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

by Hilton, Lisa

  If Athénaïs’s political power was concerned merely with her immediate circle, her influence on the culture of the court, and hence that of the nation, was highly significant, prefiguring that of Mme. de Pompadour in the eighteenth century. Louis was determined that the artistic grandeur of his reign should match its military triumphs, to which end Colbert founded four academies between 1666 and 1672 for the encouragement and perfection of the arts. To the Académie Française, founded by Richelieu in 1635, and the Petite Académie de Peinture et de la Sculpture, founded by Mazarin in 1648, were added the Académie de France à Rome (1666), the Académie des Sciences (1666), the Académie d’Architecture (1671) and the Académie de Musique (1672). “His Majesty,” explained Col-bert, “loving the fine arts as he does, will cultivate them with all the more care since they could serve to eternalize his great and glorious actions.”12 All such egotism perhaps seems petty, but Louis’s was at least a glorious ego, and it was matched by that of his mistress. Athénaïs, too, used her new power of patronage and her exquisite taste to promote the grandeur of her lover and of France.

  The Mortemarts were all discerning amateurs of the arts. Athénaïs’s brother Vivonne was one of the first great noblemen to allow that artists and writers might be treated as social equals, on one occasion hauling himself up three flights of stairs to pay a call on the eminent writer Boileau, as the latter proudly records. Athénaïs shared her brother’s appreciation of literature, and was among the first to promote the talents of the “four friends,” the writers Molière, Racine, La Fontaine and Boileau. It was she who selected Racine and Boileau as the official historians of Louis XIV’s reign, and she and the King enjoyed listening to readings of the manuscripts describing the progress of the Dutch wars immediately as they were written, and discussing them afterwards.

  Molière, whose delight in audacious comedy and hatred of hypocrisy appealed to Athénaïs, could not fail to become a favorite of hers, and perhaps she had an additional private affection because it was she who had to some extent inspired him to write Amphitryon. Athénaïs once complained to Louis that his gardens lacked fantaisie, that appearance of enchantment which was so essential in the ballet, and which was to become such a feature of the divertissements at Versailles. Such fantaisie was lavishly orchestrated in Molière’s productions. Thanks to his royal sponsor, he was able to stage extravaganzas such as Psyche, which cost 170,000 livres and boasted a chorus of 300 divinities floating on clouds, as well as a wave machine, flying zephyrs and furies and a troop of imps.

  La Fontaine, author of the famous fables, paid a fulsome compliment to Athénaïs’s taste in his 1678 dedication to Book Seven:

  Le Temps, qui detruit tout, respectant votre appui

  Me laissera franchir les ans de cet ouvrage:

  Tout auteur qui voudra vivre encore après lui

  Doit s’acquerir votre suffrage

  C’est de vous que mes vers attendaient tout leur prix

  Il n’est beauté dans mes écrits

  Dont vous ne connaissez jusques aux moindres traces

  Eh! qui connait mieux que vous les beautés et les grâces?

  Paroles et regards, tout est charme dans vous.13

  Racine’s response to the relationship between Louis and Athénaïs in the early 1670s was much darker and more complex than the conventional flatteries of La Fontaine. Louis liked Racine: he granted the playwright the post of gentleman-in-ordinary, and the two men were close for many years. Racine would read aloud to Louis when he was ill, translating Plutarch from the Latin straight from the page. Although Racine had had a strict Jansenist upbringing, which had instilled in him beliefs to which he would eventually return, he was seduced by the glamor of court life. Seeing him walking with the Marquis de Cavoye, Louis observed, “I often see those two together and I’m sure I know why. Cavoye likes to think he is an intellectual, and Racine fancies himself as a courtier.” The success of Racine’s early drama was largely due first to Athénaïs’s backing, and then to Louis’s, and has been interpreted as implicitly supporting the absolutist statecraft Louis was attempting to impose. Derived from Machiavelli, Racine’s political views at the time accorded with the King’s idea that the interest of the state has primacy over that of the individual; that decisiveness and ruthlessness, rather than generosity, are the prerequisites of stable rule. Racine’s kings are majestic autocrats, but he also explores the effects of their rule on their subjects.

  Bajazet (1672) takes place in a seraglio whose occupants are obsessed with their bloodthirsty, sexually rapacious ruler, Amurat. The erotic potency of the piece is generated by the interplay of power and subjection, the oppression of Amurat’s subjects being the predicate of their capacity for pleasure. Amurat is the center of their universe, but they are emasculated by their need for his authority, a precise dramatization of the dynamics of power as they would come to be enacted at Versailles. The necessity of pleasing the King’s mistress is another aspect of the courtier’s impotence. Even though the mistress’s status would be lower than a man’s, the King’s power becomes hers, elevating her above her sex and emasculating the male courtiers, demoting them to feminized supplicants. Louis’s political project shared the same logic of absolute power as Racine’s theater, its workings “imprisoning the world in its marvel . . . according to the will of the King.”14 The courtiers in Bajazet are frightened by their inability to “see” Amurat, for only his presence illuminates the labyrinth they inhabit. Sense, like flowers or fountains, springs up where he walks. The obsession with vision in Racine’s play accords with the emphasis Louis himself placed on the visual, performative aspect of his monarchy. Not to be seen by the King was simply to not exist. In his “memoirs,” Louis wrote that “the sons of France ...for the good of the State, must never have another retreat than the court, nor any other place of security than in the heart of their brother.” This heart was Louis himself, and it was a grave offense not to appear frequently at court, to be looked at by the King. Those who transgressed were rewarded with the phrase “I do not know him,” or, even more dreadfully, “He is a man that I never see.” Remember the delirious joy of the Abbé Locatelli at having been “seen” by the King. Not to be passed over for places, pensions, promotions, meant literally to be visible, to be seen, and the neuroses of the seraglio of Bajazet are precisely those of the enclosed world of Versailles, where a lifetime could be devoted to catching the trajectory of the royal gaze. If it paused, success; if it traversed, darkness.

  Racine’s play suggests that pleasing the mistress, then, was a step towards pleasing the eye of the king, and in some respects, Athénaïs’s taste was more advanced than Louis’s, which tended towards a rather rigid and grandiose style, as exemplified by the highly competent but unoriginal works produced by the Académie under the direction of Le Brun. These mostly took flattering classical analogies of the King’s life as their subjects, such as the Histoire d’Alexandre, which followed the story from Louis’s favorite Plutarch and flattered his imperialist ambitions. Athénaïs, by contrast, admired the works of Dutch masters such as Vermeer, which Louis found inexplicably — or perhaps perfectly explicably — quotidian. Perhaps he was less interested in art that did not flatter his personal glory. The relationship between aesthetics and vanity is indeed vexed when it comes to the question of patronage. Did complicity in their mutual project of self-aggrandizement mean that Athénaïs and Louis appreciated only art as an accessory to self-promotion? The question might equally be posed of a Borghese or a Medici, and perhaps what matters ultimately is that the works of art were commissioned and executed, whatever the motives of their owners. Even if Athénaïs patronized painters or architects merely out of vanity, her taste transcended the conventional limitations of her time, and her use of her fortune to buy art therefore made a valuable contribution to the cultural ebullience of the Grand Siècle.

  Athénaïs, like Louis, loved music. Concerts were held in her apartments, and she herself played the harpsichord. Her daughter Mlle
. de Nantes was a notable dancer and musician, and Athénaïs encouraged her to learn the guitar, which Louis had brought into fashion by taking lessons in his youth. She also patronized a female musician, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, who composed cantatas to Old Testament texts and was an accomplished harpsichord player, going on to compose a lyric tragedy, Cephile et Procris, about the Nine Years war, performed in Paris in 1694. Athénaïs shared her enthusiasm for music with Mademoiselle, who employed her own troop of violinists and also patronized women artists, most notably the popular singer Hilaire Dupuy. The Vivonnes, too, were keen musicians: one librettist, Isaac de Bensérade, dedicated to the Duchesse de Vivonne a poem which played on the family connection with the navy, as well as on its tendency to corpulence. The Duchesse recited it in her role as a nereid in a ballet in 1665. “I expect him to appear at any moment,” she sang, referring to her lover, played by Vivonne, “and every whale I see reminds me!”

  Athénaïs also took an interest in the career of her Poitou countryman Michel Lambert who, since 1661, had been master of the King’s chamber music. A singer, composer and lutenist, he created many of the ballets in which Athénaïs performed. Lully, the superintendent of music, was also a friend, as was the librettist Quinault. Athénaïs’s taste did not always overcome her vanity, and in 1677 she quarreled with Quinault when the opera Isis was performed at St. Germain. The heroine of Amphitryon did not take kindly to the inclusion of the character of Juno, Jupiter’s wife, traditionally portrayed as jealous and vengeful, implying that her role had changed from seductive lover to nagging wife. Athénaïs was so furious that she had Quinault banned from the theater for two years. She asked Racine and Boileau to compose a more flattering opera on the theme of la chute de Phaeton, but the result was not a success, and Quinault was reinstated to create Proserpine and Perseus.

  Athénaïs has been compared to a minister for culture by French historians, and she extended her enthusiasm for pleasure and gloire to every aspect of her life with Louis, setting the tone for a court which has been described as a paradox of brilliance and uselessness, a dazzling absurdity. Whether or not the King’s concentration of aristocratic power at Versailles was inspired or disastrous is a moot point, but to say that the court of France between 1668 and 1680 was “useless” seems ill-judged. These were the greatest years of Louis’s reign, the zenith of his personal triumphs and of French dominance in Europe. He established himself through his victories in Flanders and the Franche-Comte as the most powerful monarch on the continent, holding the balance of war and peace between his elegantly gloved hands, but the legacy France left to the art of living endured long after the Bourbon armies were disbanded.

  “French” is still an adjective suggestive of elegance, and well into the twentieth century, civilization spoke with a French accent, savored French cuisine, dressed in French fashions, doused itself in French perfumes, admired French artists and poets, imitated French etiquette, attributed all that was associated with refined living to the influence of France. The aristocrat of Louis’s court was ideally an intelligent amateur in every form of activity, a specialist only in the complex art of living. “Wisdom,” wrote the contemporary philosopher Saint-Evremond, “has been granted to us principally that we may know how to handle our pleasures.”15 Athénaïs has been called “the most splendid ornament of this splendid century,”16 the decade or so of her dominance l’Age Montespan, and indeed it was she who taught Louis the art of pleasure, who refined his sensuality, who shared her genius for delight with the King and attracted the admiring gaze of all Europe as she did so. Louis had a predisposition to seek la gloire, but in his enslavement to Athénaïs’s body and his captivation by her spirit he discovered the desire to paraître aux yeux de la Montespan; to be seen by her, to amaze as he was himself amazed. Appearance again. If Athénaïs’s reign corresponds with the greatest years of Louis’s, it is because she was in a great measure his inspiration.

  Chapter Nine

  “Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues

  and plays all manner of parts, even that of

  disinterestedness.”

  The year 1675 proved to Athénaïs that, despite the security she appeared to have achieved, many enemies surrounded her. On 11 April that year, when she went to make her Easter confession at Versailles, the curate, Father Lécuyer, refused in no uncertain terms to grant her absolution. “Is that the Mme. de Montespan who scandalizes the whole of France?” he shrieked through the grille of the confessional. “Well, Madame, cease your scandals and come and throw yourself at the feet of Jesus Christ!”1 Horrified, Athénaïs appealed to his superior, the local priest Father Thibout, but he, too, refused her the sacrament. For a devout Catholic such as Athénaïs, this was extremely distressing, since without absolution she could not receive Holy Communion at the Easter Mass, an essential obligation in the Church. She asked the King to find some senior churchman who could resolve the problem, but Louis rather misguidedly selected Bossuet to settle the dispute.

  Bossuet had impressed both Louis and his mother with the power of his sermons, preached extempore from brief notes. His eloquence, both in the pulpit and in his theological writings, was deservedly famous: his first work, Exposition of Catholic Doctrine on Matters of Controversy, had succeeded in converting the roistering general Maréchal de Turenne. Athénaïs, too, had admired him sufficiently to recommend his appointment as the heir’s tutor. Immensely learned, and full of integrity, Bossuet was not a wicked man, though the glee he took in thrashing the poor Dauphin shows an unpleasant side to his character, but his piety was rigid and absolutely inflexible. The true Church, in his view, had never altered, and Bossuet would never alter either. He saw his role at court as the prevention of scandal, rather than its toleration, and he was genuinely appalled by Louis’s relationship with Athénaïs. So Bossuet’s arbitration in the matter of Athénaïs’s confession took the form of delivering a lecture on adultery to the King. It was courageous of the Bishop to attempt to reform the King at the risk of incurring his displeasure, even though this courage extended only as far as to attack Louis’s mistress rather than the morals of Louis himself. So forceful was his peroration that Louis was overwhelmed, and promised the Bishop that he would see Athénaïs no more. When Athénaïs heard about this, she flew into an hysterical tantrum and took to her bed for two days, seeing no one and tearing the bed linen with her teeth as she slept.

  This sudden crisis represents the culmination of a plan hatched between the Bishop and his new friend Mme. de Maintenon. At the end of the previous year, the humble Mme. Scarron had ascended the next rung on the ladder of power by becoming the Marquise de Maintenon. Since her arrival at court, her quarrels with Athénaïs had increased in proportion to the favor she enjoyed. Able to see her children only infrequently, Athénaïs had grown more and more jealous of their sober, reliable governess, and vented her frustration in furious attacks on Mme. Scarron whenever that lady dared to suggest that sweets and late nights were not good for her charges. Whenever they fell out over the children, Athénaïs would imperiously remind the governess of her inferior status as a dependant. “‘We’ consult us only after their opinion is decided,” complained Mme. Scarron to Mme. de Saint-Géran. “‘We’ demand that I should approve and not give my opinion, I am credited only with good sense, and ‘we’ make use of me only in order to rule all the better.”2

  Following the strategy of Louise de La Vallière, Mme. Scarron began to put it about that she was no longer able to bear the indignities of her position and that she wished to leave the court to become a nun. In her letters to her confessor, the Abbé Gobelin, she describes the ferocious arguments that beset her throughout 1674. It would seem that even Athénaïs was appalled by her own tendency to violence, for her rages, from which, famously, not even the King was spared, were always succeeded by fits of exhausted, repentant sobbing. Nevertheless, Mme. Scarron was not inclined to empathy with her employer’s frustrations. As always, she referred her plight to God.

>   Mme. de Montespan and I had a violent quarrel today, and as I am the injured party, I wept a great deal and she took her account of it to the King; I swear that I suffer a good deal by remaining in a state where I will have such experiences every day, and it would be kind to me to let me have my freedom. I have wished a thousand times to become a nun ...I cannot understand that it is God’s will that I suffer Mme. de Montespan. She is incapable of friendship, and I cannot bring myself to it; she does not know how to encounter the oppositions in me which she finds there without hating me, she speaks of me as she likes to the King, and causes me to lose esteem ...I do not dare to speak to him directly because she would never forgive me.

  She adds, hypocritically, that even if she were to speak to Louis, her debt of gratitude to Mme. de Montespan would not permit her to utter a word against her.

  Of course, Mme. Scarron had no real intention of becoming a nun, particularly as the King had shown his esteem for her by increasing her annual pension to 2,000 ecus, and making her an additional gift of 100,000 livres. The poor widow began to dream of buying a country estate, that great mark of aristocratic prestige, and Athénaïs became yet more nervous about Louis’s increasing fondness for her former friend, probably recalling her own tactics with La Vallière. It is a measure of Athénaïs’s anxiety that the only way she felt she could get rid of Mme. Scarron was by securing for her what she herself coveted: a duchess’s tabouret, or stool, denied to her because of her husband’s refusal to be made a duc. Athénaïs and her sister, Mme. de Thianges, decided to arrange a marriage between Françoise Scarron and the Duc de Villars-Brancas. He was hardly an attractive suitor. Already widowed twice, he was elderly, smelly and hunchbacked (one can imagine Athénaïs dismissing this airily, as it would make the governess feel at home), and, even worse, had a reputation for being dishonest and villainous. Still, a duc of any kind was an extraordinary match for a woman who had begun life as a charity orphan. The fact that Mme. Scarron refused it suggests that she had already conceived a greater idea of her own future than would be satisfied by a second marriage of convenience. She was determined, quite clearly, to make her fortune at court.