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

by Hilton, Lisa

  After continuing his rush of conquests at Lille and Deinze, Louis ordered the court back to Paris for the winter, to St. Germain and then Versailles. The King quickly saw that he could protect Athénaïs, whose position as a married woman was highly compromising to him, by encouraging his wife to continue in her jealousy of Louise. The more observant courtiers, however, had already seen that La Vallière had been eclipsed by Montespan. During the two-week siege at Lille, when the King bivouacked with his cavalry, including the Marquis de La Vallière, the men joked that in lieu of the sister, the King spent his nights with the brother. But “In truth,” wrote the Marquis de Saint-Maurice, “this passion is only imaginary, as everyone believes he has no thoughts other than for La Montespan.”5 One evening after supper in Arras, the Queen announced that she had received an anonymous letter which explained Mme. de Montespan’s relationship with the King, and Mme. de Montausier’s complicity in it. Athénaïs pretended to be furious, and the Duchesse de Montausier joined her in protesting her innocence. The Queen said that she was nobody’s fool, that she would not be tricked into hating two such loyal ladies. She was so delighted in her delusion that the King had dropped La Vallière that she refused to believe the accusations and, luckily for the lovers, looked no further than the end of her lumpy Hapsburg nose.

  If success on the battlefield made a king of Louis, it was Athénaïs who made a man of him. Courtiers who had not followed the campaign observed on the King’s return that his demeanor, especially towards women, had undergone a radical change. No longer diffident and rather awkward, Louis had added polish and dignity to his fine manners. He became easy and graceful in company, he “began and carried on the conversation like another man.”6 People were more catty about the change in Athénaïs. No longer a fresh and virtuous young bride, she now appeared capricious, coquettish, imperious and difficult to please. This observation may have had more to do with the changed perspective of the observers rather than a real alteration in her personality, as it is hard to believe that her previous commendable behavior was entirely a manipulative affectation. People condemned her because she was not ashamed, just as they had condemned Louise because she was. If her delight in her lover and her magnificent ambitions were now obvious, they were certainly matched by Louis’s own. Their new relationship inaugurated the most dazzling and successful years of his kingship, the years which, even the harshest of French historians concede, deserve to be known as the “Age Montespan.”

  A critic of the Marquise has written that Louis could never have truly loved her since their relationship was governed entirely by desire. Even on such a biased reckoning, if this were the case, Athénaïs must have been a superlative lover for Louis to have adored her as long and as thoroughly as he did. Certainly they both had strongly sensual natures, enjoying gamey, spicy foods, perfumes ( jasmine was a mutual favorite), and the caress of delicate fabrics. Athénaïs has also been criticized for replacing the King’s tenderness with libertinism: “Her tears moved him, not because she was pained, but because he found her beautiful in tears.”7 It is true that, unlike Louise, Athénaïs did go so far as to study the King’s pleasure in every aspect of his life, including his bed. She knew that mere acquiescence, even from a beautiful woman, will not enrapture a man for long, and she sought to please and excite the King to such an extent that his doctors grew concerned about his nocturnal exertions. She took the time to learn her lover’s body, to discover what excited him and how he would react. The hagiographers of Louise de La Vallière suggest that Athénaïs was not “truly” sensual because passion did not make her miserable, as love is great only if it is tragic. Athénaïs refused to suffer. She reveled in her sexual power, and for Louis the pleasure of making love to a thoroughly enthusiastic woman after the guilty tears, the persuasions, the repetitive “surrenders” of the clinging Louise must have been intoxicating. It is interesting to observe that Athénaïs is largely responsible for the racy reputation of the “French favorite,” so much so that these ladies’ “memoirs” are often a byword for pornography. Certainly many of the apocryphal accounts of Mme. de Montespan’s life are thinly disguised erotica.

  As autumn descended damply on the court, Louise gave birth to her fourth child, her son the Comte de Vermandois. Did Athénaïs pity her vanquished rival as she danced with the King, knowing that the screams of Louise’s labor were being stifled by the music of the ball? As was customary, the child was immediately smuggled away, and that same evening, Louis took his medianoche — his late supper — in the new mother’s room, where she received him in full dress, etiquette demanding that she appear not the least indisposed. The physical agony of a tightly laced, heavy court dress must have been extreme. Athénaïs knew that no less would be expected of her if she were to have a child by the King, and she learned her lesson well. During seven pregnancies by Louis, she never once complained to him of illness or fatigue, knowing that he disliked to be reminded of the consequences of his pleasures. For the present, her own appetite for pleasure was indefatigable, and the King obliged her, with balls at Versailles and the Tuileries, ballets and parties at Monsieur’s Palais Royal, plays, racing, masquerades. The court was “a society by nature already selfish, frivolous, infinitely uncharitable, where the fight for favors, that is for life, takes a savage tone.”8 Athénaïs was brave enough and wild enough, she believed, to take on the court and win. That winter she shone so brightly that the court, more or less grudgingly, admitted that she deserved the title by which she was later to be known, “the real Queen of France.” However, her conquest was not yet complete. Was she simply an amusement for the King during the favorite’s pregnancy, her attractions enhanced by the adrenaline of the military campaign? Although her husband was still mercifully in the dark, her position was precarious. She had won the King’s love, but could she keep it?

  She was given an elegantly symbolic proof of her success in the Grand Divertissement the King gave at Versailles in July 1668. This time, the official reason was the peace treaty signed on 2 May at Aixla-Chapelle, which brought the first war in Flanders to a successful conclusion. Yet it was clear that this fête took its tone from the new mistress it aimed to please. The change in Louis’s character was reflected in his choice of theme for his party. Its title, “Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus,” celebrated earthy, rather than ethereal pleasures. The imaginary delights of an enchanted isle give way to sensual gratification. Louis took a good deal of personal trouble over the preparations. He filled the gardens of his father’s old house with marvels, arranging Savonnerie tapestries, marble statues and orange trees in silver tubs among the trees. Following a collation of candied fruits set amid miniature palaces of pastry and marzipan served in the grove of the Etoile, the King led his guests by carriage to admire the Bassin des Cygnes, after which they repaired to the outdoor theater constructed by the Duc de Créqui, where they watched Molière’s Georges Dandin and one hundred dancers in Lully’s ballet Le Triomphe de Bacchus.

  Supper was served by the light of 300 candles alongside a model of Mount Parnassus, mythological home to Apollo and the Muses, equipped with real waterfalls. Sixty lucky people sat down with the King to fifty-six dishes, while another forty tried to look graceful about joining the Queen. Louise, who was still official mistress, sat next to Louis, but as the sound of the violins mingled with the rustle of the fountains, he could barely pull his eyes away from Athénaïs, shrieking with laughter among her friends — one of whom was Mme. Scarron. After supper, 3,000 guests danced outside the old château in an octagonal ballroom, specially created for the occasion by the royal architect, Le Vau, and adorned with great swaths of flowers. As once before, the fête concluded with magnificent fireworks, illuminated 1,000 at a time. When the rockets formed the King’s insignia in the sky, it was as though he had brought back the daylight for the delight of his secret love.

  This fête, the second of the three great divertissements given at Versailles, opens a new era in Louis’s reign. In the plans for the
entertainment, Louis rehearsed the dominance over nature that was to characterize his project for Versailles, intended to show his mastery over his realm. It pleased him to ride roughshod over nature using his wealth, his will and his imagination to subdue it to his desires. In thus humanizing the landscape, he made himself master of it, showing his power to modify and even enhance what God had created. In fact, the three great fêtes of 1664, 1668 and 1674 might be interpreted as three “pagan Masses,” celebrating Louis’s omniscience as monarch. The world of the fête was one of constant mutation, of metamorphosis, the bright lights turning the Grand Bassin into a sea of fire beneath fountains of cascading fireworks. Statues became dancers; courtiers reappeared as shepherds, warriors, medieval troubadours; the very trees seem to uproot themselves to follow the King’s progress. In this shifting, shimmering world of illusions, the one constant was the King himself, the fixed point around which the universe of his ingenuity revolved. Everything — fire, water, night, day — was subjected to his will.

  This sense of Louis presenting himself as the locus of a fluctuating world is connected with his cultivation of the cult of the sun god, the theme that would dominate the decoration scheme of Versailles. Copernicus had compared the sun to a monarch, with a family of stars revolving around his throne, and Louis adopted the idea enthusiastically in his desire to establish himself symbolically as the center of the French world. The stars, in Louis’s own words, reflect the light of the sun “like a kind of court.” His chief designer, Le Brun, conceived the allegorical pattern of the statuary in the garden of Versailles to illustrate the union or linkage which composes the universe, the same “chain of being” ordained by God that was expressed in the monarchical hierarchy of the nation. It was natural, then, that in selecting a symbolic persona for himself, Louis would choose Apollo, traditionally associated, in his incarnation as Phoebus, with the sun. “Since the sun was the emblem of Louis XIV and the poets link the sun and Apollo, everything at Versailles was related to that Greek god,” explained Felibien in his guide to Versailles in 1671. Apollo is the god of the bow and the lyre. He punishes as he cures. He is the incarnation of rational order, the triumph of the human will to civilize against the natural anarchy of his rival, Dionysus. As the sun, Apollo Phoebus, he is called the Luminous, the Pure, while in his traditional relationship with the Muses, he becomes the god of the arts and of music. In sculpture, via the Greek kouros, Apollo is the ideal of masculine beauty and strength, and his gaze, his objectification of the world, is “sublime, enlarging human power against the tyranny of nature.”9 Many contemporary witnesses of Louis’s divertissements commented on how they were dazzled by the brightness that surrounded him, a brightness that seemed superhuman in a world whose darkness, broken only by smoky candlelight, is almost inconceivable to a complacent modern imagination. In a sense, Louis offered more than an identification with Apollo — in the night-made-day of his gardens that night in 1668, le Roi Très Chrétien was inviting his subjects to witness his apotheosis, that moment when a mortal is transformed into a god.

  Louis had found as his consort a woman he felt was worthy to support his self-mythologizing. Athena might, after all, make an exception for Apollo. Athénaïs de Montespan was the perfect feminine counterpoint to Louis’s conception of himself, which he planned to display in the greatest palace Europe had ever seen. Moreover, she was as hungry for power and splendor as Louis himself. The genius loci of Louis’s house seemed somehow to reside in the changing natures of his lovers, and the divertissement was a farewell to the pastoral conceit of Versailles as the King’s pleasure house. It was now to become the literal manifestation of the glory of Louis XIV. The transformation began with Athénaïs.

  Chapter Five

  “Of all the violent passions, the least

  unbecoming in women is love.”

  Cardinal Mazarin left Louis XIV three gifts: his kingdom, his taste and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Without Colbert, no less than Le Brun, Le Vau, Le Notre and Mansart, Europe’s greatest baroque palace could not have been built. While Le Brun and Le Vau designed the house, Mansart constructed it and Le Notre created the gardens, Colbert was the money man. Not that Colbert, the merchant’s son from Rheims who became Mazarin’s secretary, then minister of finance and superintendent of buildings to Louis, ever liked Versailles very much. Like many people, at first he failed to understand Louis’s passion for the place, and repeatedly tried to divert his master’s attention to the Louvre, which he considered the proper residence for the King. Versailles was too flat, too damp, too unhealthy; there was no proper town or even a water supply. Why did the King insist on retaining the unfashionable little house built by his father as the centerpiece of his palace? The foundations were unsteady, and a new hill would have to be made to accommodate Louis’s plans. Moreover, the construction costs — one third of all taxes for thirty years — were so astronomical that Louis could not even bear to look at the accounts. These were Colbert’s headache, and much of the ingenuity he deployed in improving the French economy was motivated by the necessity to alleviate it, but he grumbled and fretted, and his prudent soul was never reconciled to the terrible expense of his master’s dream.

  Colbert was so cold and impassive that he was nicknamed “the North.” His passion was administration — not a prepossessing enthusiasm, but one for which France had reason to be grateful. When Colbert took over, the treasury was meager and agriculture and trade had been severely damaged by the civil wars during Louis’s minority. Nevertheless, Louis was determined to continue the project begun in his father’s reign by Cardinal Richelieu and developed by Mazarin, to create a strong and united nation with a comprehensive cultural identity. Colbert was an unimaginative man, but he understood his master’s ambition for France, and set about providing him with the means to achieve it. In just ten years, he doubled the national revenues, starting with the reform of the tax-collecting authorities to put the treasury in surplus without raising taxes. This money he ploughed back into French manufacture and export, using the court as a showpiece to advertise the best French workmanship. Colbert poked his nose into everything. In addition to sharing the administration of the Academy for Painting and Sculpture with Le Brun, he established and directed the Academy of Architecture, oversaw the building of France’s first navy, controlled import tariffs and customs barriers, improved the French West India trading company and encouraged French expansion into Canada. Louis wrote to his son the Dauphin: “Never forget that it is by work that a King rules,” but the financial regeneration of France was the product of Colbert’s work rather than Louis’s. It seems fortunate, though, that the imaginative part of the proceedings was left to the King.

  Louis XIV’s famous declaration, “Versailles, c’est moi,” encapsulates the spirit of the baroque, and Versailles itself became the model, or ideal, for grand architecture throughout Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The idea of a baroque work, known as the “concettismo,” is “the transformation of a thought through the work of different disciplines,”1 that is, the separate elements of the object are demonstrated by the cumulative, interrelated impact of its constituent elements. At Versailles, architecture, sculpture, painting, decoration and landscaping all worked together to create a symbiotic impact which was greater than that of any element considered separately. Thus the unified appearance of château, gardens, town and roads created a spectacle which was best appreciated if all were examined together. The baroque is the expression of the classical idea of life lived as a spectacle, in which men conduct themselves as “actors” before God and every public gesture becomes ceremonial. It is notable that many seventeenth-century books on religious or public affairs have titles like Theatrum ceremoniale historico-politicum or Theatrum ecclesiasticum. Louis’s genius was to adapt this conception of life as theater for his own political ends. The architecture of Versailles, and the public life of its owner, became, as never before, the theatrical expression of, and the metaphor for, absolute power. Lou
is and Versailles came to exist in a symbiotic relationship, the one personifying and defining the majesty of the other.

  After the divertissement given for Athénaïs in 1668, Louis had his workmen brought in (a total of 30,000 men were needed to complete the château) to create an “envelope” of stone around the original building which would form the core of a new house. The principal artists at Versailles, Le Brun, Le Vau and Le Notre, had worked together at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the residence of Louis’s former finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet. In 1661, Fouquet gave a famous fête at Vaux, the splendor of which enraged the King as it was largely funded by money Fouquet had supposedly embezzled from public coffers. Fouquet was condemned to imprisonment, and Louis availed himself of the treasures of Vaux as well as of its creators. Le Vau designed the château at Versailles in collaboration with Le Brun, who was also the King’s painter-in-chief and responsible for the interior of the château. When Le Vau died in 1670, his designs were realized and expanded by Mansart.