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

by Hilton, Lisa

  Realizing at last that anger was useless, Athénaïs tried the tactic of friendship she had employed so successfully with La Vallière, feigning a great affection for the girl, who was so intoxicated with conceit at her own success that she was flattered to have the former favorite attend upon her. Athénaïs dressed La Fontanges for court entertainments, styling her hair with her own hands, as once La Vallière had wound ribbons through her own golden locks, and presented her with a New Year gift of a jeweled almanac containing predictions for the four seasons by La Fontaine. Now believing herself to be secure, Angélique allowed her passion for the king to become ever more obvious, boasting of the advancements she would achieve for her family and flaunting her jewels like a goddess. She showed off her new wealth by giving 20,000 ecus to her former companions in Madame’s train. As Athénaïs had guessed it would, this presumption began to irk Louis, especially when La Fontanges had the audacity to order him about in public. Athénaïs maintained a calm façade, writing to the Duc de Noailles about some green velvet to line her coach and remarking casually that the King visited her only twice a day, but that this was better than more frequent and quarrelsome meetings.

  If Athénaïs derived any amusement from the situation, it was from the distress of Mme. de Maintenon, who was obviously furious to have her good work on the King’s soul undone all over again. Athénaïs teased the governess by suggesting that the King now had three mistresses: herself in name, La Fontanges in bed and La Maintenon in his heart. La Maintenon attempted to persuade the maîtresse de corps to give up the king for the good of her soul, but Angélique laughed in her face and asked if she should rid herself of a grand passion as easily as a used chemise. Nonetheless, the governess continued to enjoy the King’s high favor, which further wounded Athénaïs’s pride. Louis seemed to feel no embarrassment at continuing to spend much of his time with a lady who had remonstrated so openly with him on the subject of his amours. Indeed, caught between the tantrums of the old mistress and the vacuous chatter of the new, he took increasing pleasure in the engaging and easy conversation of the Marquise de Maintenon. For the first time in his life, he was experiencing the comfort of a woman’s friendship.

  At the end of 1679, La Fontanges gave birth to a baby boy who, despite or perhaps because of the efforts of the surgeons, failed to survive. The difficult birth coupled with the distress of losing her child began to diminish Angélique’s ravishing beauty. She suffered from the loss of blood and fits of fever, and her fine features were blurred with swelling. Since she had little else to recommend her, intelligence never having been her strongest asset (she may have been as beautiful as an angel, but she was also, in the court parlance, “as stupid as a basket”), Louis began to tire of her. The vivacious, invigorating young girl had been replaced by a whining, clingy woman whose pretensions irritated him and whose vapidity bored him. In April 1680, he granted her her Duchess’s tabouret and a pension of 80,000 livres, and though she received the congratulations of the court from her bed, everyone knew that the elevation was a valedic-tory gesture.

  And although she remained at court for some months, Angélique’s star was definitely on the wane. Louis was kind to her, since she had received her illness “in his service,” as Mme. de Sévigné joked, but he was no longer in love with her. In July the royal family set off on yet another progress in Flanders. Both marquises were included in the party, but Angélique was too ill to travel, and spent the summer languishing in her sister’s new convent at Chelles. Four coaches and six and her famous coach and eight were no compensation for her ruined health, and a duchess’s pension no consolation for the loss of her lover. Too silly to recognize that beauty, in any case now little more than a memory, was enough to attract the King, but not to hold him, Angélique learned too late that she was no match for Athénaïs’s wit or La Maintenon’s charm. During the dolorous hours in the abbey, she formed the view that her continuing ill health had a sinister cause. When she returned to court in August, to universal indifference, strange stories began to circulate of her visit to Chelles. Her doctor had ordered mineral water for her, and a servant had brought her six bottles which, fortunately, she had not touched, for when they were examined the next day, they were found to contain poison. “People are saying,” wrote Mme. de Sévigné in September, “that the beauty believes herself to have been poisoned, and that she has demanded bodyguards.” Easier, perhaps, for Angélique to believe in a conspiracy than to accept that the King no longer loved her.

  In March 1681, La Fontanges gave up all hope of reconquering Louis’s heart, and, as was now traditional, retired with her household to a convent, Port-Royale in Paris. She was now suffering from a pulmonary abscess. Louis sent the Ducs de Noailles and la Feuillade three times a week to ask for news of her, but he did not visit her himself until it became clear that she would not survive. The Duchesse de Fontanges died on 28 June, vomiting horrible pus. She was twenty years old. Posterity has given her a splendid curtain line, thanks to the eighteenth-century writer Sautereau de Mary. “I die content, having seen my King weep for me.” “Sic transit gloria mundi,” commented the Marquise de Sévigné sententiously.

  Angélique de Fontanges’s short life and tragic death lent her a romantic appeal, and the pens of Paris were quick with their eulogies.

  Autrefois a la cour, on me vit égal

  Maîtresse de mon roi, je défis une rivale.

  Jamais un temps si court ne fit un sort si beau

  Jamais fortune aussi ne fut sitôt détruite.

  Ah! que la distance est petite

  Du comble des grandeurs a l’horreur du tombeau.17

  Angélique was buried in the abbey of Port-Royale, where Louis was represented by the Duc de Noailles. Her heart was taken to her sister Catherine at Chelles, after the delivery of a short sermon by the priest at St. Severin which recalled the warning of her dream. “This heart was God’s in the beginning, it was won by the world. God finally took back to Him what was His own, but it was not returned to Him without suffering.”18 It is hard to believe that Angélique would have chosen to be dispatched to salvation quite so expeditiously.

  That she had been assisted in this process by the evil machinations of Athénaïs was a juicy rumor that quickly gained currency. After all, had not the poor Duchess complained that she was the victim of a poisoning plot? Gossip sold better than eulogies, and the pamphleteers soon released melodramatic accounts of La Fontanges’s demise such as The Familiar Spirit of Trianon, or the Phantom of the Duchesse de Fontanges, recounting the Secrets of her Loves, the Particulars of her Poisoning, and her Death. The quarrels between Athénaïs and Angélique had been well known, and although Athénaïs was popular with le peuple, the temptation to create a scandal was irresistible. But what the Parisian hacks did not know was that a far more outrageous drama was waiting to explode on the public stage.

  Chapter Twelve

  “The passions set aside justice and work for

  their own ends, and it is therefore dangerous to

  follow them and necessary to treat them with

  caution even when they seem most reasonable.”

  Late in 1669, Louise de La Vallière, still officially maîtresse en titre, had fallen violently ill. In her meditations on her life, Reflections on the Mercy of God, composed in the seclusion of her convent, she remembered feeling “like a poor criminal on the scaffold, waiting until the preparations for his execution had been completed.” When she recovered, she claimed that her brush with death caused her to begin the process of atonement that ultimately led her to the Carmelites.

  In 1668, the Président de Mesmes, father-in-law to the Duc de Vivonne, found himself dealing with a rather embarrassing case in the court of the Châtelet. A pair of charlatans named Adam Coueret (who went by the alias of Lesage) and the Abbé Mariette were on trial for sorcery. Although the offense was extremely serious, it was hard to believe these two shabby mountebanks, who boasted to the judges of their proficiency in astrology, cartomancy, alch
emy and phrenology, and of the “scientific potions” they concocted from a predictably horrible list of ingredients such as bat’s blood, toad’s bones and Spanish fly, were really capable of communing with any dark powers. They trafficked their concoctions to credulous upper-class women who believed them to be aphrodisiacs, mystically empowered by being passed “under the chalice” by Mariette, who was a bona fide priest. By and large, the sorcerers claimed, these noblewomen had wished for charms to make the King fall in love with them, so that they could succeed Louise de La Vallière in the coveted role of maîtresse declarée. Among their hopeful customers had been the Marquise du Baugy, the Comtesse de Roure, the Comtesse de Gramont, the Vicomtesse de Polignac, the Duchesse de Vivonne and the Marquise de Montespan. Shocked to hear his daughter and her sister-in-law named in connection with such blasphemous activity, the Président pressed Mariette further. He explained that Lesage had recruited the clients, telling them that the powers of a priest could be put to use for their own ends. Without the benefit of a stole or a surplice, or even of a church, Mariette could make an incantation over their head and their prayers would be answered. Over whom had Mariette recited this inverted gospel? “All those persons whom Lesage brought to me: Mme. de Baugy, Mme. de Raffetot, Mme. de Montespan . . .”

  Both Lesage and Mariette were lucky, considering that a conviction for sorcery carried the death penalty, and by burning rather than hanging. Lesage got away with nine years in the galleys, Mariette nine years’ banishment. Prudently, the names of Mme. de Montespan and the Duchesse de Vivonne were forgotten after the first interrogation. Since Louise de La Vallière was still the official mistress, the two prisoners could not have hoped to gain anything by implicating Mme. de Montespan in their “powder” trade, but given her real position at the time, it would obviously not have done for the Président de Mesmes to have involved her in any form of scandal. Soothsayers were rather a vogue among the ladies of the court, and there was no real harm in fortune-telling or buying charms. But love potions to ensnare the King? The Vivonnes stood to benefit if Mme. de Montespan retained her hold on the King, so the Président thought it prudent to leave her name out of things.

  The case was never made public. Lesage’s sentence was commuted in 1674, the same year that Louise de La Vallière finally left the court. Perhaps Athénaïs’s “powders” had been efficacious after all . . .

  It is quite understandable that Athénaïs would turn to supernatural aid in her pursuit of the King’s constancy. Lucifer was still a force to be reckoned with in the Grand Siècle. Just as the clear lines of the King’s new house at Versailles were blurred by the more sinuous rhythms of the baroque style, so the incipient classicism of the times was grafted on to the superstitions of an older, darker world. It was not yet quite the age of enlightenment. Science had not yet emerged from the polymorphous explorations of the Renaissance “natural philosopher,” the magus, the mystic. The Church gave great credence still to the person of Satan and to his power: in the Catechism, the name of Satan was invoked sixty-seven times — four more than the name of Christ Himself. The Devil and his legions of demons were as real and as powerful as the Holy Saints, good and evil illuminated side by side in the candlelight of the churches, worked in the damp stone in a familiar iconography of martyrs’ hearts and cloven hoofs, suppliant eyes and devilish horns. The Devil’s work was seen everywhere: in blighted crops, in the wailing of a sick child, in the coldness of a lover’s glance. Each of life’s misfortunes had its own particular saint and a different magical remedy. The rites of Catholicism, which relied on images and the mystical intervention of the priest, encouraged such reliance on the supernatural. If something was lost and St. Anthony was deaf, then the ritual of the sieve and the shears might recover the object. While St. Claire heard appeals for the blind, a cat’s eye worn on the chest could also improve the sight. Bad luck at cards, a spotty complexion, an inconvenient husband or an empty purse — each problem was the province of a saint, and if there was no specific saint to deal with it, then a charm, a powder or a visit to the sorceress might solve it. La Fontaine wrote an amusing riddle on the subject:

  Whether you lost an earring or a lover

  Had a husband who refused to die

  A jealous wife, a possessive mother

  Or any suchlike bother

  Straight to the soothsayer you’d fly.1

  One of the most popular and successful soothsayers was Catherine Monvoisin, known to her elegant lady customers as La Voisin. In the 1670s, her business was booming. Despite her useless husband, a cowed and incompetent merchant, La Voisin had acquired a pretty suburban villa and bragged of her considerable earnings. A supplier to duchesses, La Voisin was herself a duchess among witches, presiding over her ceremonies in her fantastic “emperor’s robe” of purple velvet tooled in gold, which cost over 10,000 livres. She had many lovers from the more respectable levels of society, including a count and a marquis, and boasted that she had received invitations from the King of England and the Hapsburg emperor to demonstrate her skills. In her garden she had constructed a convenient little oven in which she baked what she coyly referred to as her petits pâtés; in fact, the ashes of over 2,000 aborted infants lent their richness to the soil in which her roses flourished. All the little inconveniences of a fashionable lady’s life could be resolved with a visit to La Voisin. She could make a bosom more bountiful, or a mouth more diminutive, and she knew just what to do for a nice girl who had got herself into trouble. It was common to see a carriage arriving at her villa from Versailles or St. Germain, full of masked and giggling ladies in search of a palm-reading or a love charm. The Duchesse de Bouillon came for a consultation about her rather meager décolletage, the Comtesse de Soissons for a “powder” to restore a certain man’s affection. And if La Voisin, with her laboratory of chemicals and her panoply of charms, failed to oblige, she would, for a fee, call upon a power stronger than her own.

  La Voisin’s skills were legendary within her own trade, and she was particularly well known for the swift dispatch of rivals or spouses in love affairs. “What a boon it is to our profession,” she famously remarked, “when lovers resort to desperate measures.” Desperate measures usually called for something more potent than a charm, and this is where La Voisin’s activities as a “sorcerer” took a sinister turn. The boundaries between “white” and “black” magic were blurred, and practitioners like La Voisin were prepared to make use of both types to procure results for their clients. It was quite plausible to create a novena for the disappearance of, say, a troublesome husband, and if this did not work, to progress to performing an inverted or “black” Mass for his disposal. In this area men were often involved, frequently hypocritical priests willing to pervert their sacred power, as in the case of Lesage and the Abbé Mariette. A further and more worldly remedy was poison, which was often associated with and produced by the practices of black magic. A huge variety of different poisons were used by witches or soothsayers: arsenic, sulphur, diamond powder, opium, mandragora, vipers’ venom, the juices emitted by a rotting toad.

  Poison had always lurked in the background of politics, since as a murder weapon it was virtually undetectable by the physicians of the time. The only method of determining whether or not poison had been administered was to give a sample of the substance in question to a dog and see if it died. As we have seen, Henriette d’Angleterre, on her deathbed, was convinced she had been poisoned, and her daughter, who became Queen of Spain, was to die of poison in 1689. It was rumored that Catherine de’ Medici, a queen who placed great faith in the power of the occult, had imported her own Italian poisoners in her train.

  If poison was sometimes seen as a political expedient, it had always, like witchcraft, been considered the peculiar province of women. It was most commonly the weapon of the weak, of those who had no protection in law and no recourse in physical strength. Regardless of the sophisticated debates of the précieuses, outside the self-contained feminine communities of the convent, with
the rare exception of extraordinary women like Athénaïs de Montespan who were not only wealthy but in control of their own finances, most women were vulnerable and powerless, dependent on the goodwill of their male relations. Married women owned no property, and if a marriage failed between a couple too poor to keep a civilized distance on their respective country estates, a wife had no option but to remain with her husband, however drunken, lazy or brutal he might be. A proverb from southern France sums it up: “Les femmes ne sont pas gens”— Women are not people. This lack of status was evident in every aspect of society, from the practice of wife-selling, which flourished into the nineteenth century, to the country tradition that women never sat down to eat with men. There are frequent references in proverbs and songs to wife-beating being a normal, even desirable activity, and whereas male infidelity was the norm, an adulterous wife could be publicly whipped or incarcerated in a convent. It is hardly surprising that, among the lower classes, “most wives seemed to have lived in fear of blows, but many a husband ate and drank in fear of poison.”2 Among wealthier women, poison was a means not only of escaping a tyrannical husband or father, but also of obtaining a fortune — indeed, poisons were often euphemistically dubbed “inheritance powders.”

  The sorceresses who produced poisons for their upper-class clients were usually much less successful than La Voisin. In 1679, a list of over 400 “fortune-tellers” was produced, all women operating in Paris accused of everything from relatively innocent white magic to criminal activity such as abortion and poisoning. Studies of witchcraft show that alleged witches were often impotent and desperate, poor and marginalized, and the Parisian poisoners follow this pattern in that they were nearly all middle-aged women, single or attached to men unable to keep them, hovering in minor trades and permanently on the brink of beggary. Many were drunkards or part-time prostitutes; most were itinerant if not actually homeless, circulating in the miserable flophouses and gin palaces of the Parisian slums. This is not, of course, to suggest that misery and poverty were exclusively female afflictions, but it is interesting that so many women, rich or poor, saw witchcraft and poisoning as an answer to their plight. The “typical” fortune-teller, then, was not an independent businesswoman like La Voisin, whose clients were wealthy, frustrated and ambitious women, but a small-time witch.