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

by Hilton, Lisa

  Athénaïs’s spirit was visible at Marly, in the capricious, eccentric style of the house, in the deliciously scented park and in the gaiety they inspired. Offering her views on the plans with Louis and his architect was the last contribution she made to the buildings which characterized the reign, and it is sad that Clagny, the first Trianon and Marly no longer stand as a monument to her talents. According to contemporary descriptions, there was a unity, an elegance of scale and a whimsicality in these buildings which created a beauty never achieved by the heavier magnificence of Versailles. The house was not completed until 1686, but Louis still used Marly, as he had Versailles, for parties and excursions before it was finished. Athénaïs organized the official opening party, which included a ball and a jolly concert at which everyone joined in the singing, as well as little stalls selling trinkets in four of the apartments, each named after the seasons. Spring was served by her youngest daughter, and Summer by Mme. de Thianges, while Athénaïs symbolically reserved Autumn for herself, and with a pleasing irony, Winter for Mme. de Maintenon.

  Athénaïs’s children were now the greatest evidence of her authority, as well as her main source of emotional succor. Following the death of his sister Mlle. de Tours in 1681, the little Comte de Vexin had died, aged twelve, in 1683, the same year as Queen Marie-Thérèse, mourned by Mme. de Maintenon as well as by his mother. Athénaïs’s four surviving children were now more precious than ever. There is no doubt that she suffered dreadfully over the loss of the other two, whatever the suggestions of some hostile historians that she was an indifferent or neglectful mother. It is true that she often displayed a laissez-aller attitude towards her offspring. On one occasion, while she was away at St. Germain, she was told that a fire had broken out at the Rue Vaugirard house. In response to this news she merely observed that it would bring the children luck, and carried on playing cards. Perhaps this seems extraordinarily unemotional, but there was, after all, very little she could do from St. Germain, and she was obviously sensible enough to realize that since the message was from Mme. Scarron, she and the children could hardly have burned to cinders.

  Any judgment of Athénaïs as a mother must be made in the context of the mores of her time. Childhood, as the term is now understood, was a modern concept in the seventeenth century. It has been suggested that prior to the eighteenth century there was a marked parental indifference towards children dying young, rooted in a pessimism about their chances of survival and manifested in a stoicism in the face of their deaths. Because of the fragility of children’s lives, as infants they “didn’t count” as people, a concept illustrated in Molière’s play Le Malade Imaginaire, in which the hero, L’Argan, is said to have only one child, his daughter Louison being too young to be considered an individual. Aristocratic babies were sometimes given titles, but not a Christian name, for similar reasons. The first daughter of Athénaïs’s granddaughter the Duchesse de Chartres, for example, was known before her death in infancy only as Mlle. de Valois. This attitude was essentially medieval. What might look to us like indifference may have been the best response in a world in which infant mortality was an everyday tragedy, since in fact there is ample evidence to suggest that grief, rather than mere resignation, was a common response. “I have lost two or three children not without regret or sadness,” writes Montaigne in the sixteenth century (though admittedly his lack of precision rather belies his concern).2 The Church discouraged the mourning of a baptized child on the basis that the infant’s innocence would guarantee a swift passage to heaven, but the poignant rituals enacted in the French countryside on the deaths of mothers and children attest to the desperate strength of the maternal bond. In Alsace, a woman who died in childbirth would be buried with a sturdy pair of shoes, to allow her to make the long trek back from purgatory to feed her baby. In Provence, if a mother and child died before “churching,” the godmother would bring a pair of shoes to the house and announce: “Mother, the Mass is going to begin. You must get up and walk.” If the floorboards creaked, it meant the mother was following to watch over her child’s soul.

  So there was, by the seventeenth century, a growing sense that children were psychologically separate from adults, unique individuals with characters of their own. This new attitude coexists with the medieval one in Le Malade Imaginaire, in which Louison, who “doesn’t count,” is nevertheless given a speaking role. When Bishop Bossuet was trying to persuade Athénaïs to give up the King and retire from court, she protested that she would not be able to take her children with her. “Your children,” answered the Bishop, “are not necessary to you; Madame de La Vallière managed to leave hers.”

  “Yes,” replied Athénaïs, “and in forsaking them she committed a crime.”3

  People were beginning to take pleasure in the prattling company of small children for its own sake; a pleasure expressed in the French word mignotage. Mme. de Sévigné writes with a note of surprise of the delight she finds in being with her little granddaughter. “I amuse myself for whole hours!” Both Louis and Athénaïs loved spending time with their children, something which had annoyed the Queen. On one occasion, when she heard some courtiers discussing the charming mignotages of the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Vexin, she blushed with jealousy, remarking, “Everybody goes into ecstasies about those children, while Monsieur le Dauphin is never even mentioned.”

  With the idea that children were individuals came a move away from the older communal tradition of child-rearing among the upper classes towards a separate upbringing. In consigning her children to Mme. de Maintenon, Athénaïs was in fact doing no more than following the fashion of the day, even if in her case — given the demands of the court on the maîtresse en titre and the initial discretion required to conceal the illegitimacy of the children — it was a particular necessity. The practice of wet-nursing has also been cited as evidence of maternal indifference. It is true that upper-class women believed it to be better for their figures not to breast-feed. However, more important considerations were the practical problems it presented for a woman expected to live the public life of a courtier and the fact that a wet nurse was felt to be in the best interests of a child. The milk of upper-class women was thought to be inferior, partly out of class snobbery — the delicate, well-born lady was seen as almost a different species from the more physically robust peasant woman — and partly because tight lacing and a rich diet were believed to impair the milk. The optimum start in life for a child, it was agreed, was provided by a healthy country woman with good milk. Aristocratic ladies were very fussy about the credentials of their nurses. Red-haired nurses, for example, were unpopular, because it was believed that redheads were a product of sex during menstruation and mothers feared that the suspect morals of the nurse’s parents might be conveyed via her milk to the child. The painting of the birth of the Virgin by the Le Nain brothers in Notre Dame de Paris illustrates how inconceivable it was for privileged women to feed their own children at the time. Here St. Anne is relegated to the background, while the holy child is being suckled by her nurse. Breast-feeding was promoted among the aristocracy in the 1690s, but it never caught on, and the practice of wet-nursing continued well into the nineteenth century.

  There was nothing, then, in Athénaïs’s behavior towards her children that departed from the customs of her time or her class. If the upper-class mother played a lesser role during her child’s infancy, her ultimate task was to maximize his or her prospects on reaching maturity. The socialization and the social success of daughters in particular was her primary responsibility. So Athénaïs became more involved in her children’s lives as they grew up out of duty as well as self-interest, though in her case, since they were now the fulcrum of her remaining power over Louis, their success was intimately connected with her own survival.

  Athénaïs took care to display her offspring to advantage. For Carnival in 1685, she gave a ball in her apartments for which Louis lent her his own musicians and dancers. The rooms were charmingly transformed into a rep
lica of the fair at St. Germain, with the prettiest young girls of the court, masked, tending stalls selling flowers, exotic fruit and trinkets. Du Maine, Mlle. de Nantes, Mlle. de Blois and the little Comte de Toulouse all attended, publicly demonstrating Athénaïs’s continuing link with the royal family. That summer, this distinction was confirmed with the engagement of her eldest daughter Louise-Françoise, Mlle. de Nantes, to the grandson of the Prince de Condé, Louis de Bourbon.

  Louis’s decision to marry his various illegitimate children into the royal family was one of the most controversial of his reign. Saint-Simon never got over it. His memoirs are infected by his constant invectives against the “bastards” and the way they usurped the proper prerogatives of the ancient nobility. He is in a constant frenzy of disgust at “their birth, which is blasphemy, and their rank, which is a scandal.” Not everyone felt quite as strongly as the ferocious little duke, but even so there had been some surprise at court when Marie-Anne, the first Mlle. de Blois, Louis’s daughter by Louise de La Vallière, had been married, aged thirteen, to the Prince de Conti. In her time, she was the loveliest woman at court, distinguished from her sister-in-law by being known as “the beautiful Princesse de Conti.” Once, seeing the Dauphine asleep, the beautiful princess remarked that she looked even uglier than when she was awake. She was greatly discomfited when the Dauphine opened one eye and retorted that she did not have the “advantage” of being a love child. Marie-Anne’s marriage made her one of the first-ranking women at Versailles but, having inherited her mother’s dullness along with her looks, she failed to take advantage of her position; she neither charmed the court with her society, nor, finding herself a widow at nineteen, did she amuse it with a scandal. She did, however, show a good deal of taste in the eyes of some in loathing Mme. de Maintenon, who grew more haughty, scheming and imperious by the day. When her brother-in-law was away at the front, Marie-Anne wrote to him saying that she was obliged to drive out with La Maintenon and “an old freak” called the Princesse d’Harcourt every day. “Judge what fun this must be for me.”4 Louis, informed by his mailbag spies of the insult, was furious with his daughter, and La Maintenon bore her a grudge ever after.

  Like the Contis, the Condés were of the blood royal, descended from an uncle of Louis’s grandfather Henri IV. The head of the family, the Grand Condé, had been a distinguished soldier, but had never quite rehabilitated himself after fighting on the opposite side to Mazarin and the Queen Regent in the Fronde. The engagement of his eldest grandson and heir, Monsieur le Duc, to Mlle. de Nantes, the King’s daughter by Athénaïs de Montespan, was therefore an important symbol of a return to Louis’s favor which outweighed the embarrassment of the bride’s illegitimacy. Indeed, “The Grand Condé and his son left nothing undone to testify their joy, just as they had left nothing undone to bring about the marriage.”5 Whether the twelve-year-old bride, whose new title was to be Mme. la Duchesse de Bourbon, was equally joyful is less clear. She was a beautiful girl, with a truly exquisite face, and was to blossom into a curvaceous and sexy woman, whereas her seventeen-year-old bridegroom was most unattractive, a midget with a huge overdeveloped head (a result, it was said, of his mother being gazed at lustfully by her pet dwarf when she was pregnant with him). Still, Louis gave a splendid party for their engagement, presenting his daughter with an enchanting dress of black taffeta overlaid with gold and pearls for the occasion. There was a promenade to Trianon in gondolas, where supper was served in pavilions of flowers while the court watched a firework display on the water. Louise-Françoise had a dowry of 1 million livres, with 100,000 a year as her personal income, while her husband received a pension of 90,000.

  Despite some unkind remarks about the miniature couple — one witness described the ceremony as a “ridiculous marriage of marionettes”6 — the wedding, on 24 July 1685, was even more spectacular. The Duc wore a coat of mauve satin, and the new Duchesse was resplendent in silver brocade with silver lace covered in emeralds and rubies. She appeared to be almost crushed by the weight of the jewels in her hair. After the ceremony, the couple were put to bed, the Dauphine handing the Duchesse her nightgown, and Louis doing the same for the Duc. Athénaïs had rather uncharitably hoped that the marriage would be consummated immediately, since she feared that the Condés might change their minds about her daughter, but since Mme. la Duchesse had not reached puberty, the bedding remained symbolic, and the next day the bride and groom returned to their respective schoolrooms. For Mme. la Duchesse, this meant returning to Mme. de Maintenon. Her mother and her governess had called a truce for the wedding day, overcome by the emotion of the occasion, and had surprised the court by greeting the couple together at the chapel door, but the next day normal hostilities were resumed. Voltaire declared the wedding Athénaïs’s “last great triumph at the court of France.”7 Afterwards, the delicate porcelain Trianon was pulled down.

  “Born of love and made for love,”8 the new Duchesse de Bourbon had inherited all her mother’s charm. She was “the wittiest, most malicious of women,”9 one of those whom Saint-Simon recollects as continuing to use the particular Mortemart language and manner of speech after her mother had left the court. Even La Palatine, who hated Athénaïs’s bastard children, had to admit that “she ridicules everything in such a droll manner that one can’t help laughing . . . in all her life she has never had a bad-tempered moment.” Unlike Athénaïs, Mme. la Duchesse left some record of this distinctive style, in a scandalous novel set in the time of the Roman emperor Augustus, with the characters drawn from the court at Versailles, which she wrote to amuse herself. Though as diminutive as her little husband, she towered over him intellectually, and it was not long before she began an affair with Marie-Anne de Bourbon’s brother-in-law, the far more dashing Prince de Conti, while the Duc was away at the front. Later, she had a longstanding affair with the Marquis de Lassay, which endured until her death in 1743. She built an enormous house, the Palais Bourbon, on the banks of the Seine, with a smaller residence next door for her lover.

  Although she proved a less than faithful wife, Louis always approved of his elder daughter. In 1686, she and her sister Mlle. de Blois both fell ill with smallpox at Fontainebleau. Athénaïs, in one of her last seasons at court, nursed them both round the clock. The Grand Condé, who was deeply attached to his granddaughter-in-law, also insisted on attending her bedside, where he was joined by Louis himself when her condition appeared grave. At the door of her bedroom, Condé, anxious that the King should not jeopardize his own health, tried to prevent him from entering, and “a great struggle ensued between parental love and the zeal of a courtier, very glorious for Mme. la Duchesse.”10 But Louis was so concerned that he insisted on being with his daughter, and did not return to Versailles until the Duchesse had recovered. Sadly for the elderly Condé, the strain was too much, and his exhausting devotion to the little girl cost him his own life.

  Despite her frequent presence at Marly in 1686, Athénaïs endured further humiliations that year. In May, Louis departed to take a course of waters at Barèges in an attempt to cure the famous fistula. Athénaïs was not invited to join the party, and collapsed in a fainting fit when she heard that she had been excluded. Leaving for Paris in a temper, she came back a few days later to collect the Comte de Toulouse, who she planned to take with her on a visit to Rambouillet while the King was away. Just as the boy and his mother were stepping into the carriage, a spiteful message arrived ordering Toulouse to stay and accompany his father to Barèges. The cure was eventually postponed, and Athénaïs remained at Versailles with her children, but it had been a nasty reminder of the new order of things for the woman who had once commanded the King. In October at Fontainebleau, Athénaïs was lodged as an ordinary courtier, while La Maintenon enjoyed the fine suite of apartments next to the King’s, where Athénaïs had made Louise de La Vallière comb out her hair so long before.

  One of the most painful snubs La Maintenon inflicted on Athénaïs was publicizing the treachery of her old friend Racine.
As the writer grew older, he had returned to the Jansenist beliefs of his youth, and became suspicious of his own genius, abandoning the drama because he thought it was sinful. Instead he contented himself with his role as royal historian and with the writing of occasional pieces such as inscriptions for medals. But when Mme. de Maintenon decided that the schoolgirls of St. Cyr should have a suitable religious play to perform as part of their education, she persuaded Racine to make an exception in this worthy case.

  St. Cyr displayed all the best qualities of the Marquise de Main-tenon’s character — her cultivation, her love of learning and her talent for education. She had founded the school with Louis’s help in 1686, in specially constructed premises not far from Versailles. It was intended to offer an education to poor girls from noble families — they had to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility on the father’s side — whose maintenance and dowry would be provided by the monarchy. For girls from the hobereau class, the poorer nobility who could neither afford to come to court nor make their fortune in any profession, it was a wonderful opportunity. Unfortunately, since the school immediately became fashionable, the poverty ideal did not endure for long, but the education provided by St. Cyr for the lucky ones was sensible and enlightened, with none of the pious limitations of so many girls’ convents. Athénaïs was one of the school’s first visitors, accompanied by the ten-year-old Mlle. de Blois, and she admired the girls in their black dresses and aprons, with colored ribbons on the bodices to distinguish the different forms. St. Cyr endured unchanged until the French Revolution. La Maintenon was to spend the last years of her life here, and when she died she was buried in the chapel. Her pride did get the better of her a little, though: Horace Walpole, visiting the school in 1769, observed that the infirmary was adorned with “every text of scripture by which could be insinuated that the foundress was a Queen.”11