonies in the Americas. France was bordered on almost all sides (except for about 300 miles of Switzerland, Savoy and Piedmont) by the Hapsburg empire, and as a result there was near-permanent conflict. Anne of Austria had been married to Louis XIII in an unsuccessful attempt to cement an alliance, and it was her beloved project that Louis should marry a Spanish princess as a means of reducing the threat. After lengthy negotiations with Mazarin, Philip IV of Spain permitted a diplomatic mission by the Maréchal de Gramont, who would woo the Infanta Maria Theresa on Louis’s behalf.

  Behind their impregnable façade of etiquette, the Spanish had a racy reputation. The laxity of Madrileño morals and the number of prostitutes in the city were a European scandal. Gramont reported drily that the Spanish abstained only from sins which did not give pleasure. Perhaps for this reason, and as a result of the Muslim influence of their former Moorish rulers, the Spanish were highly protective of upper-class women, who lived almost entirely in their homes, venturing out only to go to church. Marie-Thérèse’s father, Philip IV, was particularly puritanical, and court etiquette was crushingly formal. Gramont gleefully imagined the courtiers leaping up from funereal feasts and galloping madly off to the bagnio. When the formal marriage proposal was made, in the massive, gloomy throne room of the Alhambra, the contrast between the sober Spaniards, who were forbidden to wear bright colors, and the beribboned, peacocking Frenchmen was comically e
xtreme.

  Gramont’s description of the performance of a play illustrates the atmosphere in which the future Queen of France was raised:

  The King, the Queen and the Infanta entered following a lady who carried a torch. The King raised his hat to all the ladies and then sat down against a screen ...During the whole comedy, saving a word he addressed to the Queen, he did not move his head, nor his feet, nor his hands, only turning his eyes sometimes from one side to another and having no one near him except for a dwarf. At the exit of the actors, all the ladies rose, and left in single file from each side, joining up in the middle like nuns . . . when they have said their office; they joined hands and made their curtseys, which took several minutes, and one after the other they left, the King remaining uncovered the whole time. At the end, he rose and bowed to the Queen, the Queen bowed to the Infanta . . . the ladies left.7

  Even a comedy was received like a Mass. What must Marie-Thérèse have thought of the cheerful, anarchic crush of great court gatherings in France? She met Gramont’s pretty speeches on Louis’s behalf with stiff remarks about the welfare of her aunt Anne, but when Gramont expressed surprise at her taciturnity, he learned that she had spoken more words to him than to any man, excepting her father and confessor, in her entire life.

  On arriving in France, the young Queen confessed sweetly that she had fallen in love with her cousin through looking at his portraits, particularly one in which he wore a plumed hat. She called him “my cousin with the blue feather.” She was crazy about Louis, and pathetically grateful for any show of kindness. Her placid nature and beautiful manners made her worthy of respect, if not love, and Louis always treated her with consideration and scrupulous courtesy, showing an enlightened affection when he held her hand throughout the delivery of their first child. He came to her bed every night, and performed his conjugal duties regularly, after which the Queen had a special Mass said, coyly delighted to show off the King’s love. It was said that the Queen’s “hot” Spanish blood made her not averse to her conjugal obligations, and she loved to be teased about them, giggling and rubbing her fat little hands with excitement. It is doubtful, though, that she was a happy woman. Still, she lived quietly with her few Spanish ladies, her devotions and her imported dwarfs. She was an acceptable consort and royal mother, but she was never really the Queen of France.

  All the court, then, was desperate to know who would become the King’s favorite. Louis already had some experience of affairs of the heart. He had been relieved of his virginity by one of his mother’s maids, Mme. de Beauvais, “an old Circe,” as the diarist Saint-Simon calls her, who initiated him into the gallant science in a matter-of-fact way as the sixteen-year-old King returned from the bath. She was over forty, and apparently had only one eye, but Louis was gentlemanly towards her, giving her a pension and a house in the fashionable Marais district of Paris, from whose balcony his first crush, Marie Mancini, watched his wedding procession in the company of a certain Mme. Scarron. Marie was Louis’s first real love, and losing her gave him his first taste of the conflict between sentimental inclination and royal duty. She was one of three nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, and Louis was deeply attached to this witty, bookish girl before his marriage (though he had a rather less platonic relationship with her sister, Olympe, who became Comtesse de Soissons after their affair was over), and even proposed to marry her, at which idea even the ambitious Cardinal was appalled. Mazarin wrote to Louis: “God has established kings . . . to watch over the welfare, repose and security of their subjects, and not to sacrifice them to their private passions.”8

  Louis sulked and pouted and wrote reams of letters, but he did his duty and renounced Marie, who wept and plotted and wore black. When they finally parted she clung to him dramatically in the courtyard of the Louvre, murmuring, “You love me, you are King, you weep, and I must go.” Marie would certainly have made a more exciting wife than Marie-Thérèse: she was persuaded into marrying an Italian prince, from whom she escaped, disguised as a man, to sail to France, avoiding capture by Turkish pirates on the way. She attempted to reach Fontainebleau, but since the King was away on a campaign, the Queen had her detained in the Abbaye de Lys, after which she was encouraged to return to Italy. It was not until 1684 that she was permitted to return to the French court, and by then Louis had forgotten her. Nevertheless, it is the Mancini sisters who are to be credited with really introducing Louis to the pleasures of love, and Olympe de Soissons spent the rest of her life at court scheming to win him back.

  Twelve months after his marriage, Louis began to turn his attentions to Madame, his brother’s wife. Henriette was attractive rather than beautiful, but her charm and vivaciousness made her the center of attention during the season at Fontainebleau in 1661. She understandably preferred Louis’s attentions to the indifference of her flamboyantly homosexual husband, who was far more interested in the Chevalier de Lorraine than in his wife. Monsieur, however, had a less tolerant attitude to his spouse’s infidelity than to his own, and complained to his mother and Marie-Thérèse, who, unfortunately for her, had a very jealous temperament. Ironically then, it was Anne of Austria who directed her son’s attentions towards Louise de La Vallière.

  Anxious to avoid a scandal, she nominated three potential substitutes — Mlle. de Pons, Mlle. de Chimerault and Mlle. de La Vallière — and arranged that they be seated near the King at entertainments to distract his attention from Madame.

  Louis and Henriette thought the best way of hiding their mutual affection was to pretend to go along with this scheme, so Louis acted as though he was in love with Mlle. de La Vallière. Unlike the Mancini sisters, and Henriette, Louise was timid and earnest, and Louis believed she loved him for himself. Anne’s ruse worked too well, and soon, in the heady atmosphere of Fontainebleau, where the ballroom was decorated with the triumphant crescent moons of an earlier royal mistress, Diane de Poitiers, they became lovers. Louise apparently made the most of the drama of her defloration, begging the King to have pity on her, and bewailing the loss of her virginity aloud. However, the Comte de Saint-Aignan, who had lent his apartment for the seduction, claimed more briskly that the resistance was short and the victory prompt. Either way, the Comte soon found himself governor of Touraine in return for his discreet assistance. This complicated intrigue, and Henriette’s anger, is described in Alexandre Dumas’s novel Louise de La Vallière.

  The affair has been idyllically described as a “pastoral,” and we might imagine Louise, like a later foolish girl, tripping about on Louis’s arm as a burlesque milkmaid. Since she had very little to offer in the way of intellect, it was lucky that her rather insipid, limping beauty was matched by her excellence at country pursuits, of which the King was very fond. Like Louis, who famously brought down thirty-two pheasants with thirty-four shots at the age of seventy-six, Louise was a crack shot, and enjoyed vigorous horse riding. Certainly, the King was infatuated, and it was with Louise that he conceived the only enduring passion of his life, his love for Versailles. As a means of escaping the reproachful glares of his female relations, he organized small parties in the park of his father’s old hunting lodge, at the time a collection of just twenty rooms and a dormitory. As it was his greatest love, so it was the least explicable: there was no view, no water, no town; the air was poor, the old house was an inconvenience. But Louis seemed to know that he could make this nondescript spot the center of all that was glorious in French culture, and spent much of his life doing so. He once said: “Versailles, c’est moi.” It was his true soul mate.

  Louise bore Louis four children, of whom two, Marie-Anne, who was given the title of the first Mlle. de Blois (1666–1739) and Louis, Comte de Vermandois (1667–1683) survived beyond infancy. She was really only a moonlight mistress, a woman for secret assignations and borrowed beds, and she was unable to sustain her role when Louis made their relationship official after his mother’s death. In the winter of 1662 she fled to the convent at Chaillot, determined to become a nun, but Louis played the roma
ntic hero with relish, galloping after her to fetch her back.

  The fête of 1664 was the inauguration of Louis’s project for Versailles, the announcement of his ambition to the world. It was also the public recognition of Louise de La Vallière as maîtresse en titre, established, and, for the moment, secure. Yet amid the labyrinth of intrigues, cabals and alliances that made up Louis’s court were other ambitions, other dreams, reverberating through the pulse of conversation like the beating of a lady’s fan. Athénaïs de Montespan, so contemptuous of her old companion Louise, had ambitions of her own. The novelist Mme. de Lafayette wrote of the court that “If you judge by appearances in this place you will often be deceived, because what appears to be the case hardly ever is.”9 What, in Athénaïs’s eyes, did the fireworks illuminate? Perhaps she saw the future.

  Chapter Two

  “A bourgeois air sometimes wears off in the

  army, but never at court.”

  Athénaïs de Montespan could afford to be sniffy about Louise de La Vallière’s unremarkable connections. Her own family, the Rochechouart de Mortemarts, were distinguished by two qualities, their breeding and their charm. Theirs was one of the oldest and grandest families in France, and they had lived on their estate at Lussac, in the Poitou region, since the eighth century. The Mortemarts, of whom a Seigneur is recorded in 1094, were united with the Rochechouarts of Lussac in 1205, when Aiméry, the seventh Vicomte de Rochechouart, married Alix de Mortemart. The family motto, Ante mare ondae (“Before the sea, the waves”), is a testament to the antiquity of the line. Athénaïs’s elder sister, Gabrielle, who married the Marquis de Thianges, epitomized the family conviction that to be a Rochechouart was to be superhuman. She considered herself a masterpiece of nature, not only for her external beauty, but for the superior “essence” of which she was composed. She used to tease the King about the inferior lineage of the Bourbons, who had compromised their quarterings by marrying “trade” in the two Medici queens, and she only grudgingly admitted the ancient ducal house of La Rochefoucauld to be equal to the dignity of the Rochechouarts. Louis was delighted at her impudence, since, like all her family, she was extremely witty.