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

by Hilton, Lisa

  It is unlikely, though, that Athénaïs, however infuriated she was by Louis’s temporary obsession with La Fontanges, would have taken her seriously enough to consider stooping to murder. She had triumphed over the Princesse de Soubise and Mme. de Ludres with her wit, and La Fontanges was so notoriously stupid that it was obvious Louis would tire of her once the novelty wore off, which is exactly what happened. Moreover, as Athénaïs was famously the last person to learn of their relationship, in April or May 1679, it is impossible that she could have been involved in a murder plot which, according to Marie Voisin, was hatched in December the previous year. Des Oeil-lets, though, was apparently determined to do away with Fontanges, and the connection between Athénaïs and the plot of the poisoned silks can be explained by the fact that either Marie Monvoisin, knowing that Des Oeillets had previously acted as a go-between, simply assumed that this was still the case after 1677, or that Des Oeillets deliberately used her mistress’s name as a cover for her own plans for poisoning La Fontanges in 1679.

  The second poisoning attempt, recounted by La Filastre, also exonerates Athénaïs from any involvement. Aided by Madeleine Gardey, La Filastre had tried to enter service at the court to get closer to La Fontanges, but the attempt had failed. If Mme. de Montespan was really employing the two witches to poison her rival, it would have been nothing to her to gain them entry to the court. Des Oeillets, by contrast, no longer had any influence there. In August 1679, La Filastre left Paris for the Auvergne, to look for the ingredients for a new poison for La Fontanges, but she was short of money, and Madeleine Gardey had to sell some jewelry to pay for the journey, and then go around borrowing to pay for her friend to return. It seems strange that a woman as rich as Athénaïs would have left her coconspirators financially in the lurch. Finally, why would Athénaïs have continued her contact with the witches when La Voisin had been arrested several months earlier, and Madeleine Gardey was under police surveillance? Even if Athénaïs had wanted to poison La Fontanges, she was too intelligent to have persisted when the chances of discovery were so high. Mme. de Caylus was convinced that the rumors about Athénaïs were “without foundation,” and she was undoubtedly right. All the blame for the conspiracy must surely lie with Mlle. des Oeillets, to whom posterity has not been nearly so unkind.

  If it is relatively simple to acquit Athénaïs of the charge of attempted murder, while conceding that she did buy aphrodisiac powders from the witches and may have participated in some sinister though harmless rituals, the vision of her participating in the black Mass is extremely disturbing, and one which most historians, even those with a care for her reputation, have accepted as true. Three other witnesses, Mme. d’Argenton, Mme. Badouin and Dupin, an actress, claimed that Guibourg had celebrated such Masses for them. However, it is quite possible that the black Mass was a fabrication produced by the witnesses, encouraged by the prejudices of their interrogators.

  Modern scholarship often takes the view that the practice of witchcraft was largely an invention of its prosecutors. The Church, after all, sanctioned belief in witchcraft — in the seventeenth century it was heresy not to believe in it, and witchcraft confessions demonstrate a consistency which suggests that formalized Devil-worship, as opposed to the “cunning” of superstitious folk practices, was learned behavior, the performance of a role prescribed by scholars and theologians. “The modern myth of Devil-worship, with its night-flying and sabbats, was a gross invention of friarly authors, an amalgam of papal fabrication with ancient pagan superstition.”9 Again and again, witch-trial confessions all over continental Europe attest to the preoccupations of the prosecutors, reflecting the educated assumptions of the authorities who controlled the law courts. The idea of the black Mass appears in theological literature in the mid-fifteenth century, and was refined by the seventeenth into such texts as Pierre Lancre’s The Tableau of Inconstancy of Wicked Angels and Demons (1613), which provides what is practically a recipe for the alleged activities of the La Voisin circle: “To dance indecently, to banquet filthily, to couple diabolically, to sodomize execrably, to blaspheme scandalously, to pursue brutally every horrible, dirty and unnatural desire, to hold as precious toads, vipers, lizards and all sorts of poisons.” The use of torture would of course exact precisely the sort of confession the inquisitors believed they needed, but “there is no good evidence that a single coven ever existed, or that witches ever participated in a sabbat of any kind.”10 Guibourg and his fellow prisoners may have been screaming out, as the mallets shattered their bones, no more than a formula already well known. “A kind of scholarly pornography was generated, while the use of torture secured the right confession.”11 It is by no means certain, then, that Athénaïs de Montespan ever laid out her perfumed flesh to serve as a bloody altar anywhere but in Louvois’s imagination.12

  It was not, however, such speculation that saved Athénaïs’s public reputation and protected her from prison or worse, but the intervention of her friend Colbert. Perhaps Colbert suspected that Louvois’s involvement in the case was less than disinterested. In any event, he was not prepared to let Athénaïs go undefended. He sent all the papers La Reynie had collected to an independent counsel, a lawyer named Claude Duplessis, who had recently published a treatise on criminology. Duplessis considered that, quite simply, La Voisin had no motivation for not mentioning Athénaïs (unless she had been bribed with the offer of a last-minute reprieve) and, most plausibly, that Athénaïs had no motivation for harming Louis. Colbert summarized Duplessis’s analysis in an eloquent document for Louis. First, he appealed flatteringly to Louis’s own judgment. “Could there be a witness more reliable or a better judge of the falsity of all this calumny than the King himself ? His Majesty knows in what sort of a way Mme. de Montespan has lived with himself, he has witnessed all her behavior, all her proceedings at all times and on all occasions, and a mind as clear-sighted and penetrating as Your Majesty’s has never noticed anything which could attach to Mme. de Montespan even the least of these suspicions.” He goes on to discuss the impossibility of the attempted murder, discreetly observing that it was not in Athénaïs’s interests to poison the man to whom she owed everything and upon whom the future of her children depended. As for “those little anxious moments of jealousy, which her affection could have produced in the mind of Mme. de Montespan,” these had begun only in 1679. Colbert concludes with an appeal to Louis’s affection: “Such things are inconceivable, and His Majesty, who knows Mme. de Montespan to the very depths of her soul, could never persuade himself that she could have been capable of such abominations.”13

  Given that Athénaïs was to remain at court for another eleven years, it appears that Louis was convinced. He had a stormy interview with Athénaïs who, with typical Mortemart élan, “first cried, then made reproaches and finally spoke haughtily.”14 It was at the zenith of the scandal, in 1680, that Athénaïs was appointed superintendent of the Queen’s household, an honor which Louis would hardly have conferred on a dangerous woman who had plotted to poison him. After the suspension of the investigation, Athénaïs received a gift of 50,000 livres, which shows that if nothing else Louis was still prepared to pay her gambling debts, and in 1681, she appeared with Louis at a ball for Mlle. de Nantes, a surprising show of parental solidarity if Louis really believed she was a child murderer. The two youngest of their children were also legitimized that year, a gesture of respect, if not of love, and for some years at least Athénaïs maintained her position as the leading woman at court, very much a presence in Louis’s daily life.

  Perhaps the King had a more private reason, too, for believing she was innocent. During his involvement with La Fontanges, the royal virility had apparently needed a boost, and Louis’s valet Vienne (who owed his appointment to Athénaïs — another of her ill-judged protégés) had been supplying him with aphrodisiacs. Louis also had a private medicine cabinet where he prepared his own concoctions, and if the Journal du Santé du Roi is to be believed, his frequent fits of the vapors may have had as
much to do with his doctors’ prescriptions or his own self-administered doses than any powders Athénaïs slipped him. If the King’s head had ached recently, it might well have been simply because he was overindulging in Spanish fly.

  So Athénaïs was protected, but the price of preserving her reputation was a grave miscarriage of justice. Just as it was impossible to condemn the guilty without compromising the maîtresse en titre, it was equally impossible to acquit the innocent. Having been closed by the King as the accusations against his mistress began to emerge, the Chambre Ardente reopened in 1681 and continued its trials until 1682, when La Reynie, who considered it a dishonor to the King to have to interfere preferentially in the proceedings, had to concede defeat. It was proving impossible to try the 106 remaining prisoners without resorting to the evidence Louis was determined to suppress, and La Reynie therefore suggested that the only solution was to use lettres de cachet to lock them up for life. Of course, this meant that many potentially innocent people would live out their days chained to the walls of Besançon or Belle Ile, while others who were certainly guilty, including Guibourg, Lesage and Madeleine Gardey, were spared the fire. Some of the leftover prisoners from the Chambre Ardente were still alive thirty-seven years later, still being whipped if they spoke to their jailers, for fear that they might mention Madame de Montespan’s name.

  The exact contents of the documents delivered to Louis concerning Athénaïs de Montespan’s involvement in the Affair of the Poisons can never be known, because he burned them with his own hands. It is uncertain, for example, how much he knew of the plotting of Mlle. des Oeillets. Was there other evidence which gave him reason to doubt Athénaïs? And if his reason convinced him of her innocence, did his superstition, his susceptible imagination, lead him back to terrible scenes of debauchery and slaughter? She was, after all, enough of a witch to have enchanted the King, and now that her spell seemed irretrievably broken, he was never quite able to trust her again. Innocent as Athénaïs surely was, there was yet sufficient ambiguity surrounding her dealings with the witches to destroy the remains of Louis’s love, and to haunt her reputation forever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hope may be a lying jade, but she does at

  any rate lead us to the end of our lives along a

  pleasant path.”

  Louis de France, the Grand Dauphin, known as Monseigneur, had very different tastes in women from his father. Indeed, this dull, indolent young man cheerfully married one of the ugliest princesses in Europe, Marie-Victoire of Bavaria, and on her death in 1690 contracted a secret marriage with her even uglier lady-in-waiting, Mlle. de Choin. It was fortunate both for him and for the Bourbon blood-line that his inclination was so in step with his duty, for when the time came for him to be married in 1680, Marie-Victoire was the only real choice. The Grand Dauphin’s mother, Queen Marie-Thérèse was, along with her sister the Archduchess of Austria, the last truly sane member of the Spanish royal family which, by the end of the seventeenth century, had really become very peculiar indeed.

  Since it was known that the King wished Marie-Victoire to be admired, no one ever mentioned her plainness. Her teeth were rotten, she had a sallow complexion with brown stains set off by a huge nose, and the rough red hands of a kitchen maid. The Dauphin, though, was quite delighted with his Dauphine, and as she compensated for her looks with intelligence and education, the court universally approved of the match. Mme. de Maintenon was particularly delighted, as the Dauphin’s marriage was an opportunity for Louis to heap more attention on her. After the Affair of the Poisons, it seemed that there was no chance of Athénaïs recapturing his heart.

  In 1679, even as the King’s romance with Mlle. de Fontanges was in full bloom, it had appeared that les deux sultanes, as Athénaïs and La Maintenon were known, were neck-and-neck in the race for the royal favor. Perhaps La Maintenon would replace La Fontanges to gain the ascendancy, or perhaps Athénaïs would make a late comeback. This competitive ambiguity was preserved by the prestigious posts Louis bestowed on each of them. For some time, Athénaïs had been soliciting for the job of superintendent of the Queen’s household. This was the highest-ranking position for a woman at court, and was one of the few things that Louis, out of good taste, had ever denied her. To calm her wrath over his infatuation with Mlle. de Fontanges, Louis bought the commission for her from his old flame the Comtesse de Soissons (who left Versailles as a result of the poisons scandal) for 200,000 ecus. But the fact that Athénaïs had been barred from receiving a duchesse’s tabouret, and that the duchesses were still able to take precedence over her, continued to rankle. Louis solved this by inventing for her the title of chief adviser to the Queen, a position which was to carry a duchesse’s privileges, including at last the blessed tabouret. Surely Athénaïs must have felt, as had Louise de La Vallière and as would Angélique de Fontanges, that being officially permitted to sit down in the presence of a man by whom she had had seven children was a poor exchange for the loss of his affections.

  La Maintenon, by contrast, had every reason to feel encouraged. When the household for the new Dauphine was created in 1679, Louis took the unprecedented step of creating a second post of dame d’atour specifically for the former governess. This meant that La Maintenon would now be a member of the Dauphine’s household, requiring her to be officially in Louis’s company, which was not the case for the superintendent of the Queen’s household, a more administrative post. Both marquises were included in the royal party that set off to greet Marie-Victoire, but when the court returned to Versailles, the sharp eyes of the Gazette noticed that it was Mme. de Maintenon, not Mme. de Montespan, who occupied the coveted seat next to the King in the royal carriage.

  Mme. de Sévigné’s letters are now full of the growing influence of the King’s new favorite. On 5 June 1680, she notes: “The credit of Mme. de Maintenon still continues . . . She goes to visit him [Louis] every day, and their conversations are of a length which give rise to numberless conjectures.” On 9 June: “Mme. de Maintenon’s favor is constantly increasing, while that of Mme. de Montespan is visibly declining.” A court joke had the two marquises meeting on the Queen’s staircase at Versailles. Says La Maintenon to La Montespan, “What! Are you going down, Madame? I am going up.”

  At court, people recalled the Grand Divertissement of 1668, at which Louise de La Vallière, Athénaïs de Montespan and Françoise Scarron had all been present together. Had they but known, ran the joke, that here were the past, the present and the future seated at the same table. Mme. de Sévigné reported of “Mme. de Maintenant”: “Nothing now but perpetual conversations between her and the King, who gives all the time he used to bestow on Mme. de Montespan to Mme. la Dauphine” (and, by implication, with La Maintenon, her dame d’atour). If Athénaïs had cherished the hope that Louis would return to her after he tired of Fontanges, she knew she could no longer sustain it after the stresses of the Chambre Ardente or in the face of such obvious neglect. She refused, however, to take the traditional route to the convent. Her only chance of remaining at the court which had been her life for twenty years was to displace La Maintenon by any means available. Mourning the loss of her looks with the melancholy peculiar to the beautiful, she “was ready to die with mortification at the influence obtained by wit and conversation”1 and, embonpoint or no, was determined to trump La Main-tenon’s wit with her own. But what Athénaïs had not realized was that times had changed. She had always been more concerned with amusement than with truthfulness and, having once bested Louise de La Vallière’s dull earnestness with her own fantastic humor, she found herself as bewildered as her old rival now that La Maintenon had been clever enough to make sincerity a fashion. Appearance had been everything to Athénaïs in her desire to impose her gloire on the world, but she had allowed appearance and artifice to become conflated. So, though she remained Louis’s mistress in name, she was horrified to discover the frailty of her true position.

  One small reassurance was that Athénaïs’s erstwhil
e employee was unpopular with much of the court. La Maintenon’s secretiveness and ostentatious piety, as well as the long hours she was spending closeted with Louis, gave rise to fear and distrust. And amid the obsession with etiquette and precedence which was becoming the main occupation of many of the aristocrats enclosed in this city of the rich, the governess’s humble birth and rather dubious history counted against her. It was on this front that Athénaïs launched her first attack. Madame Scarron’s bohemian marriage of convenience, her early poverty and her pretensions to an aristocratic lineage had already disgusted the Dauphine and her cousin Madame. Both German ladies were intractable on the subject of breeding, and one of their pleasures was making life a misery for those courtiers with flimsy quarterings. Gratifyingly for Athénaïs, they both hated La Maintenon for her upstart influence over the King, and in this they were joined by the Duc de Saint-Simon who, while he came to resent Athénaïs for the precedence her bastard sons were given over the dukes of France, did respect her for the purity of her own lineage. For good measure, Athénaïs made sure that the governess’s sexual history was also called to account. “Could she suppose that people would always remain in ignorance of the first volume of her life?” mused Mme. de Sévigné, and while it appears unlikely that La Maintenon had indeed led the life of a merry widow, there are certain ambiguities in her history which lent credence to Athénaïs’s malicious insinuations. It was rumored, for instance, that she had had a lesbian relationship with the great courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. The basis for this gossip was a pornographic novel, L’Ecole des Filles, published in 1655, in which the experienced Suzanne initiates the timid Fanchon, said to represent the young Mme. Scarron, into the delights of sapphism (the English diarist Samuel Pepys bought a copy in secret and pronounced it “a mighty lewd book”2). Ninon’s own recollections do not confirm this, but Voltaire notes that the two were intimate friends, and slept together for several months, this being “a fashion in friendship.”