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

by Hilton, Lisa

  She was always the best of company, with graces which palliated her proud and haughty manner and which were indeed suited to it. It was impossible to have more wit, more refinement, greater felicity of expression, eloquence, natural propriety, which gave her, as it were, an individual style of talk, but delicious, and which, by force of habit, was so infectious that her nieces and the persons who were constantly about her . . . all caught the style, which is so recognizable today among the few survivors.

  Athénaïs was ravishing, and yet her modesty and virtue were equally remarkable in this flamboyant, licentious world. Everyone agreed that young Mlle. de Tonnay-Charente was as prudent as she was charming.

  Esprit is difficult to translate concisely. It can mean mind, wit, intellect, spirit, but also something which is essentially a combination of all these, the whole talent and energy with which one approaches the world. In France at the time, esprit was an “acknowledged power with which all the other powers reckoned,”13 something of substance that was a valuable social tool. Athénaïs honed her esprit at the home of the Maréchal d’Albret in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois in the Marais district of Paris. It was here that Françoise de Rochechouart abandoned her baptismal name and became Athénaïs, a name she picked for herself and which suited her much better. Given her later career, the name of the Greek goddess of virginity was an amusing choice, but perhaps even at this stage a very knowing one. Athena the defiant virgin would accept no mortal suitor. She is associated with wisdom and victory, and with the Muses; she is the protectress of ancient Athens and therefore of civilization. In her helmet and dragonskin tunic, Athena carries on her shield Perseus’s gift of the Gorgon’s head, the Medusa whose glance turns men to stone. In so naming herself, Athénaïs was conjuring a powerfully symbolic image ideally suited to the classical playfulness of the Parisian salons. It was a name that emphasized her uniqueness, a name to give her courage, and to invite challenge.

  The salons, or ruelles as they were then known, after the bed alcove in which the hostess traditionally received her guests, were an important intellectual counterculture to the intrigues of the court. In the more relaxed atmosphere of the earlier years of Louis XIV’s reign, before the rigid requirements of attendance at Versailles meant social and political death for anyone who received the dreaded royal “I do not know him,” it was possible for a socially ambitious person to move in circles beyond the court. The most famous salon hostess was the fragile, cultivated Mme. de Rambouillet. It is clear from Athénaïs’s own scanty instruction that enormous effort and initiative were required for a woman to obtain more than a rudimentary education, and Mme. de Rambouillet was inspiring. She was trilingual, well read in literature and theology and interested in painting and architecture — she had designed her own house on Rue St. Thomas du Louvre. Disgusted successively by the coarseness of Henri IV’s court and the dullness of Louis XIII’s, Mme. de Rambouillet retreated to her own salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where she assembled a circle of like-minded men and women.

  The feminine dominance of the salon was its defining characteristic. Here, as nowhere else, women could exercise power by deploying esprit. De Rambouillet and her imitators effectively established miniature courts where women, traditionally the arbiters of manners and taste — “Everything that depends on taste is their province,” praised Malesherbes — directed high-flown conversation. Accomplished, worldly women were a necessary counterpoint to the boorish,

  limited arenas of politics and the army, which were of course dominated by men. Even among the upper classes, male behavior was often shockingly uncivilized. In an etiquette manual of 1671, Antoine de Courtins found it necessary to advise aspiring courtiers not only against belching, farting, spitting and scratching, but against exposure of the penis in company. As an adolescent, Louis XIV himself was not above tipping his mother’s ladies out of their armchairs for amusement. The salon hostesses aimed to purify language and behavior through the elaborate courtesies they demanded from their male guests, who were cast in the roles of courtly lovers and required to “woo” the leader of the salon with their conversation. Such women soon became known as précieuses for the refined ideals of their manners and speech. Some were genuine intellectuals, seriously concerned with ideas, but the term femme savante is more indicative of a gracious, socially accomplished woman than a thoroughly educated philosopher. Other salons were monuments to superficial fashion and pretentiousness, where silly society women flattered themselves by playing at knowledge. As a result, the label précieuse, originally complimentary, soon took on a derogatory aspect, suggesting an affected hypersensitivity, which Molière was quick to satirize in Les Précieuses Ridicules.

  Nevertheless, many salons had serious aims, and Athénaïs gained a good deal of her polish and sophistication at the Hôtel d’Albret. Here conversation was taken as seriously as any other art form, and following Pascal’s dictum that “le moi est haïssable” — it is hateful to speak of oneself — subjects were, in theory, elevated above gossip or personal anecdotes to a more philosophical level, though religion and politics, then as now, were avoided as signs of bad taste. A popular game was the creation of maximes, pithy generalizations about human behavior “in a form combining the maximum of clarity and truth with the minimum of words arranged in the most striking and memorable order.” The most famous collection of such sayings is that of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, who produced them during a six-year attendance at the salon of Mme. de Sablé, Mme. de Rambouillet’s successor as the leading précieuse. Despite Molière’s mockery, the influence of the salons on French literature, language and thought in the seventeenth century was immense, and exceptional in that this influence was largely stimulated by women. The salons, it is suggested, transformed the flowery, overelaborate French language of the sixteenth century into what

  Leonard Tancock has called “the clearest and most elegant medium for conveying abstract thought known to the modern world.”14

  In attempting to rid their language of any traces of barrack-room coarseness, Mme. de Rambouillet, Mme. de Sablé and their followers bestowed upon it a unique precision and grace. In her thoughtful essay on Mme. de Sablé, George Eliot remarked:

  In France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone has the mind of woman passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history.15

  Much salon discourse centered on complex analyses of love, influenced by (admittedly much simplified) Neoplatonic thought. Love was categorized in minute qualitative gradations, most notably by Mlle. de Scudéry in her interminable symbolic novel Le Grand Cyrus. Here, the highest form of love is expressed in a platonic mingling of sympathetic souls (but then, Mlle. de Scudéry was so extremely plain that perhaps this was the best she could hope for). “Love riddles” were a popular stimulus to discussion. For example: “Does the pleasure caused by the presence of the one we love exceed the pain caused by the marks of their indifference?” Or: “Is it more pleasurable to love someone whose heart is occupied than someone whose heart is indifferent?”

  La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes contain numerous thoughts on love, and Athénaïs would certainly have heard witticisms such as “Love lends its name to countless dealings which are attributed to it, but of which it knows no more than the Doge knows what goes on in Venice,” quoted to her at the Hôtel d’Albret. In the salons, her natural talent for conversation gained an assurance and a breadth of reference which made up for any deficiencies in her convent education, while her beauty enabled her to take her learning back to court without being considered an earnest old bluestocking like Mlle. de Scudéry. The suppleness of précieuse conversation was a form of performance, a means of renegotiating accepted ideas, and one in which women, so unequal everywhere else, could enjoy a discursive equality with men. All her life, Athénaïs was able to
use this talent for repositioning to suit her desires; her gift for speech, as much as her beauty, was her first exercise of power.

  Some of the conversational games were more adventurous, involving kissing or the explanation of bedroom dilemmas. A popular pastime was “Jeu de Roman,” in which one member of the group began a story continued by the others. Athénaïs must have excelled at this. Written portraits, or “characters,” were exchanged among the guests, who would try to guess who was represented therein. They were often arch, if not downright insulting, as was the Cardinal de Retz’s observation of La Rochefoucauld: “He has always been chronically irresolute, but I do not even know the cause of that, for in his case it cannot have come from a vivid imagination, since his is anything but lively.”16

  In speaking and writing about love in this fashion, the précieuses suggested that women could take an active role in affairs of the heart. The poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been described by Jean-Paul Desaive as “a narcissistic one-man show in which women served as a pretext, but not as a genuine presence.”17 That is, all the Helens and Cynthias of classicized love poetry were reduced to a generic type of the ideal beloved, which had nothing to do with how real women felt or spoke or acted. Of course, the educated, leisured world of the salons was open to only a privileged minority, but their role was important in establishing that women were reasoning, feeling creatures in their own right rather than the passive subjects of male literary fantasy.

  It was unsurprising, therefore, that the salon debates often centered on the artificial constraints of marriage. While the Scudéry school advocated the suppression of all physical feeling in order to attain the “pure” love that was the standard of thorough sophistication, a liberal attitude to sex was a further demonstration that one was polished and civilized. The view of marriage as a social tool was widely understood and accepted, but the women of the salons questioned the double standard which permitted men to look elsewhere for sexual gratification. That marriage was usually a choice made for rather than by women was perceived as normal, but a degree of rebellion was posited, not only against women’s chastity, but against the “tyranny” of maternity. The social necessity of marriage was rarely questioned seriously, but alternative models for love were suggested; effectively,

  in Carolyn Lougée’s words, “What was advocated here in terms of liberty, nobility and the quest for the perfect friendship was nothing other than the institutionalization of adultery.”18 In the seventeenth century, nothing could be further from the idea of love than that of marriage: Bussy-Rabutin summed this up when he wrote that “the gods of hymen have long been incompatible with the gods of love.” And so the lighthearted cleverness of the salon discussions attempted to resolve what seemed an insoluble conflict between virtuous conduct and the inclinations of the heart. To adhere to the mores of one’s society, to retain one’s moral integrity, and yet to love within a system that made choice almost impossible was the conundrum.

  Yet despite such apparent high-mindedness, the précieuses did not take themselves too seriously. Mme. de Sévigné, who knew Mme. de Sablé and attended the salon of the novelist Mme. de Lafayette, took great delight in ridiculing her son’s amorous misadventures in her letters.

  The young wonder [Marie de Champmesle, a famous actress], has not broken off so far, but I think she will. This is why: yesterday my son came from the other end of Paris to tell me about the mishap that had befallen him. He had found a favorable opportunity, and yet, dare I say it? His little gee-gee stopped short at Lérida. It was an extraordinary thing; the damsel had never found herself at such an entertainment in all her life. The discomfited knight beat a retreat, thinking he was bewitched. And what will strike you as comic was that he was dying to tell me about this fiasco. We laughed a lot, and I told him I was very glad he had been punished in the part where he had sinned.19

  That a son could have a good laugh about his impotence with his mother, and for her to relate the news with glee to his sister, provides a balance to the rarefied ideals of the Scudéry school of love, and both attitudes coexisted in the salon jokes. Louis admired wit of the Sévigné style, but was bored by the verbal meanderings of those who attempted to imitate Mlle. de Scudéry. Athénaïs would always be aware of Louis’s dislike of précieuse pretension, and Primi Visconti observed that if anyone spoke to the King in an elaborately affected manner, he and Athénaïs would mock them together sotto voce.

  Mme. de Maintenon, the secret wife of Louis XIV’s declining years, took seriously the implications of such an interest in love and sex. When, much later, she came to establish her famous school for aristocratic girls at St. Cyr, she strongly rejected the association of nobility with sophisticated idleness. Old hypocrite that she was, she warned her pupils against the dangers of witty conversation and “expressed most vehemently . . . the antithesis between domesticity and bel esprit.”20 The liberated conversation of the salons suggested that traditional marriage and participation in civilized society were mutually exclusive. A refusal to accept the hypocrisies inherent in society marriage, La Maintenon feared, was inimical to Christian virtue.

  Athénaïs had already experienced the application of such lax attitudes towards marital fidelity. In 1653, the Duc de Mortemart, already well past fifty, had fallen in love with Marie Boyer, the wife of Jean Tambonneau, head of the Parisian chamber of commerce. He lived with her quite openly for the next twenty years, and the workings of their scandalous ménage at Pré-aux-Clercs must have had a profound effect on the young Athénaïs. Marie was over thirty when Gabriel became her lover, positively ancient by the standards of the time, and despite her elegant dress sense she had certainly passed the bloom of her first good looks, disguising faint traces of smallpox with a good deal of rouge and powder. The aging lovers attracted some sly comic attention.

  Mortemart le faune

  Aime la Tambonneau

  Elle est un peu jaune

  Mais il n’est pas trop beau.21

  Despite her humble social origins (a “nothing,” sneered the snobbish Saint-Simon), Marie, too, held a successful salon, where she received “the flower of the court and the town.”22 Witty and dashing, Marie gambled furiously, and pursued amorous intrigue with equal fervor. People joked that her skirts were so light that they blew up at the slightest wind. Tambonneau was fully conscious that he was a cuckold, but he turned his horns of shame into cornucopia by recognizing the advantages of his wife’s loose living. Such an adjustment was often the policy of husbands cheated by the King himself. When Louis later cast his eye on the beautiful Princesse de Soubise, her husband prudently made himself scarce for the duration of their fling, and acquired a huge fortune and one of the most beautiful houses in Paris as a reward for his discretion.

  Athénaïs must have felt the affront to her mother’s dignity keenly. Diane was perhaps less disgusted by her husband’s infidelity — after all, adultery was a way of life for aristocratic men — than by his irritating constancy to Marie. Humiliated, she would decamp to Poitou for much of the year. In 1663, she obtained a “separation of bed and board” from her husband, which was an acceptable form of estrangement in a practically divorce-free society, a gesture which shows a good deal of courage and independence. It is extremely unlikely that a young girl would have visited her father’s mistress, but Athénaïs must nevertheless have been influenced by Marie’s social success. To a sheltered convent pupil, Diane’s difficulties might have been the first indication of the fragility of aristocratic marriage, in which love and fidelity were confined to polite appearances. Yet Marie demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to flourish beyond the pale of adultery, provided that her charm and ambition secured her a powerful protector. An inconvenient husband could always be bought off.

  Many commentators have observed a certain ruthless cynicism in Athénaïs’s character as an adult, a trait which may have originated in the betrayal of her mother. One history places these words in her mouth: “I know well that honor
is nothing but a chimera, a pretty fantasy that was invented to hold persons of our sex to their duty.”23 The sophisticated cynicism of the salons can certainly be divined in such an opinion, but the contrast between her father’s worldliness and her mother’s disappointed fidelity was to be one of the main sources of conflict in Athénaïs’s life. She was strongly drawn to the piety and gentleness of her long-suffering mother, torn between the desire to live virtuously and her ambition to exploit the hypocrisies of her society as analyzed by the salons.

  One woman who had the courage to practice what the précieuses preached was Ninon de Lenclos, Paris’s greatest courtesan. Like Marie Boyer, she had been able to attain a position in society despite her disregard for its conventions, and she had also shared Marie’s lover, the Duc de Mortemart, who had interceded for her in a legal action in 1651. Along with her paying customers, Ninon selected her own lovers, whom she divided into three categories, “favorites,” “caprices” and “martyrs.” She was a skillful businesswoman, but her

  lifestyle was one of restrained good taste rather than the dissipated luxuriousness associated with successful prostitutes. Ninon demonstrated that women’s condition could be changed, that marriage could be refused, that love and freedom did not have to remain the prerogative of the male. She played a part in the sophisticated verbal and written culture which grew up around the question of love; Molière sent Tartuffe for her approval, and her opinions were influential to writers such as Mere and Saint-Evremond, whose essays discussed the précieuse project. In her will, she had the perspicacity to leave 1,000 francs to the twelve-year-old son of her lawyer, who struck her as an intelligent child. His name was Voltaire.