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

by Hilton, Lisa

  Not all French ladies were as frugal in their diet as the Princesse de Soubise. The English traveler Robert Dallington had remarked upon the prodigious greed of Frenchwomen as early as 1604, in his View of France; by Louis XIV’s reign their appetites were positively scandalous. A magistrate attending a court ball in 1667 was disappointed when the lovely dancers appeared to do nothing but eat. Queen Marie-Thérèse was notoriously greedy, and addicted to her Spanish chocolate. She complained that no one enjoyed the spicy Castilian food she prepared in her own apartments, but when she dined in company she gobbled busily, complaining that everyone would eat her food and leave her nothing, which the King thought was very funny. Louis’s own appetite was terrifying, as evinced by the veritable ordeal of refreshments ladies had to endure on journeys with him.

  Perhaps his insistence that women did not refuse food was a polite way of disguising his own greed. The King dined twice a day, and a typical meal might consist of four plates of soup, one pheasant, one partridge, stewed mutton with garlic, ham and salad, pastries, fruit and hard-boiled eggs. In case he was peckish during the night, the royal chamber was provided with the en cas de nuit: three loaves, three cold dishes, two bottles of wine and a decanter of water. Louis’s bulimic eating was of a piece with his other traits — his building mania, his love of the vast, grandiloquent paintings of Le Brun, his love of accumulation and opulent décor, his sexual voracity. He ate as he was determined to do everything else, like a god. Although the fork had been in use since 1648, the King, and most of the court, continued to eat with their fingers. Molière once complained that some of the King’s officers had said he was not good enough to eat with them, and Louis punished their snobbishness by making a midnight feast of his en cas de nuit, sharing it with Molière in his bedroom. The King had dipped his fingers into the same dish as the playwright, and no one snubbed Molière after that.

  Louis also used food to express the gentler side of his nature. He kept his pockets full of sweets, with which he loved to feed Athénaïs and his children. Twice a day, he fed his beloved hunting dogs, seven or eight of which were always to be found in his rooms, with his own hands.

  He himself had a penchant for sweet biscuits dipped in Burgundy, his favorite wine. Champagne wine was also popular, though at that time the region produced a flat, sweet red wine rather than the sparkling white for which it was to become famous. Claret Louis pronounced “surprisingly drinkable” when he tasted it for the first time. A true Frenchman, Louis was interested in the quality and freshness of all his food and drink. He was most solicitous of the turkeys bred at Versailles (which, it must be said, he rather resembled in later life), bestowing on their keeper the grandiose title of Captain of the Royal Turkeys. Louis was also proud of the greenhouses at Versailles, which provided exotic fruits such as pineapple for dessert courses.

  One of Athénaïs’s few surviving letters, to Daniel Huet, a correspondent of her later years, concerns food. “We take the liberty of presenting you with these little étrennes [New Year gifts] which accompany the wishes we are making for your health and prosperity,” she wrote. “That God increases your courage, that He conserves your good humor, maintains the freshness of your color, that He makes your water purgative, the sweets abundant, the strawberries refreshing and the peas more easily digestible.”9

  Various fads stimulated the appetite of the court. The craze for green peas began in 1660, when one M. Audiger, who had been entrusted with the important diplomatic mission of collecting recipes for liqueurs in Genoa, returned from Italy with a hamperful. They were ceremoniously shelled by the Comte de Soissons — “a name of good omen for leguminous vegetables,”10 since Soissons was particularly famous for its green beans — and the cooking of the peas was entrusted to one Sieur Baudoin. “All declared with one voice that nothing could be better or more of a novelty,” reported Audiger proudly,11 and Mme. de Sévigné immediately dispatched the news of this latest trend to her daughter in the provinces. Everyone at court soon became ill from a surfeit of green peas. Louis was not keen on the only sad little passion of his wife’s life until about 1671, when Mme. de Maintenon began to extol the benefits of chocolate (it was impossible for her to enjoy anything unless she believed it had improving qualities). The humble cauliflower, stewed in stock and served with butter and nutmeg, had its day as a fashionable dish, while white bread and meat were consistent symbols of wealth.

  M. Audiger had also picked up the Italian skill of ice-making during his Italian mission, and he introduced to France the new luxury of water ices flavored with fruit, musk, amber and spices. Louis enthusiastically built two ice houses at Versailles, and ice pyramids two or three feet high, filled with fruit and flowers, became the centerpiece of royal banquets. The appearance of ice in summer lent a miraculous air to the delicate, scented flavors, and Louis, of course, loved anything that suggested his power over nature. At summer picnics, guests were served fruit and wine in bowls and goblets cast from ice.

  Athénaïs herself had good taste in chefs. Her personal cook, Mouthier l’Aine, was a member of a dynasty of royal chefs: his father had cooked for the Grand Condé, the head of the aristocratic Condé family, and his son, Mouthier Le Jeune, was to become chef to another royal mistress, Mme. de Pompadour. It is not surprising, given her love of food, the effects of her pregnancies and the general culture of gluttony, that Athénaïs struggled to maintain a slim figure. One poem of the 1670s compares her rather Rubenesque physique with that of the skinny Louise de La Vallière.

  L’une boîte et marche en cane

  L’autre est forte et rubican

  L’une est maigre au dernier point

  L’autre crève d’embonpoint.12

  Most courtiers suffered as a result of their overindulgence, and Louis himself was afflicted by gout. Women seemed to find the vogue for spicy food particularly exciting, although the consequences were all too predictable. An extraordinary example of how unrestrained some women had become occurred when Mmes. de Sceaux and de la Trémoille were caught short in their theater box after a feast of curry. Unable to hold back, they relieved themselves there and then and threw the results into the audience, explaining that they thought this “hygienic.” Just how shocking such acts were depends on one’s perception of standards of hygiene at court.

  In the popular imagination, Versailles is sometimes seen as a gilded dung heap where exotic perfumes concealed foul odors and the courtiers relieved themselves cheerfully on staircases or even beneath their clothes. Certainly the world then was generally a much dirtier place, and the elaborate courtesies practiced at Versailles operated to some extent to soften a fundamental grossness of life which had to be ignored rather than concealed. Paris was the dirtiest city in France, and probably in Europe; it could be smelled from two miles outside the city gates, and the narrow, filthy streets of the town, with their streaming open sewers, piles of excrement and rooting pigs made scented gloves and posies a practical remedy against nausea. Versailles was more modern, though lavatories were practically unknown, and the rumor that ladies urinated beneath their skirts probably came about because of the small chamber pots women took to church with them to hear the famous preacher Bourdaloue, whose sermons were hugely popular, but often lasted for over four hours. These little vessels, named for the preacher, saved women from having to miss a word. The King owned an ornamental chaise percée on which he was ceremoniously seated during the evening ceremony of Coucher (his formal bedtime), but he considerately used a chamber pot in private, as did most people.

  However, his reign might be judged particularly dirty on the evidence of contemporary French conduct manuals, which advised on hygiene as well as manners. In a study of a hundred such manuals from 1500 to 1839,13 the seventeenth century certainly comes off worst. Only the period 1600–1700 does not specify how frequently the nails, mouth, head, teeth and ears should be cleaned, in comparison with the direction “morning and evening” in 1500–19, or “morning and mealtimes” for 1700–19. Under Louis
XIV, then, cleanliness was essentially peripheral and for show, confined in the main to the face, hands and nails.

  Bathing, though, was a popular activity during the summer. Henri-ette d’Angleterre, Monsieur’s first wife, frequently held bathing parties at which she and her ladies ventured into a river in their shifts. Queen Marie-Thérèse indulged in long hot baths, using the famous olive oil soap that is still manufactured in Marseilles today. Louis’s own personal hygiene is more questionable. A brief dab at the hands and lips with a napkin is thought by some to have sufficed him, while others claim that he and Monsieur were rubbed down with spirits and perfume every morning. Clean linen was certainly important, as it signified status as well as cleanliness, and Louis changed his shirt three times a day. To follow suit, the court engaged laundresses from Paris whose dry-cleaning methods involved oils, bran, alum and lemon juice.

  Distressingly, Nancy Mitford has presented Athénaïs to history as a “grubby woman,”14 but it seems unlikely that someone with such a talent for dress and such concern for her beauty would have been slovenly in her personal habits. There was a bathroom at Clagny with a mosaic floor, modeled on the Appartement des Bains that Louis had designed for Athénaïs at Versailles, and she was fond of perfume and scented creams. As Zola’s Nana pointed out, immoral women have a greater stake in hygiene than their dirty but virtuous sisters, and it seems unlikely that the fastidious Louis would have enjoyed sleeping with a sluttish paramour. However, since Athénaïs was so often pregnant, during which time bathing was discouraged, she may not have always been as fragrant as a goddess ought to be.

  Louis may have objected to drinking the water prescribed daily by his doctors, but he loved playing with it. In 1669, at St. Germain, he had created a private suite of four rooms, decorated with mirrors, classical frescos and miniature silver fountains. There was a grotto of mirrors with a fountain rising from the floor into a mirrored cupola, refracting an infinity of tiny rainbows across an infinity of Louis. Streams of light, streams of water; the glittering cascades of the first of Louis’s private playrooms were quintessentially baroque in their duplicitous realism, their sensuous blurring of the real and the imagined worlds.

  The Galérie des Glaces and the famous fountains of Versailles were more formalized, static expressions of this baroque spirit, which was tempered, if not opposed, in much of the architecture of the palace — with the exception of the Appartement des Bains. Here Louis created another voluptuous private space, as much for lovemaking as anything so pragmatic as washing. Situated on the ground floor at Versailles, directly below the King’s apartments, the rooms were a secret refuge for Louis and Athénaïs; a hiding place, an erotic retreat. After a suite of anterooms for undressing and changing into special silk robes came the Chambre de Repos, furnished with an enormous bed before a mirror of equal size, and then the bath, an octagonal pool hollowed from a single block of marble, three meters across and one deep, surrounded by couches and fed by a system of hot taps which dispensed perfumed water. The rooms were decorated in sumptuous oriental style for Louis’s reine sultane with marble columns, polished alabaster and gilding. The bed was embroidered with frolicking pastoral nymphs, suggesting an Eden, a real Sultan’s paradise, where Louis could revel in his mistress’s opulent nudity in sinless, pagan fantasy.

  Such hidden voluptuousness typifies the contrasts of the early years of Versailles — of splendor and squalor, of public elegance in the rigidly stratified etiquette of the public apartments and the private vices of sex, gambling and gluttony. At the height of her fame, Athénaïs was also the heart of the baroque Versailles, its most expressive personality. A description of this period has “the great woman”15 returning from a gondola party, making a floating, fairylike progress through a summer’s night, a naiad in a world composed of endless watery reflections that magnified her beauty even as their tumbling refractions betrayed its exquisite transience. Athénaïs adored the life of the court, and confident at last in the renewal of the King’s love, she could afford to dazzle her friends and disregard her enemies. The mirrors of the Appartement des Bains reflected a grande sultane whose position appeared, finally, to be unassailable.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Jealousy feeds on doubts, and as soon

  as doubt turns to certainty it becomes

  a frenzy, or ceases to exist.”

  In 1667, soon after their love affair had begun, Athénaïs and Louis, got up as shepherd and shepherdess, had performed together in the Ballet des Muses. Flanking them on the stage had been Madame Henriette and Louise de La Vallière, while the Queen, as ever, watched from the sidelines. So many disguises, opening like Chinese boxes to reveal even as they concealed. Louis the man who played Louis the King dancing as Louis the shepherd, with Louise, the official mistress, who had once been the screen for the King’s infatuation with his sister-in-law and now diverted attention from his new love, who still appeared, in Marie-Thérèse’s eyes at least, as her demure lady-in-waiting. As Athénaïs attained the height of her success in the 1670s, it would seem that such disguises had been thrown off, but it was her ability to negotiate the symbolic theatricality of court culture which contributed to that success, to her establishment as “the Real Queen of France.”

  One reason why it is so difficult to penetrate the true character of Louis XIV is that his life was entirely given over to the enactment of his persona as King. Very rarely did any public gesture distinguish his person from that function, or the function from the person, since even the most mundane gesture was formalized into a symbolic royal ritual. True, the awkwardness that had been remarked upon before the beginning of his affair with Athénaïs had suggested that as a young man Louis had been uneasy in his role, but it becomes increasingly problematic to differentiate between his public and private personae, or even to claim that such a distinction existed. Primi Visconti observed several times that if Louis was in company and the door opened, he would compose his features differently “as if he had to appear on a stage. Altogether, he knew well how to play the King in everything.” No understanding of Louis’s relationship with Athénaïs is complete, then, if his lack of a “real Queen,” a consort who was capable of fulfilling an equivalent symbolic function, is not taken into account. Early in the 1660s, Louis’s attraction to his brother’s wife, Henriette, could be explained as much by this unfilled role as by her own personal charms. On one occasion, in 1661, Henriette had even substituted for the Queen in one of the most spiritually resonant of royal roles: the washing of the feet of twelve paupers on Maundy Thursday. This humble ritual, which imitated Christ washing the feet of His disciples, and which was simultaneously enacted by priests and bishops all over France, confirmed the divine aspect of the monarch that formed the sacred justification for his temporal power.

  It was an embarrassment to Louis that Marie-Thérèse had failed to do her duty at the church of St. Denis, and her inability to “perform” as Queen continued to humiliate him, though he was too dignified to reveal this in his behavior towards her. As the only time Marie-Thérèse showed any sign of life was at the gaming table (and even then she never managed to win), Louis must have been exasperated that his brilliant court, so carefully managed to display his gloire in its every aspect, should have had such a rotund and dreary centerpiece. It was Athénaïs who possessed the innate sense of royalty that Louis required, and by the 1670s, Louis’s love for the bewitching shepherdess of the Ballet des Muses had developed into a profound reliance on the woman who comprehended so sympathetically his lust for la gloire as to execute with élan in the theater of the court the role in which his wife acquitted herself so poorly.

  Considered by the court and the ambassadors to be “the Real Queen,” Athénaïs could bank on her public importance to Louis in maintaining her position as maîtresse en titre. She could not, however, afford to be complacent about the fidelity of his affections. Only two weeks after passing on the news of the Marquise’s renewed power, Mme. de Sévigné reported that there was the �
��smell of fresh meat in Quanto’s country.” Marie-Elisabeth (called Isabelle) de Ludres was a lay canoness at the aristocratic convent of Poussay in the Vosges mountains. Ten years younger than Athénaïs, she had come to court in 1670, following a broken engagement at the age of fifteen to the Duc de Lorraine, to serve Henriette d’Angleterre, and subsequently Queen Marie-Thérèse. She was in a sense a lesser version of the maîtresse en titre, tall, slender and blue-eyed, with a mane of tawny hair, and reputedly as witty as she was pretty. With her strong northern accent, she pronounced a “d” as a “t,” which Mme. de Sévigné’s daughter Mme. de Grignan laughed at, but the King found it most charming. Louis appeared altogether very interested in the young woman, who bore the honorary title of “Madame” to reflect her status as a canoness, and the court was awash with rumors that Athénaïs was about to be deposed.

  It was, of course, not the first time Athénaïs had had to cope with a threat to her position in Louis’s heart. Quite apart from the machinations of the dévot party, the King was constantly tempted away from fidelity to his mistress by the bevies of ladies only too anxious to surrender their favors. Athénaïs’s gracious suppression of her inclinations to jealousy, so long as Louis confined himself to casual flings, had, over the years, proved a wise policy. Louis had no real need to seek satisfaction elsewhere, other than for a little sexual novelty, and in general he treated the women who flung themselves at him “like post horses that one mounts but one time, and that one never sees again,” according to the old soldier the Marquis de Saint-Géran, who cheerfully admitted that he would have offered his own daughter for service in the saddle.

  Where necessary, Athénaïs used her wit to confound any hussy who looked likely to prove unusually troublesome, and although a French proverb has it that esprit may be the weapon of the weak, she deployed it with great success. For her own entourage, she selected women whose virtue was exceeded only by their plainness, although one of them, Mlle. des Oeillets, nonetheless managed to focus the King’s roving eye for a moment. Where vigilance failed, rumor, that treacherous ally, could cool Louis’s ardor. One pretty rival, Mlle. de Grancey, who resembled La Vallière too closely for comfort, was dealt with by a whisper emanating from Athénaïs’s supple tongue that suggested she had a secret child by Monsieur’s favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine. The beautiful princess Marie-Anne de Wurtemburg lost her chance when it appeared that she had prostituted herself to a corrupt Jacobin monk who claimed to have discovered the philosopher’s stone. When the King’s former lover, Olympe Mancini, now Comtesse de Soissons, vented her spleen on Athénaïs by ensuring that the Queen was surrounded by the most beautiful maids-of-honor she could procure, Athénaïs railed with great self-righteousness against the loose morals of these young ladies, and dispatched the Duchesse de Richelieu to convey this suspicion to the Queen. Alarmed that she should be harboring a potential harem, Marie-Thérèse played straight into Athénaïs’s hands by disbanding her maids-of-honor in 1673, replacing them with respectable married ladies.