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

by Hilton, Lisa

  The royal family now presented a most edifying spectacle of orderly domestic life. The King seemed to be converting sincerely to religion. He was spending those hours he did not bestow on Mme. de Maintenon with his wife, and the neglected Queen blossomed beneath this unexpected attention. “I am informed that the Queen is very well at court, and that the complaisance and interest she has shown during the journey [to Flanders in 1681] ...have gained her a thousand marks of regard,” reports Mme. de Sévigné. In a scheme of consummate hypocrisy, it was Mme. de Maintenon who had encouraged Louis to finally pay attention to his little Spanish wife. Marie-Thérèse was pathetically grateful to the woman who had once conspired to keep her husband’s illegitimate children invisible. “She was touched to the very verge of tears, and exclaimed in a kind of transport, ‘God has raised up Mme. de Maintenon to bring me back the heart of the King!’” La Maintenon worked on the poor Queen’s timidity with no disinterested motive, happily accompanying that lady to pay a call on the King when she was too overawed by her magnificent spouse to do so alone. The Queen’s gratitude was very public, and La Maintenon notes that she has been presented with the royal portrait as a mark of esteem, adding gleefully “Mme. de Montespan never had any such thing.”

  In the eyes of her supporters, Mme. de Maintenon was achieving marvels, restoring order and respectability at last to the libertine court. “All good men, the Pope, the bishops, applauded the victory of Mme. de Maintenon, and considered that she had rendered a signal service to the King and to the State,” comments M. Lavallée.8 Pope Innocent XI did indeed take an interest in the activities of Louis’s self-appointed spiritual mentor, hoping that the King’s conversion might pave the way to a reconciliation between the Vatican and the French court, between which relations were strained. La Maintenon received various gifts of relics and prayer books from His Holiness, the most appropriate of which was surely the preserved corpse of a martyr. La Maintenon was in paradise at this gratification of her immense spiritual pride, but she was careful to represent her joy to her confessor, Abbé Gobelin, as mere satisfaction at discharging her pious duty. “I am but too much extolled,” she wrote to him, “for certain good intentions which I owe to God.” The only outward signs of her changed position were her indulgence of a hitherto dormant taste for finery and an increased haughtiness in her manner, though she continued to behave sycophantically to the Queen.

  The court was bewildered by their monarch’s attraction to this quiet, mysterious, middle-aged lady. How had she come to have such an influence over him? Primi Visconti summarizes their theories:

  No one knew what to believe of it, because she was old: some saw her as the confidante of the King, others as a procuress, others as a skillful person to whom the King was dictating his memoirs of his reign. It is certain that with regard to the change in her clothes and manners, no one could explain what had taken place. Many were of the opinion that there are men who are drawn much more towards older women than to younger ones.

  This last suggestion hints at the truth. For despite the pomposity of her pronouncements on sin, her harrying of Athénaïs over her adultery, and her rejoicing in the conversion of her monarch, which she had been trying to effect for the previous seven years, Françoise d’Aubigné had become the King’s mistress. If he had not previously had a taste for mature charms, Louis seems to have developed one.

  It seemed to be Marie-Thérèse’s eternal fate to be deceived by those who professed friendship towards her. As Athénaïs had done long ago, La Maintenon impressed the Queen with her demonstrations of piety and used her encouragement of a reconciliation between the royal couple as a cloak for her own machinations. But why had she chosen to make what was clearly a tactical surrender? Interestingly, her correspondence with the Abbé Gobelin for that year has been lost, but the letters she exchanged with her siblings seem to impart a new sense of joy and confidence. It is uncertain exactly when their sexual relationship began, and therefore impossible to know whether the post of dame d’atour, for example, was a reward or a bribe. Since there was no new official mistress after the fall of Angélique de Fontanges (although Athénaïs still nominally held the title), it seems probable that Mme. de Maintenon took her place in about 1680. It is improbable that such an energetic forty-two-year-old as Louis would remain chaste for long, and likely that La Maintenon felt it was more prudent to succumb to his advances than to risk losing her hold over him to yet another mistress. The conclusive proof that she had become his lover is a remark she subsequently made to Mme. d’Aumale: “I was happy, and only concerned to amuse him, to remove him from women, which I could not have done had he not found me complaisant and always ready. He would have sought his pleasure elsewhere if he had not found it with me.”9 Perhaps this chilly widow of forty came to regret this “complaisance,” since she found herself fulfilling her conjugal duties into her seventies.

  How, though, did she reconcile her own adulterous behavior with years of condemnation of that very sin? The correspondance générale of Mme. de Maintenon gives some clue, although these papers should be read always as a contrived exercise in posthumous public relations rather than the ingenuous revelations of the lady’s private thoughts. Since Mme. de Maintenon professed to believe that she had been chosen by God to bring the King, and thus the realm of France, back to the path of virtue, she saw the sacrifice of her own virtue as a necessary and therefore forgivable inconvenience. This long explanation by M. Lavallée, one of her most ardent supporters, suggests as much.

  People saw with dismay that this Prince had not yet abandoned the irregularities of his youth, that he was becoming more and more the slave of his pleasures, and that he was advancing towards a disgraceful old age, in which his own glory and that of his country would be tarnished. Now the King was not only the head of the state, but its very soul; he was the country incarnate, a sort of visible Providence and the lieutenant of God on earth . . . What would have become of this royalty of divine essence and its divine and glorious mission with a Prince neglectful of his first duties, whose passions rose superior to all the laws of God and man, surrounded by women imploring a glance from him and by courtiers who had built up infamous hopes on the future scandals of a licentious reign? . . . Out of this slough Mme. de Maintenon drew Louis XIV; she brought him back to his duties, to the assiduous care of his realm, to the good example which he owed his subjects; she dissipated the clouds of pride which enveloped him, and made him descend from Olympus to inspire him with Christian sentiments of repentance, of moderation, of tenderness . . . and, above all, of humility.10

  What price a little extraconjugal sex in return for such miracles? It might be argued, however, that since Mme. de Maintenon’s tenure as mistress coincided with the most disastrous wars, ruinous expenses and isolationist hubris of the reign, Louis might have been better to remain a Jupiter in the pagan realms of Athénaïs than to descend into Catholic bigotry in the virtuous bed of his pious widow. La Main-tenon’s own perception of her role in Louis’s life, however, corresponds with Lavallée’s invocation of the divine role of the King. It would be no exaggeration to say that she believed herself to have saved France, as well as her monarch, from the lubricious embrace of Athénaïs de Montespan.

  On 30 July 1683, Mme. de Maintenon’s expectations changed dramatically. In May that year, the court had departed on the summer progress to inspect the troops stationed in Burgundy and Alsace. The Queen returned to Versailles in July with an abscess on her arm, from which she developed a fever. Doctor Fagon, the King’s new physician, bled her, and then, against the advice of the other surgeons, administered a huge dose of emetic. Marie-Thérèse went into violent convulsions and it became clear that she was going to die. Courtiers idling in the Galérie des Glaces were astonished to see Louis sprinting towards the temporary chapel to fetch the viaticum, tears streaming down his face. The Spanish Queen died peacefully, with the Grand Dauphin at her bedside weeping and kissing her hands. Through his own tears, Louis declared remorsefully:
“This is the only grief she has ever caused me.”

  The Queen was the only one of Louis’s women he had never loved. Such a sad, quiet, dutiful little life she had lived, the least vivid satellite in the Sun King’s orbit. In the last year of her life she had had the pleasure of her husband’s increased gentleness, but her existence had always been a marginal one, rewarded by the court only with dim respect rather than with love or indignation. Before she died, she whispered pathetically that she had known only one happy day since she became Queen. Was it perhaps her wedding day? Marie-Thérèse was a hopeless Queen for such a King, and not having done any harm is a sorry royal epitaph, but at least she died under the happy delusion that her husband had returned to her at last.

  After visiting the corpse and sprinkling it with water, Louis departed immediately for Monsieur’s house at St. Cloud, since etiquette did not permit the monarch to remain in the same house as a corpse. He then repaired to Fontainebleau, where he was joined by Mme. de Maintenon as part of the Dauphine’s suite. The governess was attired in such voluminous mourning, and wore such a lugubrious expression, that Louis had to laugh at her excess of sincerity, and indeed it seemed that he himself had completely recovered from the death of his wife. He was sporting a fetching purple half-mourning, and appeared disinclined to relinquish the delights of the new hunting season out of respect for Marie-Thérèse.

  Between La Maintenon’s affected gloom and Louis’s callousness, the only person who appears to have behaved with a proper sense of decency was Athénaïs de Montespan. She was disgusted by the lack of distress exhibited by the King, Monsieur and Mademoiselle. The latter, chastened, remarked that during Marie-Thérèse’s illness, Athénaïs had tended her faithfully, and that after her death she showed all her Mortemart breeding in the way she performed her duties. Unlike La Maintenon, smug in her billowing black, Athénaïs behaved like a great lady, possessed, as Mme. de Caylus put it, of “an elevated spirit,” who knew the value of her public role regardless of any compromised private integrity. Marie-Thérèse would have understood.

  After the Queen’s heart had been embalmed and taken to Val de Grâce, her corpse was carried through the silent, black-draped rooms of Versailles and taken to St. Denis. On the way back, recalls Made-moiselle in her memoirs, everyone laughed a good deal in the carriages, while the accompanying musketeers amused themselves by hunting the plentiful game on the surrounding plain. No one was present to see the body interred. With Marie-Thérèse already forgotten, what was to become of Athénaïs, whose post as superintendent of the Queen’s household no longer existed?

  Perhaps if it had not been for the Affair of the Poisons, Athénaïs might now have been granted her dream of becoming the King’s wife. It was clear that Louis, still a relatively young man, would marry again, but equally it was unlikely that he would choose to make a state alliance. No particularly alluring foreign princess was available, the House of Bourbon seemed assured of two generations of heirs, and Louis’s arrogance sought no strategic alliance in Europe (given the state of the treasury, it is just as well for his pride that he did not attempt to seek one). Bossuet was in despair lest the King’s new freedom inaugurate another phase of licentious behavior, and Athénaïs, having abandoned hope of becoming Louis’s wife herself, found that she agreed with her old enemy. “We must think of remarrying him as soon as possible,” she said. “Without that, so well do I know him, he will make a bad marriage sooner than none.”11 It was time for Louis to abandon public sins and sinner-esses and set an example befitting His Most Christian Majesty. It seemed sensible, therefore, for him to marry someone he liked, so that he should not be tempted into adultery once more. It was hardly difficult to identify the obvious candidate.

  Many courtiers had already allied themselves to La Maintenon in anticipation of the King making her at least his official mistress. As Mme. de Maintenon left the Queen’s deathbed, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had whispered to her, “Do not leave the King now, Madame. He needs you more than ever.” One faction at court was clearly confident that the governess’s power would now be formalized. The Abbé de Choisy explains why Louis would have made such a choice.

  He was unwilling to marry through consideration for his people, and wisely judged that the princes of a second marriage might, in the course of time, cause civil wars. On the other hand, he could not dispense with a wife. Mme. de Maintenon pleased him greatly. Her gentle, insinuating wit promised him an agreeable intercourse capable of regenerating him after the cares of royalty. Her person was still engaging and her age prevented her from having children. To which we may add that Louis was sincerely desirous of leading a regular life.12

  The Affair of the Poisons had brought home to Louis quite how desperate some women at court were to become his lover, and he was appalled by the stories of poisons and potions aimed at the possession of his person. His increasing religious faith was offended by the lurid revelations of the trials, and the reflection they cast on a society of women whose moral decline seemed to have descended beneath gallantry and gourmandizing, and yet whose behavior could be seen as having being encouraged by his own sinful example. The state had been compromised by the investigations and, as Louis saw it, he had therefore been compromised as well, which was intolerable to his self-esteem. A wife to whom he could be faithful would prevent him from falling in with the murderous schemings of the court ladies.

  La Maintenon herself, however, was by no means certain of her position. Was it conceivable that the greatest monarch in the world could ally himself with a woman of very dubious pedigree, the widow of a disreputable poet and a former servant in his household? As long as Marie-Thérèse had been alive, Mme. de Maintenon was able to continue her mission for the domination of the King’s soul under the protection of his marriage. Without the Queen, she was dangerously exposed, a contingency she had apparently never accounted for. She wrote to her brother: “The longer I live, the more clearly I recognize the futility of making plans and projects for the future; God nearly always brings them to nought, and, as He is hardly ever taken into account when they are made, He does not bless them.” One senses that she felt aggrieved that God should have put her in such an inconvenient position. Her behavior in the weeks following Marie-Thérèse’s death indicates a great agitation of her normally tranquil spirits. She wandered about Fontainebleau at odd hours in floods of tears, complained of headaches and attacks of the vapors, and paid no attention when anyone spoke to her. The only power she had was to withhold herself sexually from Louis, perhaps in an attempt to force his hand, and a letter written to Mme. de Brinon a fortnight after the Queen’s death discreetly suggests as much. “I implore you to pray for the King, as he has more need of grace than ever to sustain a state contrary to his inclinations and habits.” No great sacrifice this, since for La Maintenon sex was always a weapon, never a pleasure.

  What were Louis’s feelings at the time? Throughout the twenty-three years of his dynastic alliance with Marie-Thérèse, he had struggled with the conflicting exigencies of duty and desire, unable to lead the ordered personal life he longed for within the confines of his loveless marriage. Aged forty-five and becoming more and more pious, he was aware of the conflict between his own virility and the necessity of living an orderly public life. He had been troubled previously by his relationship with a married woman, but as Voltaire later remarked, “When he was no longer in love, his conscience made itself felt more keenly.”13 Athénaïs was no longer the tempestuous, enchanting beauty of the 1670s and even if he had wished to marry her, matters would have been complicated by the fact that Montespan was still alive. A wife he desired would save him from the temptations of the court, and now, since another state marriage was neither necessary nor particularly feasible, and Athénaïs no longer considered, it seemed reasonable that he should please himself. Moreover, Louis was methodical in his habits, and selecting the Marquise de Maintenon would continue two of them that were long established: replacing the current mistress with one of her
ladies, and trusting as his confidants ministers who owed their status to merit rather than aristocratic birth. And as Lamartine suggested, “An attachment to Mme. de Maintenon seemed almost the same thing as an attachment to virtue itself.”

  Louis’s natural choice was therefore the Marquise. However, to marry a commoner would be a violent assault on the God-given hierarchy of the French monarchy, and thus upon his own status and power. It was precisely such a disruptive misalliance that he had forbidden in the case of Lauzun and his cousin Mademoiselle. Françoise Scarron could never be an acknowledged Queen of France, taking precedence over the princesses of the blood — it would be an outrageous affront to what was perceived as the natural order of society. During his relationship with Athénaïs, Louis had learned that the law and public opinion could, if necessary, be swayed to his will, but marriage to La Maintenon required a more private acceptance.

  That Louis had hit upon a solution is clear from the change in tone of La Maintenon’s letters. Rumors were already circulating about the King’s intentions, and La Maintenon was happy to encourage them. “There is nothing to reply on the subject of Louis and Françoise; those rumors do circulate — but I’d like to know why she would be unwilling?” wrote Mme. de Sévigné. “I should never have believed that difficulties in this matter should have come from her side.” This comment has been interpreted as an indication that La Maintenon had refused a proposal of marriage and was anxious to set the matter straight, but it is also likely that she would have started such a rumor precisely by denying it, in order that once again her public conduct should be seen as a model of modest discretion. Either way, the ex-governess can barely contain her joy. “Do not forget me before God,” she wrote on 20 September 1684 to Abbé Gobelin, “for I have a great need of strength to make use of my happiness.” The “vapors” from which she had been suffering departed, according to Mme. de Caylus, at the same time as the court from Fontainebleau.