by Hilton, Lisa
Frustrated, Athénaïs must have complained directly to Louis, for Mme. Scarron’s letters now describe her concern at the King’s sudden coldness towards her. “My friends have perceived it,” she told the Abbé, “and have made their compliments on my disgrace.” She decided to preserve her dignity by resigning before she was dismissed, but before she could act on her resolution, Louis made the surprising gift of a further 100,000 livres and permission to acquire the estate and manor of Maintenon. Unsurprisingly, the new Marquise de Maintenon abandoned her plans for the convent.
Why did Louis elevate his children’s governess to such a position? It seems that he was reluctant to lose the company of a woman whose conversation and calm temperament he increasingly appreciated, and that he offered her Maintenon to compensate her for her claims of injustice. Throughout their disputes, the new Marquise had made sure that everyone knew just what she suffered at the hands of Mme. de Montespan, and perhaps the King was concerned for his mistress’s popularity. Unconsciously, though, Louis was comfortable with a domestic set-up involving two women — the pattern he had established with Athénaïs and Louise — and it probably flattered his pride that Athénaïs should have a rival of sorts to keep her on her toes. Moreover, Louis genuinely enjoyed spending time with his children and their governess, a pleasure that Athénaïs jealously affected to despise as a bourgeois trait, and he was anxious that the children’s welfare should not be compromised. He dispatched Louvois to effect a reconciliation between the two marquises and, for a while, cordiality reigned again, though the intermittent friendship between them continually flared up into rows.
It was now that Mme. de Maintenon began to see her presence at court as a mission to save the King’s soul, and the first obstacle to her goal was Athénaïs. Mme. de Maintenon knew that Bishop Bossuet had some influence over the King. Although he had no official justification for meddling with the monarch’s conscience, he had made himself popular with Louis by performing such delicate services as supporting Madame Henriette on her deathbed and conveying the news of her demise. He had also been the one to tell Louis of the death of his three-year-old son by Marie-Thérèse, the Duc d’Anjou, in 1671. La Maintenon now worked to establish a friendship with Bossuet, who represented, along with his colleague the Duc de Montausier, the devout faction at court, the “dévot party.” Despite the assistance he had given the King in his first meetings with Athénaïs, the Duc had become rather a puritan since the death of his wife, and these two men saw Mme. de Maintenon as a potential female missionary who could use her still-evident beauty to persuade where reason failed in dismantling Athénaïs’s empire. A new tone now enters Mme. Maintenon’s letters to the Abbé Gobelin. “I beg you to ask God to guide my project for His glory and my salvation,” she asks. This project was being hatched with Bossuet, and together he and the Marquise plotted to terrify the King into abandoning his love.
The dévot party launched their battle for the King’s soul at Lent in 1675, when the celebrated orator Père Louis Bourdaloue preached his powerful sermon on adultery for the third time. His text was daring in its condemnation of Louis’s adultery in particular, and exhorted the King to set an example to his subjects by abandoning debauchery and returning to a godly life. The following preacher, Jules de Mascaron, went even further, condemning Louis’s quest for military glory by comparing a hero to a thief who merely performed at the head of his armies the robberies that petty criminals could carry out alone. With obvious pleasure, Mme. de Maintenon reported the King’s discomfort to her confessor, and though Louis was irritated, he was also troubled.
Bossuet’s strategy was the delivery of a long explication of Christian humility from which the King could infer that the basis of a Christian life was not mere adherence to the outward forms of the Church, but a loving submission to God’s will. His Most Christian Majesty responded peevishly that no one had told him any such thing. Bossuet was not able to persuade Louis that repudiating his mistress was the only route to salvation until she was refused absolution by the Versailles priests at the end of Lent. Had Bossuet himself prompted this refusal? By playing on Louis’s superstitious nature, the bishop convinced him that this unrelated incident was a sign from God that he should change his ways. Louis broke down and conceded that he would break with Athénaïs. “I do not require, sire, that you should extinguish in a single moment a flame so violent,” wheedled Bossuet, “but, sire, try, little by little, to diminish it; beware of entertaining it.” What seems particularly harsh in all this is that Athénaïs was far more pious than her lover, who was never actually refused communion, though he did have enough scruples not to take it. Essentially, Louis was a nominal believer, following, as did almost everyone in France, the observances of the Catholic Church, attending Mass and reading his breviary, but without ever searching his arrogant heart for true belief or repentance. This early cohabitation of faith and sin was perhaps the explanation for the acceptance of His Most Christian Majesty’s “maîtresse declarée,” a position which appears heavily ironic at a Catholic court. In a letter discussing the King as late as 1694, after his “conversion,” the educational writer Fénélon accused him of being superficial in his religion, of loving only his own glory and convenience and of conforming to Christian practice only through fear of hell. It is unlikely that Louis even believed that kings went to hell, but he was nonetheless superstitious as well as sentimental, and Bossuet played on both his pride as a king and his susceptible emotions. Athénaïs, on the other hand, was a devout believer who wished to repent sincerely, at least each time she went to confession, and who undoubtedly struggled with her conscience throughout her career as the national scarlet woman.
After her two-day fit of hysterics, Athénaïs rallied herself and prepared to retaliate. It is likely that she judged that Bossuet and La Maintenon were much less interested in the King’s soul than in having power over his judgment, and sinner though she might be, Athénaïs despised such self-righteousness. She treated Bossuet to a splendid display of anger, accusing him of wanting to dominate the King to feed his own pride, and of plotting to remove her because she stood in his way. Bossuet responded with infuriating smugness that if Athénaïs refused to convert and save her soul, then it was her own choice, but that she should not try to block the King’s path to salvation. Grinding salt into the wound, Mme. de Maintenon described the mistress’s distress to Gobelin, adding sententiously: “Her state moves me to pity. No one cares for her, even though she has done good to many people.” Including the gloating governess.
Having failed to terrify Bossuet with her fury, Athénaïs considered blackmail. She investigated his background to see if there was a skeleton in his closet she could rattle before him, but Bossuet’s habits were irritatingly free of scandal. Bribery was the next option, and Athénaïs tried to wheedle the prelate into relaxing his severity with the promise of a cardinal’s hat. But he was not to be tempted, and Louis made his Easter communion chastely. Humiliated at the failure of her strategies and by the furious gossip of the court, Athénaïs retreated to Clagny to plan her next attack. “The King and Mme. de Montespan have left one another,” reported Mlle. de Scudéry excitedly, “loving one another more than life, purely on a principle of religion. It is said that she will return to court without being lodged there, never seeing the King except in the presence of the Queen.”3
For the next month, Louis kept to himself, seeing his ministers only briefly and spending hours every day with Bossuet, who delivered endless advice on conversion, all centered on the necessity of giving up Athénaïs. Louis suffered a great deal from this conflict of love and duty, conceding only painfully to each of Bossuet’s demands. He agreed to live an honest life, and never to fall into sin again. Desperately, Louis asked Bossuet to permit a final interview with Athénaïs, but the prelate claimed that this was not a sign of true repentance, since the good Christian sought to avoid temptation wherever possible. Never at ease with internal conflict, Louis even went as far as to proclaim in
a trembling voice to the Dauphin that the boy should follow his father’s example in never giving himself up to “guilty attachments.”
Yet the final interview was eventually granted, just before Louis’s departure for the front for the summer campaign, in a glass-walled room and under the watchful eyes of selected pious courtiers. “They could be seen from head to foot. The conversations were long and sad,” Mme. de Caylus reported. Most courtiers, however, did not believe that the separation would last. Mme. de Sévigné had her money on Athénaïs. Athénaïs was improving Clagny as Dido built Carthage, she remarked, but the story would have a different end from the abandonment of Dido by her lover, Aeneas, depicted in the Clagny murals. Even Père Bourdaloue was skeptical, answering Louis’s self-congratulatory question, “Father, you must be happy with me?” with: “Yes, sire, but God would be more satisfied if Clagny were forty leagues from Versailles!” Athénaïs said nothing when asked if she would return to court, but she laughed a good deal, and continued receiving visitors as though nothing had happened.
Mindful of these cynical omens, Bossuet delivered his strongest homily yet to the King just before Pentecost. Once more, he emphasized that Louis must banish Athénaïs completely from his life. “Sire,” he wrote, “you must know that you cannot be truly converted unless you work to remove from your heart not only the sin, but the cause of it.”4 Louis not only had to leave Athénaïs, but to cease even to love her. A copy of this lesson was sent to Clagny, where it moved Athénaïs to tears, perhaps of repentance, perhaps of regret. Moreover, Bossuet insisted to Louis that political and moral good were inextricably entwined, and that a return to his mistress would be the ruin of France. “The profession Your Majesty has made to change His life has filled the people with consolation, it persuades them that Your Majesty’s giving himself to God will render you more than ever attentive to the obligation imposed on you to watch over their misery, and it is from this that they hope for the ease of their cares of which they have great need.”5 Bossuet may have cared that the majority of Louis’s people still lived in miserable poverty, but even so he was mainly concerned with the dismissal of Athénaïs.
During her lover’s absence at the front, Athénaïs appeared to have accepted the separation and even to have “converted” herself. Both she and Louis took communion at Pentecost. Louis had ordered Bossuet to visit her, and the Bishop reported that she was calm, and occupying herself with works of charity. So many tears, so much violence, so much effort, he believed, were signs that God was working in both their hearts.
Queen Marie-Thérèse was of course delighted by Bossuet’s efforts, and attempted to assist him by showing friendship towards Athénaïs, from whom she had inevitably become estranged. Together they visited Trianon, a rather curious choice of excursion, and paid visits to convents (perhaps the Queen was hinting that it was time Athénaïs followed Louise’s example). All the court ladies, headed by the Queen, visited Clagny, where the work continued regardless of the interference of bishops. Athénaïs had lost none of her magnifi-cent airs and displayed a confidence she must have been far from feeling. Perhaps she knew in her heart that if only Louis could see her again, all would be well. Separation might kill their love, but “friendship,” as all lovers know, was impossible.
In fact, distance seemed to have heightened Louis’s ardor. Even amid the excitement and confusion of the Dutch battlefields, he found time to write to Colbert with minute instructions for the improvement of Clagny. “I am much relieved that you have bought the orange trees for Clagny. Continue to take the most beautiful, if Mme. de Montespan wishes it,” he wrote on 15 May. If Louis was sending her orange trees, in which they had both delighted at Trianon, it must have seemed to Athénaïs that their love was not over. In total Louis indulged Athénaïs’s love of orange trees to the tune of 22,738 livres during his absence in the summer of 1675. “The expense is excessive,” wrote the besotted King, “and I see by that that nothing is impossible for you in order to please me.” He instructed Colbert to continue to satisfy any wish Athénaïs might express.
Having successfully besieged Maastricht, Louis returned determined to see Athénaïs again. Perhaps his new conquests had recalled to him the beginnings of their own affair. Perhaps the freshness of the orange trees he had lovingly ordered was too enticing after the mud and sweat of the battlefield. There is no discernible reason for precisely why Louis changed his mind, but the casuistical argument current at court was that if both lovers had renounced their relationship, there was no reason why they should not meet in the harmony of friendship. The Duchesse de Richelieu, one of those friends whom Athénaïs had taken care to cultivate, skillfully championed the idea that the sinner had repented and that she was content merely to take her rightful place at court. After all, as Mme. de Caylus conceded, “Why not? . . . Mme. de Montespan ought to be there because of her birth and her duties; she can live as a Christian as well there as anywhere else.” So when Louis set off for Versailles in July, the court, the world, were agog to see whether his passion for the beautiful marquise would conquer the fear of God Himself.
It appeared that Athénaïs had won. Her apartments at Versailles were prepared as usual, and Louis, alarmed by Bossuet’s exigency, turned the problem of his conscience over to his confessor, Père la Chaise, giving his word of honor that he would “do nothing but what was right.” La Chaise, who had a mistress of his own, one Mme. de Bretonvilliers (nicknamed “La Cathédrale” by Parisians), unsurprisingly supported the King in his wish that Athénaïs be permitted to appear at court. Louvois and Colbert were in agreement for once in their hope that the King would return to her, as they feared that in the absence of a maîtresse en titre, Bossuet might become too intimate with Louis and threaten their own power. Seeing that Athénaïs had influential allies, Bossuet, terrified that all his work had come to nothing, set off to meet the King at Luzarches in a final effort to dissuade him from falling into sin. He was too overcome to speak, but threw himself on his knees, weeping pathetically. Louis ignored his tears, merely remarking, “Say nothing to me, Monsieur. I have given my orders.”
Chapter Ten
“Love, like fire, cannot survive without
continual movement, and it ceases to
live as soon as it ceases to hope or fear.”
Athénaïs had to wait one whole miserable year before her lover returned to her. When Louis arrived at Versailles in that summer of 1675, he announced to the Queen and the Dauphin that he planned to keep the vows he had made before his departure, and that they ought to inform anyone who was curious of this fact. Athénaïs had to content herself with a courteous public salutation and no more. Louis insisted on seeing her only in company, and she was forced to keep her anger and frustration to herself. Nothing could more clearly emphasize the ultimate imbalance of power between the lovers than this fact that, unless Louis wished otherwise, he could use the stringent demands of etiquette to avoid any private scene with his suffering mistress, who had no right, even by virtue of their intimacy, to demand an explanation.
Ever the accomplished courtier, Athénaïs once again made a tremendous effort to keep to herself the pain she must have been feeling. If Louis no longer shared her bed, her public position was as strong as ever, since she had not been replaced, and she took care to demonstrate to the court that her social, if not her sexual standing was unaffected. On the surface, she appeared to agree that the King’s conversion was a splendid improvement, and one that she shared herself. She maintained her disdainful superiority over the other court ladies, giving splendid suppers and queening it over the Queen. She exploited her privilege as far as to ignore etiquette by taking precedence over the duchesses, who by rights ought to have preceded her. If Louis was angered by these liberties, he did nothing to prevent them, feeling perhaps that he had no right to do so, and the King’s approach set the tone for the court. If Athénaïs was no longer maîtresse in anything but name, her actions did nothing to suggest it and, publicly, at least, she man
aged things so skillfully that after a while everyone forgot that a rupture had ever occurred.
Everyone that is, except Bossuet. Furious that Athénaïs was, to all appearances, reestablished, he persecuted her in a most un-Christian manner. In September, while the court was at Fontainebleau, Athénaïs sent her friend the Duchesse de Richelieu to ask the curate if he would hear her confession. Despite the fact that her conduct had been irreproachable for months, the priest reported proudly to Bossuet that he had refused her on the grounds that although she had mended her conduct, she had not repented in her heart. The fact that this was undoubtedly true does nothing to excuse Bossuet’s hypocrisy, since he was perfectly prepared to believe in such a repentance on the part of the King. Bossuet also encouraged Mme. de Maintenon to aggravate Athénaïs while remaining in good favor with Louis — not that she needed much encouragement in this endeavor.
Mme. de Sévigné guessed that Bossuet had good cause to worry, but she was also perspicacious enough to imagine how difficult the situation was for Athénaïs. Of the visit to Fontainebleau she writes: “Everything was ready when a bolt fell from the blue that shattered the joy. The populace says it is on account of Quantova, the attachment is still intense. Enough fuss is being made to upset the curé [Bossuet] and everybody else, but perhaps not enough for her, for in her visible triumph there is an underlying sadness.”1
