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

by Hilton, Lisa

  Both Marie Monvoisin and Guibourg said that they “believed” that the naked woman serving as the altar for the black Mass had been Mme. de Montespan. The only physical picture provided was that of Marie Monvoisin, who described the masked woman who visited her mother as a “tall brunette.” Athénaïs was medium-sized and blond, and Marie agreed that the woman she had seen was in fact Mlle. des Oeillets. Guibourg was not able to prove that he had seen Mme. de Montespan, either — even at the Mass supposedly celebrated in Mme. de Thianges’s rooms, he had only been “told” that the woman who had participated was Athénaïs. His memory of the incantation repeated on this occasion, in 1667 or 1668, seems suspiciously clear and, most importantly, the date he gave contradicted that supplied by Marie Monvoisin, who placed the Mass in 1674. If Marie’s date was correct, then the request that the King should abandon Louise de La Vallière would have been superfluous, since she had not only already been dismissed but had left the court. If Guibourg’s date is accepted, then although the La Vallière argument would stand, the request for the friendship of the Dauphin would seem odd, as he was only six years old at the time. Moreover, the incantation seems to have been concocted by someone with no knowledge of court affairs or customs. The Queen had already proved that she was not sterile, and since this was the only acceptable reason for a monarch to repudiate his wife, the request that Marie-Thérèse be discarded for Mme. de Montespan is ridiculous. Besides, Athénaïs herself would have known that even if the Queen were dismissed, she herself could not marry Louis unless her own husband, from whom in 1667 she was not even formally separated, was to die. It is inconceivable that Athénaïs would have recited such stupidities, however nefarious her intentions.

  Further doubts on the reliability of the Vincennes confessions are cast by the role of Louvois, whose presence in the Affair of the Poisons was prominent from the start. More properly, such matters should have been within Colbert’s jurisdiction, and the progress of the investigation may in some ways have been influenced by the rivalry between the two ministers. Louvois’s thirst for power was notorious — Saint-Simon goes so far as to suggest that he may have encouraged Louis to go to war simply to ensure his own primacy. The conclusion of the Dutch wars in 1678 meant that, for the present, domestic affairs, and therefore Colbert, took first place. Colbert had always been an ally of the Mortemart family, and was a particular friend of Athénaïs’s. Mme. Colbert had cared for the youngest of the mistress’s children, Mlle. de Blois and the Comte de Toulouse, and in 1680 Colbert’s third daughter, Marie-Anne de Seignelay, had been married to Louis de Rochechouart, the eldest son of Athénaïs’s brother the Duc de Vivonne. Apart from their brief coalition in the Lauzun affair, Louvois had always disliked Athénaïs, and, sensing the way the wind was blowing, had already openly declared himself a “Maintenoniste” (he was subsequently to be a witness at Louis’s second, secret, marriage). Louvois therefore had a good deal to lose if, as had happened so many times before, Athénaïs once again succeeded in making Louis return to her. If, on the other hand, her reputation should be irreparably blackened, Louvois, via Mme. de Maintenon, would have a great deal of influence over the King.

  When Louvois, who had been following La Reynie’s investigations ever since the La Grange case, heard of the arrests of La Bosse, La Vigoureux and La Voisin, he wrote to Louis expressing his concern at the “extraordinary” revelations that were appearing. He interviewed Lesage in his cell, and offered him a pardon if he would talk. As the arrests began, it was notable that many of the accused were friends of Colbert — the Duchesse de Bouillon, the daughter of Louvois’s deceased rival the Maréchal de Turenne; the Duchesse de Vivonne, mother-in-law to Colbert’s daughter; the Duc de Luxembourg, whom Louvois hated because of Louis’s faith in his generalship. When the news of Luxembourg’s arrest began to circulate, Louvois rushed to him and offered to help him escape, saying that he would be mad not to flee into exile — a flight that would of course have been most convenient for the minister.

  It is quite possible that Louvois manipulated the other prisoners as he manipulated Lesage, and encouraged them to name Mme. de Montespan. Louvois was certainly spreading rumors that someone close to Louis was involved in the poisonings. On 3 February 1680, before Marie Monvoisin began her revelations, he wrote to La Reynie: “With regard to that person to whom the use of poisons is not unknown, that person whom you consider dangerous to allow to remain at court, the King has judged it appropriate to receive you and hear you on that matter.” Given that the arrest warrants for those aristocrats involved in the case had already been served, on 23 January, and that Mlle. des Oeillets had left Athénaïs’s service in 1677, there could only be three possible identities for this person. The maid Cato, whose position La Voisin had tried to help her secure, but who, she claimed, knew nothing about any of the witches’ other activities; the Duchesse de Vivonne, who had now been twice accused of dabbling in the occult; or, as Louvois’s self-conscious discretion seems to insinuate, Athénaïs herself. It is implausible to go as far as to suggest that Louvois was in fact the author of the whole Affair of the Poisons, but two remarks he made do prove that he was aware that the prisoners were lying. To the governor of Besançon, in 1682, Louvois said that Lesage “could never have said a word of truth,”8 and to M. de Chavelin, Intendant of the Franche-Comté, he confessed that all the sottises (idiocies) uttered against Athénaïs de Montespan were without foundation. So was Louvois pushing Louis to believe the worst about his former favorite? Since September 1679, Louis had been anxious enough about possible scandal to have some of La Reynie’s documents kept apart, as instructed in his letter of the 21st. Marie Monvoisin had accused Athénaïs on 26 July 1680, and on 2 August, Louis wrote again to La Reynie:

  Having seen the declaration made on the twelfth and twenty-sixth of last month by Marie Marguerite Monvoisin, a prisoner in my château at Vincennes ...I write this letter to tell you that it is my will that you make every effort within your power to get to the truth of the statements made in her declarations and in her answers to your questions. It is my intention that you take every precaution to make sure that all reports dealing with this particular inquiry be filed in special dossiers, kept separate from the records of the investigation.

  At this point, the relationship between Louis and Athénaïs had reached an all-time low. They had not slept together since the birth of the Comte de Toulouse, and had not met in private for months. In the spring, they had had an embarrassing public quarrel sparked by a complaint by Louis about the strong perfume Athénaïs had taken to using. Was he becoming paranoid about the source of his mysterious headaches? Athénaïs snapped back that if she had those imperfections of which he accused her, at least she had no offensive smells about her. They quarreled again when Louis refused to take supper at midnight in her rooms, as had been his custom for years. Colbert intervened, and Louis was persuaded to change his mind, though only on condition that the whole court was present. Was he afraid of Athénaïs’s temper, or of the dangers of her table? Despite the tensions, however, appearances were kept up, and Athénaïs and her six-year-old daughter Mlle. de Nantes had been included that summer in the customary progress to Flanders.

  On 1 October 1680, the day that Françoise Filastre was burned alive in the Place des Grèves, Louis called a halt to the proceedings of the Chambre Ardente. No such action had ever been taken before, but it seems that both Louis and La Reynie were convinced of the impossibility of continuing the tribunal without further compromise to Athénaïs de Montespan. At this stage, the chief of police seems to have been firmly convinced of her guilt, and to have been torn between his duty and his loyalty to the King. “I affirm that my spirit is confounded,” he noted, “in the discussion of all the reasons that I have tried to examine, as subject and as judge, and what an effort I make to keep nothing before my eyes but my duty.” As far as La Reynie could see, there was no way around the conundrum. “I have done what I can since I examined the proofs and the accusations to assure m
yself and to remain convinced that these facts are true, and I could not get to the bottom of it. I have researched, on the contrary, all that could persuade me that they were false, and this has been equally impossible for me.”

  La Reynie continued his investigations privately, on Louis’s behalf, and began to consider the involvement of Mlle. des Oeillets. When questioned, she denied all knowledge of the poisoners, and defied them to identify her, but when she was presented to them in November 1680, all the living prisoners who claimed to have known her identified her correctly. For La Reynie, this seemed to be the definitive proof that Mme. de Montespan was guilty of sacrilege, of the attempted murder of Mlle. de Fontanges, of the murders of children and of treason for giving aphrodisiacs to the King and for attempting to murder him. In La Reynie’s opinion, she deserved the fire. Mlle. des Oeillets, though, was never punished, and died a comfortable and wealthy woman in 1687. If La Reynie had pursued the accusations about her more closely, he might have come nearer to what seems the only likely solution to Mme. de Montespan’s involvement in the Affair of the Poisons.

  Claude de Vin des Oeillets was born in 1638, and entered Athénaïs’s service in about 1668, thanks to the support of the Duc de Mortemart, who was a protector of her mother, a well-known actress. She remained in service until 1677, when she retired to her fine hôtel particulier near Clagny. On her death, she left two other properties in Paris, a country house, a carriage, expensive Dutch china, plenty of diamond and pearl jewelry, rich Flemish tapestries and over 2,000 gold louis. She had not come by such wealth entirely through her services to Athénaïs. According to Primi Visconti, “This lady gave out that she had had commerce with the King several times. She also claimed to have had children by him. She was not beautiful, but the King often found himself alone with her when her mistress was busy or unwell. La des Oeillets tells me that the King had his troubles, and that he would sometimes spend hours before the fire, pensive and sighing.”

  Perhaps Louis was sighing about what Athénaïs would say when she learned that he had indeed had a child by Mlle. des Oeillets. There was no question of his recognizing the little girl, who was given the name of Louise de la Maisonblanche and baptized as the child of false parents. She was married to the Baron de la Queue, and Saint-Simon notes priggishly that the Baron had been made captain of the guards and was provided with money in exchange for having married a daughter Saint-Simon believed Louis to have had by a gardener. Louise was very jealous of her glamorous half-sisters, who became the Princesse de Conti, the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Duchesse d’Orléans, whereas she was consigned to a quiet, rather sad life in the country, though her marriage was successful and she had several children. Her mother had entertained high hopes of replacing Athénaïs as maîtresse declarée. Visconti recalled that “there was a Mlle. des Oeillets, the daughter of an actress, who fixed the attentions of the King for a time considerable enough for her to be able to hope to become mistress, but the taste of the King changed, which caused her such chagrin that she died of a languishing illness.”

  If Mlle. des Oeillets did die of love in 1687, she spent plenty of time trying to avenge herself first. It is unlikely that her hopes were ever justified, since Athénaïs would hardly have retained her services after the birth of Louise in 1676 if she felt she had reason to be concerned about Louis’s loyalty. In relation to the accusations against Athénaïs, Mlle. des Oeillets was said to have been the courier of the love powders and an assistant in the plot against Mlle. de Fontanges. In 1675, she apparently approached La Voisin on her own behalf and asked for advice on how to murder the King by magic. The job was given to Lesage, but he lost heart when he heard that Louis had been experiencing attacks of the “vapors.” This date is confirmed by the Journal of the Health of the King, which notes in October that Louis was suffering from violent headaches accompanied by breathing difficul-ties and shivering. A few days later, he was feverish, with burning skin and inflamed eyes, all of which was enough to scare Lesage off. His place was taken by another poisoner named Vautier. If this was true, it seems that Des Oeillets, presumably incensed by Louis’s decision not to acknowledge their unborn child, had become furious enough to attempt to murder him herself.

  According to Marie Monvoisin, Des Oeillets had been accompanied to her mother’s house by a mysterious English “milord.” Hence the origin of the story about the poisoned petition and the payment of 100,000 ecus. It is extremely doubtful that Athénaïs, even with her enormous wealth, could have raised such a sum, and even less likely that a ladies’ maid could have produced it. Athénaïs’s pension at the time was only 2,000 ecus, raised to 5,000 when she became superintendent of the Queen’s household. Indeed, the entire budget for the state in 1679 was only 42 million ecus. This, however, was said to be the sum offered to La Voisin, Trianon and Vautier to help Des Oeillets and the Englishman flee to England if the plan succeeded. At the time, La Voisin was known to have been boasting of imminent enormous wealth and spending lavishly. Marie Monvoisin also claimed that when her mother was arrested, the Englishman offered to help her to escape. Was Des Oeillets therefore involved, knowingly or not, in some wider political plot to assassinate Louis?

  Marie Monvoisin said that the Englishman was Des Oeillets’s lover, and that he had promised to marry her. Was their relationship the secret behind the mysterious letter handed to La Reynie during the La Grange case, whose authoress spoke of the crime of treason and who threatened to marry her correspondent’s rival if he did not succeed? It is conceivable that the Englishman, and the mythical 100,000 ecus, were part of some international conspiracy to murder Louis XIV, whose recent victory in Holland had made him the most powerful monarch in Europe. His son, the Dauphin, now a docile and indolent teenager, would be far less of a danger to the other European powers. At the time, in England especially, there was a good deal of anti-Catholic hysteria centered on the Catholic King James II, Louis’s cousin, who had been deposed in the glorious revolution of 1688 and had taken refuge at the French courts, and his descendants were to plague the rulers of England with “Popish plots” for another sixty-five years. Louis’s loyalty to his embattled Catholic cousin was perceived as a real threat to the Protestant cause in England. (Interestingly, the best claim to the English throne after the overthrow of James was La Princesse Palatine’s, but since she had converted to Catholicism, of which she never really approved, in order to marry Monsieur, the crown went instead to her cousin, Louis’s future enemy William of Orange.) That the English “milord” might well have been using Des Oeillets’s disappointed passion for the King to further the aims of a Protestant power can be no more than speculation, but the fact remains that his existence in the Affair of the Poisons has never been satisfactorily accounted for.

  The conspiracy of the poisoned treaty, if it took place, did not succeed, and Des Oeillets then apparently turned to Guibourg, who mixed her a poison in the chalice consisting of her own menstrual blood, flour, bat’s blood and the Englishman’s sperm, claiming it would kill the King slowly. Des Oeillets’s subsequent visits to La Voisin were supposedly made on the Marquise de Montespan’s behalf, but Lesage confessed that “the plan was to give [the poisons] to Mme. de Montespan, and to poison the King by this means, through Mme. de Montespan, without her thinking that she was doing it.” If Des Oeillets really did plot to murder Louis — and the evidence of the prisoners is much more cohesive on this point — then she played perfectly into Louvois’s hands in his scheme to disgrace Athénaïs.

  At the time of her questioning, Des Oeillets claimed to a friend that the King would never dare to prosecute her, and she wrote to Louvois claiming that it was Mme. de Montespan’s other maids, who hated her, who were responsible for the slanders against her. Some historians view the identification of Des Oeillets by the Vincennes prisoners as a farce stage-managed by Louvois, for she was not presented to them anonymously as part of an identity parade, but merely shown, alone, to the witches. Could it not be that Des Oeillets had Louvois, rather th
an Louis, to thank for her immunity? That, having trapped her by having her identified, he then offered her protection to remain silent about the truth of Athénaïs’s involvement with the poisoners? After all, Louvois was the only person who said definitively that he knew the accusations against the King’s mistress to be false.

  The last part of the accusations against Athénaïs concerned the attempt to poison Mlle. de Fontanges, and here again, Des Oeillets was involved. The King’s mistress herself, and many of the court, were convinced that she was being poisoned. After her death, Madame made several references in her correspondence which show that she was certain Athénaïs de Montespan was responsible. “She died under the firm persuasion that the Montespan had poisoned her along with two of her women. It is said publicly that they were poisoned.” 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, one of the scurrilous pamphlets circulating in Paris, featured a diatribe from La Fontanges against Mme. de Montespan: “It is you who poisoned me to satisfy your envious rage! ...Tartary awaits you, tigress, that terrible place where all poisoners are found, frightful with the cries and the contortions made by these unfortunates! You will be placed in the same rank as Brinvilliers and the others who have attempted the lives of innocents!” What Athénaïs made of this terrible slander is unknown, and she made no public effort to defend herself. But Louis expressed a wish that no autopsy be performed, which shows that he, too, was suspicious.