by Hilton, Lisa
The Dutch were prepared to concede 10 million livres, Maastricht, Brabant and the Rhine towns as well as Dutch Flanders, but Louis wanted more. Beyond these concessions, he demanded another 14 million livres, the towns of Nijmegen, Grave and Moers, a trade agreement favorable to the French, freedom of religion for the cruelly oppressed Dutch Catholics and, in a rather nasty piece of pomposity, a tributary medal to be presented to him annually by the Dutch ambassador in thanks for the peace. Despite his victories, Louis’s exigency with the Dutch now threatened him with a European war. In 1673, he left again for the front, accompanied famously by those three “Queens of France” — Athénaïs, Louise and, of course, Marie-Thérèse — whom the populace were astonished to see in the same carriage. Athénaïs was pregnant at the time, and her baby, Mlle. de Nantes, was born at Tournai. The siege of Maastricht began, during which D’Artagnan, the famous musketeer, was killed. The siege is recorded in one of the fourteen canvases devoted to the campaign by the artist Van der Meulen, commissioned years later for the royal pavilion at the house Louis built at Marly. The pictures have a curious quality of stillness to them, their wide plains and chill northern skies reflecting a more disciplined composition than the crowded, sprawling epics painted by Le Brun. Louis seems to glow in the paintings, always the central figure and slightly larger than life, as though his presence drains the color from the muted tones of the surrounding Flemish landscape. On his white horse, the walls of Maastricht before him, the young hero of the painting is the ideal of the warrior prince. Yet in reality, Louis was increasingly beleaguered. In September 1673, the Hapsburg emperor Leopold declared war on France, as did Denmark and the electors of Cologne and Münster. Spain joined in October, while the English concluded a separate peace with Holland in February of the next year.
In July and August of 1674, Louis staged the last and the most extravagant of his three grands divertissements, designed to display his strength and his mistress to the world. It was a gesture of political defiance, as well as one of love; proof that neither Louis’s armies nor his coffers were exhausted. To dance through his gardens with his lover while the whole of Europe schemed against him was entirely typical of Louis’s majestic insouciance. As the separation from Montespan was practically completed, Athénaïs could now be publicly acknowledged for the first time as Queen of the new Versailles. Over six days, Louis choreographed the familiar but still breathtaking range of entertainments — operas, ballets, collations, fireworks — around the sections of the palace which had just been completed. The first event, a performance of Lully and Quinault’s new opera Alceste, showed off the Cour de Marbre; the second, a pastoral ballet entitled the Eclogue de Versailles, used the new gardens of the Trianon as scenery. Les Fêtes de l’Amour et Bacchus, inspired by the beginning of Louis’s love affair with Athénaïs six years before, was performed in the Allée du Dragon. A feast was served in the new suite of “grands appartements,” and the highlight was an illuminated promenade by gondola on the canal, with a light display by Le Brun. For the King, this magnificent homage to his love was a complementary aspect of his increasing martial power, since at Versailles, politics and aesthetics moved in a constant symbiosis.
While the cost of Versailles was one of the trials of Colbert’s existence, Louis always knew how his expenditure would demonstrate his power internationally. One awed envoy from Brandenburg estimated that the house, gardens, fountains, lakes and orangery alone must have cost at least 24 million livres, leaving out the expense of stables, works of art, decoration and domestics.Versailles became a barometer of the political climate of Europe, and when the works paused, the continent worried, since it meant that money was being diverted for the King of France to go to war again. For the court and the ambassadors, Versailles was a book as much as a palace, the means by which the Sun King used all available symbols to create and impose his power. Nothing in the design of Versailles was without its symbolism, from the statues — Apollo in his chariot, or the giant Encelade being crushed by rocks for his defiance of Zeus — to the fountains, whose choreography was minutely devised by Colbert and the master of the fountains in a ten-page manual, so that when the King walked in his garden, they would spring to life in order — the Couronnes, the Pyramide, the Dragon, the grotto of Ceres, the Dosme, the Apollon, the horses, the Latone, the Aigrettes, the bosquets, the Cinq Jets — the music of the water coming alive with Louis’s step and fading with his retreat, as though the rainbow cascades were activated merely by his presence. The legions of undergardeners sprinting between the fountains, struggling at the taps with damp hands and rasping lungs, were invisible, and where the King walked, the music of the water followed him.
“Life,” Louis wrote in his memoirs, “is a mixture of pleasure and greatness.” No one understood this better than Athénaïs de Montespan. One of her chief attractions for Louis was her enthusiasm for and grasp of the crucial seventeenth-century concept of gloire. The literal translation of the word, “glory,” seems too vague a term for an idea which, if not entirely coherent, certainly had meaning for the King and his contemporaries. Gloire encompassed everything that was done to magnify the King’s power and splendor on earth, and all that would contribute to the greatness of his posterity. In the “memoirs” written (or, more probably, ghosted) as an instruction to his son the Grand Dauphin, Louis uses the word repeatedly, and his tone is picked up by other correspondents, most notably Colbert, in relation to him. No action of a monarch’s life, teaches Louis, can be committed without reference to the idea of la gloire, which thus encompasses the monarch’s constant awareness of his own condition as a prince. Even recalling his powerful emotions of grief on the death of his mother Anne, Louis is unable to neglect the opportunity to remind his son of the obligations of kingship: “This event . . . did not fail to affect me so deeply that for several days it made me incapable of giving my mind to any other consideration than the loss I was sustaining. For, although I have told you continually that a prince must sacrifice all his private emotions for the glory of his empire, there are occasions when this principle cannot be put into practice just at first.”
Elsewhere, the King writes to the members of the Petite Académie in 1663: “You may judge, Messieurs, the esteem which I have for you, because I am entrusting to you the thing which is the most precious in the world, my glory.”1 Gloire embraced not only political or military achievements, but cultural and romantic ones, too. Louis saw it as an obligation to encourage the very best painters, sculptors, architects and writers to beautify his reign for eternity — “Nothing contributes more to the glory of the prince than these immortal works which the painters and sculptors leave for posterity.”2 Equally, the love of the most desirable, beautiful women was an essential component of la gloire.
Athénaïs perfectly understood her lover’s equation of glory and seduction, knowing that his love for her was the necessary complement to his political power. “Glory,” Louis wrote, “is an exacting mistress . . . In the love of glory, one must display the same refinements — nay, even the same restraint — as in the tenderest passions.” According to the gallant psychology of the times, a love affair was prestigious or glorious in proportion to the qualities of the beloved, and if Athénaïs occasionally accused the King of loving her only because he judged it his duty to have the finest woman in France as his mistress, she nevertheless agreed with his estimation of her. Whether Louis loved her for herself, or for the fact that her beauty, her wit and her blood made her the most desirable woman in his kingdom, Athénaïs was prepared to live the glorious symbolism of her role superbly.
Perhaps in some ways, Louis did choose Athénaïs as maîtresse en titre because he owed it to his “image.” Neither Marie-Thérèse nor Louise de La Vallière were fitting consorts for a man of Louis’s ambitions. Yet Athénaïs enraptured him in private as much as she flattered him in public. “Her mettle, her spirit, her beauty which surpassed everything seen at the court, flattered the pride of the King, who showed her off like a t
reasure. He was proud of his mistress, and even when he was unfaithful to her he returned quickly because she was more gratifying to his vanity.”3 Athénaïs’s sense of her own worth proved a powerful attraction to Louis, as she seemed to be the only person in his world who was not afraid of him. She teased and scolded him, delighted him with her jokes and terrified him with her tantrums; she loved him as an equal because, as a Mortemart, she believed herself to be so. A Mortemart was a prize even to a King of France. If La Vallière had claimed to prefer the man to the King, then Athénaïs, uniquely, was able to love the King simply as a man, a quality which commanded not only a twelve-year passion, but a powerful respect.
Athénaïs’s faith in her own breeding was the principal basis for her belief in her value. She once wrote to her son, the Duc du Maine: “You are the son of a hero . . . It is well that you should know that you are fortunately spared any admixture of blood less noble — as is often the case with people of your kind [royal bastards] ...You are the exception to the rule, in that in both bloodlines you can count courage, nobility, wit. While this gives you a singular advantage, to be sure, it still imposes an obligation to live up to both.”4
Du Maine’s Mortemart blood, then, imposed as much responsibility as his Bourbon lineage. In enacting the role of Louis’s mistress with maximum splendor, Athénaïs, too, was doing her duty to her great family name.
“Mme. de Montespan was imbued with the same sense of glory as the King,” wrote Mme. de Caylus, and indeed, Athénaïs’s pride was exceeded only by his. She established this mutual goal publicly in 1670 with her selection of the King’s protégé Molière to create a fiveact comedy with music and ballets in which the King would dance as Apollo. She entitled it The Magnificent Lovers, as much for herself and the King as for any imaginary protagonists. Athénaïs and Louis, the title implies, were the most beautiful, most splendid, most imperious lovers in the world. Appropriately, this was the last time the thirty-two-year-old King was to dance in public, and it was the perfect swan song for his balletic career.
The art of ballet owes a great deal to Athénaïs, since it was as a result of the enthusiasm for dance she shared with the King that choreographic sequences and different balletic movements began to be categorized and recorded for posterity. Ballet might be seen as the art which most profoundly reflects the beliefs and ambitions of the seventeenth century. To dance well was to demonstrate the perfectibility of human nature, the harmonious expression of the civilized as opposed to the natural. In the ballet, wrote the Abbé de Pure, “you appear as you are, and all your actions are dependent on the eyes of the spectators, exposing to them the good and the bad with which Art and nature have favored or disgraced your person.”5 Louis took the ballet extremely seriously, rehearsing until he made himself ill, as though to be the finest dancer in the realm was yet another manifestation of his kingship. Ballet was the most civilized of fantasies, illustrating the aspiration to transcend, or at least to seem to transcend, the reality of a world which was often harsh and cruel. Even at Versailles, the glittering apex of the social structure, it was impossible to ignore the poverty and misery of most of the world; even at Versailles, justice was arbitrary, hard and increasingly tyrannical — indeed, Versailles imposed its own cruelties, its own humiliations, on those who were not sufficiently beautiful or well born. Hence the ballet became the ultimate manifestation of the need to appear graceful, suggesting that masked, on a stage, a pastoral idyll or a classicized love, untainted by the vulgarity of life, was attainable.
Appearances, then, were all, and Athénaïs was determined that her personal gloire should match that of the King. From 1674 onwards, she pursued material ambition assiduously. Mme. de Sévigné now gives her another private nickname — “Quanto,” from the Italian card game Quantova — meaning “how much?” If Athénaïs’s desires seemed insatiable, so, too, was the King’s eagerness to gratify them, and he encouraged her extravagance, giving her access to his treasury for her needs, for her spending was yet another indication of his power. But Athénaïs was always too clever to show any sign of covetousness or to turn a hint into a demand. Knowing, for example, that Louis disliked being asked for jewelry — so generous with everything else, he was niggardly when it came to jewels — she never accepted it as a gift from him, preferring to borrow what she wished to wear. This demonstrates a perceptiveness about Louis’s psychology, for he had a peculiarly uneasy relationship with jewelry, probably rooted in the humiliating sale of so many of the crown jewels during the Fronde, and at the time of his marriage he had been mortified by the discrepancy between the dazzling diamonds of his wife’s retinue and the relatively poor adornments of his own. The King was enchanted by Athénaïs’s reticence, and it prompted him to be more generous to her than he had ever been to Louise. In 1674, he wrote to Colbert from the front near Dole, instructing him to have a beautiful casket made for the jewels that Athénaïs might “borrow.”
The casket must contain a pearl necklace, and I wish it to be of fine quality; two pairs of earrings; one of diamonds, which must be fine ones, and one of other stones; a case with diamond fastenings; a case with fastenings of different kinds of stones, which must be removable two at a time. I require stones of different colors, so as to allow of them being changed. I shall also want a pair of pearl earrings. You must also procure four dozen studs, in which the central stones must be removable, while the outer circle must consist of small diamonds . . . It will be necessary to go to some expense over this; but I am quite prepared for it, and it is my wish that the work should not be done hurriedly.6
The pearls in question turned out to be larger than the Queen’s.
Athénaïs extended her influence far beyond personal ornament. She was anxious that her Mortemart relations should share in her good fortune. Despite the unkind jokes speculating that the Duc de Mortemart had greeted his daughter’s disgrace with avaricious delight, the family had not initially reacted well to her scandalous ascent to the position of royal mistress. Any paternal misgivings may have been eased by the Duc de Mortemart’s appointment as governor of Paris and Ile de France in 1669. In accepting this prestigious post, the impecunious Duc was also released from his ceremonial duties for which, at sixty-nine, he considered himself too old. In 1668, however, her brother Vivonne had gone so far as to renounce his right to succeed his father as first gentleman of the chamber as a gesture of protest.
Yet Vivonne, who was, after all, a great friend of the King’s, ended up doing extremely well out of his sister’s disgrace, though perhaps he may have found the charges of nepotism hard to take since, like all the Mortemarts, he was extremely able and talented in his own right. Louis certainly loved him, and never tired of telling hilarious stories about Vivonne’s adventures. Like his father, Vivonne fancied himself as a gallant, but he did not have his father’s way with the ladies; indeed Bussy-Rabutin claimed that Vivonne failed even “with women who until that moment had refused nobody.” Following another family tradition, the tendency of the Mortemarts to ruin themselves and then save the day with a fortuitous marriage, Vivonne had repaired his father’s squandered fortune by marrying a tremendous heiress, Antoinette-Louise de Roisy, who brought with her a dowry of 800,000 livres. Further resources were provided by the King, who paid off 300,000 livres of debts (sadly, less than a fifth of the astronomical family total) and provided another half a million to release the ancient family title of Maréchal de Créqui. By way of further compensation to his friend for the theft of his sister’s virtue, Louis named Vivonne captain-general of the galleys, with charge over the French Mediterranean fleet; vice-admiral of the Levant; viceroy of Sicily and governor of Brie and Champagne — the latter no doubt prompting many jokes at the gourmand governor’s expense.
Yet of all these honors, the only one that is known to have been bestowed as a direct result of Athénaïs’s influence was the maréchal’s baton. She had searched through the King’s pockets for the list of newly appointed maréchals, and treated him to a viole
nt tantrum when she discovered that Vivonne’s name was absent. Louis, who was never able to refuse Athénaïs to her face, explained the omission as an error by Louvois. “Send for him at once,” Athénaïs demanded, and gave Louis a good scolding until the minister appeared. Louvois quickly grasped the situation, apologized and added Vivonne’s name to the list. Nepotism may have been a way of life at court, but for Athénaïs to proclaim her rights so stridently was evidence of either tremendous courage or tremendous arrogance when a few offensive words might have been enough to have a lesser woman whisked off to a convent. Luckily for her, the King enjoyed being berated by the woman he loved, and luckily for the fleet, Vivonne was a brave admiral who distinguished himself throughout the 1670s.
Athénaïs enjoyed a close relationship with both of the sisters who still maintained some contact with the world, the Marquise de Thianges and Marie-Madeleine, who became Abbesse de Fontrevault. Mme. de Thianges, bored by her husband’s country tastes, spent most of her time at court, cultivating her interests in music, theater and opera. She had been a prominent member of the salon established privately by Mademoiselle at the Palais du Luxembourg during the years of her disgrace after the Fronde. It was here that the vogue for pen portraits was introduced, with Mademoiselle extemporizing those of the King and Monsieur for the amusement of her guests. The genre was later mastered by La Bruyère in his Caractères of 1688. Louis would often accompany Mme. de Thianges to hear lectures by the writers Racine and Boileau, and as has been stated, she occasionally substituted for Athénaïs in other respects, though, surprisingly, without arousing her sister’s jealousy. Athénaïs looked after Mme. de Thianges’s family well. She shared with her sister the percentage on all sales of meat and tobacco in Paris that she had been granted, and was also, of course, responsible for arranging her niece’s lucrative marriage. The Marquis de Thianges benefited, too: he was appointed a lieutenant in the Duc d’Anjou’s household cavalry.
