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

by Hilton, Lisa

  The Abbesse de Fontrevault was perhaps the most beautiful of the three sisters described by Voltaire as “the three most beautiful women of their age,” and also the cleverest scholar. She had taken up her vocation, rather sadly, under pressure from her father, but resigned herself most successfully to a religious and academic life. She knew Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew and was a prolific translator of the classics and writer of verses, religious tracts and moral treatises, one of which, on manners, remained in print well into the eighteenth century, and she was as successful in her religious life as she was in her worldly studies. Marie-Madeleine, a true femme savante in the intellectual tradition of the salons, was greatly admired by serious thinkers, including Athénaïs’s enemy Bishop Bossuet. Her elevation in 1670 to abbesse of Fontrevault, a great twelfth-century Benedictine convent, was a somewhat controversial measure of Louis’s respect for his mistress’s family, since the post, which carried the responsibility for sixty convents, had traditionally been reserved for women of the blood royal.

  When the Abbesse visited Paris in 1675 to tend the Duc de Morte-mart, who had suffered a stroke, the Queen invited her to dinner and presented her with a diamond worth 3,000 louis. Marie-Madeleine had the Mortemart gift for conversation, with a sharper intellectual edge: “Mme. de Thianges talks like a woman who reads,” it was said, “Mme. de Montespan like a woman who dreams, and Mme. de Fontrevault like a woman who talks.”7 Although she did not appear at large court functions, Louis was so captivated by her conversation that he tried to persuade her to stay at court. It was to no avail — she was committed to her abbey — but she did continue to make brief excursions to Versailles to visit her sisters. It is typical of the rather flexible religious sensibility of the early decades of Louis’s reign that the nuns apparently made no objection to their abbesse paying calls to a woman considered by the dévots to be the disgrace of the nation. The Abbesse was certainly no prig. When she was in Paris, for instance, she would accompany Athénaïs to hear the sermons of a plump Jesuit priest who was the double of Vivonne. The ladies were greatly diverted by hearing worthy sentiments and religious homilies delivered by what appeared to be their roué of a brother got up in a surplice.

  Athénaïs’s main family priority was the welfare of her children by the King. Now that, to her delight, they were established with Mme. Scarron at court, and she herself was officially recognized as the maîtresse en titre, she wanted a proper residence of her own. She already had a little pleasure house, the exquisite porcelain palace of Trianon, which Louis had had built for her in 1670 in the grounds of Versailles, and in the evenings, she and Louis would sail down the Versailles canal, perhaps in one of the two magnificent gondolas presented to the King by the Doge of Venice, to enjoy its superb flower gardens.

  Trianon, an ensemble of four pavilions enclosing a central salon, had been inspired by the discovery of the Tour de Porcelaine at the Imperial Palace of Nanking in 1664 and constructed by Le Vau in the chinoiserie (more properly lachinage) style first popularized by Mazarin. Blue and white Delft tiles covered the walls, while the interior was of polished white stucco ornamented with azure (in a neat dramatic irony, this décor was created by a duo of Carmelite monks). Externally, the miniature palace presented a charming mélange of classical and approximately oriental styles. Aside from the salon, which was designed for more formal entertainments, the main feature of Trianon was the bedroom, named, of course, “La Chambre des Amours,” which was decorated in white, silver and blue and boasted a huge, mirrored bed trimmed with gold and silver lace, tasseled fringes and gold and silver braid. Here, if anywhere, snug inside the gilded canopy and flounced curtains, the King and his love could make a secret world.

  The pavilions were largely given over to the preparation of food, evincing the lovers’ shared delight in gastronomic pleasures, but the great joy of Trianon was the gardens. The little house was surrounded by anemones, Spanish jasmine, tuberoses and orange trees, emitting the heady perfumes both Louis and Athénaïs loved. Here, too, Louis’s gloire appeared to triumph over nature: even in the depths of winter, guests could promenade in a spring garden, thanks to the millions of hothouse flowers that were planted out every day. Like the fountains, fresh flowers seemed to spring up wherever Louis walked — though Le Bouteux, the head florist, had to keep a staggering 2 million flowerpots in constant circulation in order to achieve this effect.

  Trianon, then, was a delightful place for moonlit meetings and private games, but Athénaïs wanted a real château that would display her taste and status. Together, the lovers decided to engage the young architect Jules-Hardouin Mansart, who had taken over the construction of Versailles after Le Vau’s death in 1670, to design a house at Clagny, an estate that Louis had purchased in 1665 to enlarge the parkland of Versailles. The King had originally decided on another little pleasure house, but Athénaïs was tired of trinkets, and when she saw the plans she remarked with audacious contempt that it was the sort of thing one gave to chorus girls. Chastened, Louis gave her one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe.

  Of all the spectacular gifts Athénaïs received, Clagny was the most impressive. It took 1,200 men to build the house which cost 2,074,592 livres (more than $11 million in today’s values). Until the house was completed, Athénaïs lodged in the old manor house on the estate, which was pulled down in 1677, and was involved at every stage — in 1674 Louis wrote to Colbert from the front: “[As to] the plan for the house at Clagny, I have no answer to send to you at present, as I wish to ascertain what Mme. de Montespan thinks about it.”8 Mansart constructed the house on similar lines to Versailles: east to west, with two wings perpendicular to the main façade, which had nineteen windows facing west. At either end of the wings were an orangery and a painted chapel, and in between stretched the gallery, 210 feet long by 25 feet wide, and ornamented with bas-relief sculptures and huge paintings from the Aeneid. Above the entablement hovered allegorical divinities of the seasons, the elements and the four corners of the earth. The dome in the center of the house formed the roof of Athénaïs’s salon, which was reached by five marble steps and surrounded by huge corinthian columns, and had an anteroom in black and white marble on each side. The court was fascinated by Athénaïs’s new palace — even Queen Marie-Thérèse could not resist paying a visit to the works.

  Since both Louis and Athénaïs were passionate about gardens, the garden at Clagny became a wonder. Louis writes again to Colbert: “Mme. de Montespan is most anxious that the garden should be planted this autumn. Do everything that will be necessary to oblige her in this matter.”9 After a second estate had been bought to give the gardeners the scope they needed, Clagny’s park extended to 429 acres. André le Notre, the most celebrated gardener in France, who had created the “miracle” of the Versailles gardens as well as those of Sceaux, St. Cloud, Fontainebleau, Chantilly and the Tuileries, was employed to design the grounds, and remarkably, Athénaïs’s gardens were finished by 1675. Mme. de Sévigné, that ardent gossip, was prompt in paying them a visit. She was delighted by them, and commented on how triumphant Athénaïs appeared amid her workmen. “You know Le Notre,” she gushed. “He has left a little, dark wood which makes a perfect effect; there’s a forest of orange trees in large tubs, on both sides of them are palisades covered with tuberoses, roses,

  jasmine and carnations; a beautiful, surprising, enchanting idea — everybody adores this spot.”

  A charming conceit was the model farm Athénaïs created, prefiguring the vogue for mock rusticity that took off in the following century. This little caprice cost 2,000 ecus, which were spent, in Mme. de Sévigné’s words, on “the most passionate turtle doves, the fattest sows, the fullest cows, the frizziest sheep and the goosiest geese.” Athénaïs, then, was playing at milkmaids long before Marie Antoinette thought of it.

  Clagny has been described as “perhaps the most regularly beautiful house in France,”10 and while it lacked the awesome scale of Versailles, many contemporaries considered
it far lovelier.

  Little is known about the interior of Clagny, aside from the famous gallery which forms the background for the seductive portrait of its mistress. The décor would have imitated that of the interiors of Versailles, where Le Brun and Hardouin-Mansart replaced the gilded paneling popular under Louis XIII with an Italian scheme of pictures inset in multicolored marbles and gilded bronze. Furniture at the time was magnificent but generally rather sparse. However, as the idea that it should provide comfort gained ground, it was becoming more diverse. Moreover, with the stability and refinement of the social life at Louis’s court, it was beginning to be positioned more naturally, grouped for conversation rather than placed standing stiffly against the walls. Appropriately, the “commode” became popular at this time, and although French furniture did not reach the zenith of its beauty and ingeniousness until the eighteenth century, artists like Boulle were already creating pieces which reflected a new style of domestic arrangement, more private and relaxed.

  Athénaïs certainly possessed some of the tapestries that were being produced at the Gobelins manufactory, reorganized by Colbert in 1662 and immortalized in Le Brun’s painting of Louis’s visit there. Many of the images on these tapestries were created from cartoons by Le Brun, some of them, such as the Histoire du Roi or the Histoire d’Alexandre, featuring the King’s personal iconography and others reflecting contemporary fashions such as interest in the exotic East.

  Clagny was very much a baroque house, like Versailles engaging in the heterogeneous dialogue of styles promoted by the ease of intellectual exchange in seventeenth-century Europe. It anticipated, but was not of, the neoclassical age; rather it represented an interaction of the baroque and the classic, the simpler, more contained, classical design of the house being enlivened by the baroque decorations, whose richness and variety formed a contrast to the static lines of the structure. In a sense, Athénaïs herself was very much a “baroque” personality: mercurial, emotional, capricious, excessive. One writer describes her “galanterie,” at once proud and disturbing, ambitious and eccentric, as quintessentially baroque. Her taste combined an exquisite refinement with a liking for the bizarre, almost the brutal, the one exemplified by the delicate silver filigree carriage drawn by white mice she devised to amuse Louis; the other by pet bears she was to keep in her private menagerie at Versailles. The characters of Louis and Athénaïs were drawn to each other not only by their love of magnificence, but by their delight in the fantastic, the theater they could make of their lives; yet this delight might be labeled “classical” for the paganism inherent in the elevation of Louis the Sun King over His Most Christian Majesty. Thus in the personalities of the amants magnifiques was reflected their location at the cusp of a fluid, contrasting interaction between the dominant and the emerging artistic forms of the day.

  One of Louis XIV’s finer qualities as a king was his extraordinary capacity for le détail de tout, which probably stemmed from his great need for control through knowledge. He was interested in everything, and never too concerned with great matters of state to neglect domestic niceties. His letters to Colbert regarding his plans for Athénaïs’s house or her jewelry demonstrate just how intimately she was involved with his life, and the extent to which he consulted her taste in artistic, if not political matters. At St. Germain, for example, which Athénaïs found tired and old-fashioned, Louis directed Colbert to redesign her apartments. “How is it,” he wrote to his minister, “that you have inquired nothing concerning the work that must be done at St. Germain on the terraces of the apartment of Mme. de Montespan?”11 Athénaïs was to have new decorations, a fountain, a birdbath, a little garden, and Colbert was expected to find the time to see to them, in between dealing with small matters such as the government and the economy. Louis always tried to anticipate Athénaïs’s responses. His constant questions were, “What will she say?” and “Will this please her?” If it is allowed that the greatest years of the Great Century were between 1668 and 1680, this greatness must be seen as involving Athénaïs to a significant degree, since Louis was as concerned with and influenced by her taste and her appreciation as he was with his own.

  It was Primi Visconti who christened Athénaïs the Real Queen of France, a role in which she was recognized by at least one ambassador. She was, after all, internationally famous. An African embassy respectfully presented gifts of a tiger, a panther and two lions to Louis, for his new menagerie; a golden pheasant and a Moorish dwarf to Marie-Thérèse, and a selection of pearls and sapphires to the King’s “second wife” (presumably a commonplace for the ambassadors). Athénaïs’s status was such that Saint-Simon describes her salon as “the center of court life — the center of pleasures, of fortunes, of hopes, the terror of ministers” (though as Saint-Simon could not for long contain his loathing for the legitimized royal bastards, he added that it was also “the humiliation of all France”). In later years, the cachet of a royal mistress was such that the eminently chaste Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg selected a lady to whom he gave the title and court functions of being a mistress, though not the more intimate favors the position usually merited.

  The extent of Athénaïs’s political influence was, however, negligible. Despite Mme. de Caylus’s estimation that “Mme. de Montespan had an ambition to govern and to make her authority felt,” it was really only Mme. de Maintenon who secured any purchase on the King’s political direction. Athénaïs was able, of course, to secure powerful and lucrative positions for herself and for her family, and she had some influence on other appointments (her admiration for the oratory of Bishop Bossuet, for example, had led to his appointment as preceptor to the Grand Dauphin, a piece of discernment which, as in the case of Mme. Scarron, Athénaïs would come to regret), but Louis adhered adamantly to the principle that love should not be allowed to interfere in politics. Early in his reign, he had asked his councillors to inform him if they suspected that any woman was exerting undue influence on his decisions, and promised that in such a case he would be rid of her in three days. In his “memoirs,” he expressed his conviction that “time given up to love affairs must never be allowed to prejudice affairs of state . . . And if we yield our heart, we must never yield our mind or will ...We must maintain a rigorous distinction between a lover’s tenderness and a sovereign’s resolution ...and we must make sure that the beauty who is the source of our delight never takes the liberty of interfering in political affairs.” Louis’s rhetoric had certainly collapsed by the time of the ascendancy of Mme. de Main-tenon, but perhaps this motivated him all the more strongly to assert the principle.

  This political mistrust of women was not confined to the King’s lovers. After Mazarin’s death, Louis had effectively banned his mother Anne from politics, despite her obvious capability, while Marie-Thérèse was barred from attending councils, traditionally a prerogative of the Queen Regnant. Athénaïs may have been disinclined to meddle when she recalled the fate of Marie de Hautfort and Louise de Lafayette, the only two women who had held any sway over Louis’s father: Cardinal Richelieu had swiftly dispatched them respectively into exile and a convent. Indeed, with the exception of Anne of Austria, the period is notable for its lack of politically influential women. Louis’s attitude may have been fueled by the brief resurgence of feminine power that had taken place during the hated Fronde, in which the Duchesse de Longueville and his own cousin, Mademoiselle, had played an active part. Women were generally considered dangerous, meddling and too light-minded to comprehend the magnitude of military or diplomatic strategy. It is a pity that neither Mme. de Maintenon in Louis XIV’s reign or Mme. de Pompadour in Louis XV’s, both of whom were women of tremendous intelligence, did nothing to disprove the theory.

  Louis also made it clear that he was bored by too much demanding political discussion, and Athénaïs understood that it was her role to amuse rather than to advise. Still, she created a private sphere of influence through her intimate circle. As well as the advantages she obtained for her immediate fam
ily, she was instrumental in the selection of the Duc de Montausier as the Dauphin’s tutor (the appointment that originally alerted her husband to her infidelity), and the gift of the governorship of Guyenne to her old friend the Maréchal d’Albret, in whose salon she had first met Mme. Scarron. Her allies the Duchesse de Richelieu and Louvois’s mistress Mme. du Fresnoy were given positions in the Queen’s household, and she encouraged the King to make the Queen’s doctor, Antoine d’Acquin, his own premier médecin (a favor that D’Acquin returned by turning a blind eye to those little “love potions” Athénaïs purchased in Paris). Rather eccentrically, Athénaïs chose La Vienne, a famous Parisian swimmer, as the King’s first valet of the chamber. To have power over such a person, even though he was officially only a servant, would have been extremely useful to a royal mistress, for Vienne became one of Louis’s closest confidants. Finally, in addition to the Thianges–Nevers marriage, Athénaïs arranged matches between her nephew Louis de Rochechouart and Colbert’s third daughter, and her niece Gabrielle-Victoire de Rochechouart and the elderly, but very rich, Marquis de Canaples. It was in the marriages of her own children, though, that the extent of Athénaïs’s power was eventually demonstrated. By conferring such favors and obligations, Athénaïs profited from the negative example of the friendless Louise de La Vallière by surrounding herself with powerful supporters, thus ensuring that it was in the interests of many courtiers that she remain maîtresse en titre.