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

by Hilton, Lisa

  La Maintenon was particularly concerned that the pupils should excel at French composition, and she thought that acting would improve their style. Racine obliged them with his penultimate play, Esther, in 1689, and the performances were a tremendous success, with Louis attending the first and last nights. But it was obvious that the piece was a thinly disguised allegory of the current state of affairs at Versailles, and in the discerning opinion of the novelist Mme. de Lafayette, it was a contemptible piece of flattery designed to bolster La Maintenon and humiliate Athénaïs. In the play, the holy, humble Esther triumphs over the imperious Vashti, and the identity of the king, Ahasuerus, needed no explanation. The wits joked that in locating St. Cyr so close to Versailles, old Esther was creating a harem for Ahasuerus, but the fact that anyone with taste declared the piece a nonsense can have been of little consolation to Athénaïs. Now that Racine had returned to religion, his loyalties were all with the enemy of his former patron, and in changing his allegiance he made Athénaïs an object of very public ridicule.

  She still had her children. Athénaïs was close to both of her daughters, though in later years her maternal role evolved into that of mediator, since after the marriage of Mlle. de Blois, the two sisters became, for the most part, deadly rivals. If the court was surprised that two of Louis’s illegitimate daughters had been married to princes of the blood, they were speechless at the King’s choice of husband for his youngest. Françoise-Marie was to marry Philippe, Duc de Chartres, the son of Monsieur and La Palatine, and the eventual head of the house of Orléans, whose rank was grandson of France, from his descent from Louis XIII. At the time, no one suspected that her husband would ultimately become the Regent of France.

  Mlle. de Blois had not, unlike her elder sister, been brought up by La Maintenon, for although she had been born at that lady’s château in 1677, during the alliance Athénaïs had made with the governess to dispose of Mme. de Ludres, La Maintenon had refused to have anything to do with her, or with the Comte de Toulouse, who were, of course, the result of Athénaïs’s reunion with Louis after his religious crisis in 1676. La Maintenon, cheated in her attempt to conquer the King’s soul, “did not spare her exhortations and remonstrances”12 at the birth of Athénaïs’s youngest daughter, and she and her little brother were brought up in the old house at Rue Vaugirard in Paris, where La Maintenon had begun her career. Although rather too plump, Mlle. de Blois was pretty, with perfect skin and her father’s melting eyes. She suffered from the defect of having one shoulder higher than the other, which Mme. de Caylus interpreted as evidence that she bore “the conflict between love and duty” in her person.

  Philippe, Duc de Chartres, who became Regent of France on Louis’s death in 1715, was far more talented than his indolent cousin the Dauphin or his cowardly cousin Du Maine, and suffered as a consequence. He was clever, cultivated and brave, interested in science as well as the arts. But Louis very unwisely allowed himself to be prejudiced against his nephew, and Philippe was kept kicking his heels at Versailles, forced to hear inflated accounts of the Duc du Maine’s exploits on campaign and going mad with frustration. Not having inherited his father’s penchant for boys, he vented his humiliation in a string of affairs with women (he became a father aged thirteen after impregnating the daughter of the concierge at the Palais Royal), drinking, gambling and dabbling in such dangerously unorthodox sciences as alchemy. Louis was perhaps rather intimidated by Philippe’s promise, and forcing his daughter upon him as a backhanded honor was one way of demonstrating his power over the lesser House of Orléans.

  A good deal of plotting was necessary to bring about the marriage. In 1688, Louis announced that he intended to raise a few lucky men to the Order of the Holy Spirit, one of the highest honors in France. Among the nominees were Monsieur’s boyfriend the Chevalier de Lorraine and his brother the Comte de Marsan. Monsieur also submitted the names of two more of his favorites, the Marquis d’Effiat and the Marquis de Chatillon. This outrageous nomination of flagrant homosexuals to the holy order was Monsieur’s pay-off for his support of the marriage. On Athénaïs’s suggestion, he was also given the Palais Royal, which had previously been leased from the Crown. The real opposition to the match, however, was likely to come from Madame, La Palatine, who would never stomach such an insult to her proud German blood.

  Madame had a curious relationship with the King. Like her predecessor, Henriette d’Angleterre, she was more than a little in love with him, as her obsessive reportage about his activities, preserved in her voluminous correspondence, shows. These letters, the writing of which consumed hours of Madame’s day, give one of the best portraits of life at Versailles, although inevitably they are as full of gossip and prejudice as they are of hard facts. Madame and Athénaïs may not have had much in common, but they both appreciated that the most interesting part of a person’s character is often the untruths attributed to it. The letters were opened by the King’s spies, as Madame well knew, and she used them to make criticisms of Louis that his terrifying manner would have prevented her from making to his face. When she got wind of the marriage plot in 1688, she made her opinions clear in a letter to her aunt Sophie, the Electress of Hanover.

  I must confess to my dearest Tante that I have been most distressed lately ...I have been made privy to the reason why the King treats the Chevalier de Lorraine and the Marquis d’Effiat so well; it is because they have promised him that they would persuade Monsieur to ask the King most humbly to marry the Montespan’s children to mine, that is, the limping Duc du Maine to my daughter and Mademoiselle de Blois to my son. In this case Maintenon is all for the Montespan, since she has brought up these bastards and loves the limping boy like her own...Even if the Duc du Maine were not the child of a double adultery but a true prince, I would not like him for a son-in-law, nor his sister for a daughter-in-law, for he is dreadfully ugly and lame and has other bad qualities to boot, stingy as the devil and without kindness. His sister, it is true, is rather kind . . . But most of all, they are the children of double adultery, and the children of the most wicked and desperate woman on earth . . . whenever I see these bastards, my blood boils over.

  Whatever her view of Athénaïs, La Palatine was quite accurate in her estimation of Du Maine. He was eventually married to a daughter of the Condé family, who was popularly thought to resemble a black beetle. The couple were so very short and so very proud that Du Maine’s sister referred to them contemptuously as “les poupées du sang,” the dolls of the blood. Madame, relieved that her own daughter, Elisabeth-Charlotte, had been spared such a fate, explained in a letter: “I believe that the King’s trollop must have been told what the populace of Paris is saying, and that must have frightened her. They are saying very loudly that it would be shameful for the King to give his bastard daughter to a legitimate prince of the house.” Madame may have been pleased to flatter herself that she had public opinion on her side, but in truth Athénaïs was not in the least bit afraid of the Parisians, or of Madame, come to that, especially as Louis had already married one illegitimate daughter to a Conti.

  Madame’s son, however, did not escape. On 10 January 1692, she wrote again to her aunt, with “eyes so thick and swollen that I can barely look out of them,” with an account of how the betrothal had come about. Apparently, Monsieur had come to her room and said, “Madame, I have a message from the King for you, which will not be too pleasing to you, and you are to give him your answer in person tonight. The King wishes me to tell you that since he and I and my son are agreed on the marriage of Mademoiselle de Blois to my son, you will not be foolish enough to demur.”

  Madame was far more at home on the hunting field than in the hushed antechambers where intrigue bred, but in this extremity she had bestirred herself to play the courtier. After Philippe had been talked around by his tutor, the Abbé Dubois, La Palatine had attempted to persuade him to stand up to his uncle and refuse the match. But given that Louis’s manner famously reduced everyone, especially his relations, to a state of te
rrified agitation, it was hardly likely that he would refuse his “consent.” So when Madame was summoned to Louis’s Cabinet, it was to be presented with a fait accompli. She was so appalled that she barely managed a wobbling curtsey, and immediately withdrew. The engagement was announced that evening at Appartement, and the court rushed to congratulate the couple while reveling slyly in Madame’s delicious discomfiture. La Maintenon could hardly disguise an air of triumph. Although she must have hated the elevation of Athénaïs’s daughter, whom she had refused to raise, she had endured so many insults from Madame’s pen that her delight at La Palatine’s humiliation overcame her jealousy of Athénaïs. No one, however, dared to approach poor Madame, who strode weeping noisily along the Galérie des Glaces, sniffling into her handkerchief and looking, according to Saint-Simon, like Ceres after the abduction of her daughter Proserpina. At supper, neither Madame nor Philippe could eat, always a sign of extreme distress for the Bourbons, and Mlle. de Blois was so nervous in her gaudy outfit that her governess had to take her on her knee. Saint-Simon adds that the next day Madame answered her son’s nervous greeting with a powerful slap in the face.

  Gleeful descriptions of the affair soon sped in dispatch bags around all the courts of Europe. Madame, aware that she had made an embarrassing public spectacle, resolved to put the best face she could manage on the wedding. After all, as she wrote to her aunt, “I will have no trouble getting used to [my daughter-in-law], for we will not see each other often enough to annoy each other ...Saying bonjour and bonsoir each morning and night won’t take long.”

  The bride’s sister, Mme. la Duchesse, was nearly as furious as Madame, and even less restrained. In marrying Philippe de Chartres, Mlle. de Blois would become a granddaughter of France through her husband’s rank, and would therefore take precedence over her elder sister, a mere princess of the blood. Mlle. de Blois would have a longer train and be permitted to sit in an armchair in the presence of the King, while Mme. la Duchesse would have to writhe with envy on a straight-backed, armless chair. Even worse, Mme. la Duchesse de Bourbon would have to address the new Mme. la Duchesse de Chartres as “Madame.” Neither of these great ladies was yet out of her teens. Mme. la Duchesse was so peeved that she could not bear to attend the ceremonies which, as Saint-Simon records with gloomy satisfaction, had more splendor than pleasure about them.

  The betrothal took place on the evening of 17 February 1692 and the marriage the following day. At the engagement Mlle. de Blois wore a dress of gold, embroidered all over with tiny black flowers, trimmed with gold Spanish lace and decorations of diamonds and rubies, with more diamonds in her fair hair. Her fiancé was magnifi-cent in gold brocade with pink and gold ribbons. The bride’s dowry was an astonishing 2 million livres (more fuel for the rage of Mme. la Duchesse, who had received only 1 million), a pension of 150,000 livres a year and jewelry worth 600,000 livres.

  For the wedding, Mlle. de Blois wore silver, while the Duc de Chartres appeared in black velvet — perhaps his mother’s choice — and marvelous shoes encrusted with pearls and diamonds. At the “bedding” ceremony, the Duc was given his nightshirt by King James II of England, who had been exiled to the French court since 1688, and Madame, with gritted teeth, presented the new Duchess with hers. The next day, the fourteen-year-old girl received the congratulations of the court as she lay in bed. “Sodomy and double adultery had triumphed,” wrote Saint-Simon disgustedly.

  The new Duchesse de Chartres took a pragmatic view of her marriage. “I don’t care if he loves me, so long as he marries me,” she said of Philippe. The marriage was not really a happy one, although the couple eventually had seven children. Françoise-Marie felt isolated in her husband’s family, and looked to her Mortemart cousins for support, which infuriated her hostile mother-in-law. From the beginning, Philippe’s infidelities were legion, and after the birth of his first legitimate son, Athénaïs’s grandson, he installed his mistress, Marie-Louise de Séry, in a house right under his wife’s nose at the Palais Royal. He insulted his wife further by having Marie-Louise act as hostess during the state visit of the Elector of Bavaria. Philippe was not really a wicked man; he was just young, frustrated and unhappy, largely thanks to the unfair treatment meted out to him by his jealous uncle Louis.

  The “esprit Mortemart” was discernible in Françoise-Marie, but it was combined with a laziness and a lack of interest in court life unknown to Athénaïs. Madame complained that her daughter-in-law spent all her time reclining in her salon, too idle even to dine with her family, as this would have meant sitting on a stool rather than lolling on a sofa. The Mortemart tendency to plumpness manifested itself early in Françoise-Marie, for she was really a glutton, and drank to excess as well. Her pride was notorious, and she incensed Madame by suggesting that it had really been rather kind of her to agree to become Duchesse de Chartres, as her husband was only the King’s nephew, while she was his own daughter.

  The marriage held, and a show of loyalty was maintained, at least in public. Eventually, Madame and her daughter-in-law were reconciled, united in their hatred of the scandalous Marie-Louise. After Philippe’s mistress died, the couple grew closer, and Françoise-Marie reigned supreme at the Palais Royal until her death in 1749.

  But where, during all the scheming and plotting that surrounded her daughter’s marriage, was Athénaïs? She was not even invited to attend. Athénaïs had to read about her daughter’s marriage, and that of Du Maine a month later, in the Mercure Galant, like any bourgeois housewife hungry for a bit of upper-class gossip. Sadly, this was largely the work of her disloyal son the Duc du Maine. Early in 1691, Louis had announced that he intended to leave for the siege of Mons and to take the Comte de Toulouse with him. Athénaïs was particularly upset, since she had just learned that Mlle. de Blois was to be taken from her charge and placed in the care of the wife of the Duc du Maine’s tutor, Mme. de Montchevreuil. To deprive her of her children was to deprive her of her only reason for remaining at court, and Athénaïs was deeply offended and hurt. In desperation, she asked Bossuet to inform the King that since he obviously had no further use for her, she required his permission to retire from court to the convent of Les Filles de St. Joseph, in which she had been charitably interested for some time. Perhaps she was dusting off Louise de La Vallière’s old tactic to revive some flame of Louis’s love. Whatever her reasons, she immediately regretted her impetuousness, for Louis received the news with perfect equanimity, and announced that this was most convenient, since he had intended to give her apartment to the Duc du Maine and to pass on the Duc’s to Mlle. de Blois. Mortified, Athénaïs gathered up her baggage and her dignity and retreated to Clagny, from where she coolly announced that in fact she had not really intended to leave the court for good, and that she thought it rather hasty of him to have had her furniture removed.

  It was the Duc du Maine who, far from begging his mother, the “belle madame” of his childish letters, to remain at his side, had gleefully sent on her things with all speed. He had also been seen throwing Athénaïs’s delicate furniture out of the windows of her apartment. Du Maine had long since realized that he had more to gain from his beloved governess, the King’s secret wife, than from his troublesome, embarrassing mother, and had plotted with her old enemy Bossuet to take advantage of her careless remark. What better way of ingratiating himself with La Maintenon than by sacrificing his mother? La Maintenon loved Du Maine as her own son, and they were both greedy for power and keen that the Duc should position himself as the leader of the factions that were forming among the younger generation of courtiers. Athénaïs’s presence was too much of a reminder to Du Maine of his compromising birth, and in his ambition, La Maintenon found the ally she needed to achieve what she had been hoping for for twenty years.

  Du Maine really was a revolting little individual. He felt no loyalty to his mother for her work in securing him the great fortune on which he founded his fantasies of power, or for the tenacity with which she had insisted on remaining at court to safeg
uard his future and that of his siblings. When he realized she could be no more use to him, he packed her off like a sacked chambermaid. Saint-Simon is not the most reliable judge of the characters of Athénaïs’s children, but in the case of Du Maine his description seems accurate. He compares the Duc to the Devil

  in malice, in perversity, in unkindness to all and good to none, in sinister plotting, in sublime vaingloriousness, in conceits without number and endless dissembling; yet with much seeming amiability, especially in the arts of pleasing and entertainment, for when he wished he could charm. Being the most arrant coward in heart and mind, he was also most dangerous, for provided he could manage it unseen, he was ready to go to dreadful lengths to escape what he feared, and would lend himself to the meanest and most despicable actions, by which the Devil lost nothing.

  Du Maine’s cowardice was a devastating blow to his father, who revered martial prowess, and who hoped that as his own years of campaigning drew to a close he could live his battles vicariously through his son. Louis created a special precedent to allow Du Maine to lead an army by promoting the Duc de Vendôme, the dashing, illegitimate grandson of Henri IV, to a general’s command, in which, unlike Du Maine, he proved most able.

  Du Maine took up his post at the head of the left flank of the Maréchal de Villeroy’s army in 1695. On 14 July (not a happy date for the French monarchy), the Maréchal sent orders to Du Maine to attack the enemy, who were greatly disadvantaged, being outnumbered, out-armed, exhausted, and trapped in an open position on a plain, their only hope of escape the cover of a wood three leagues away. It would be a sure and simple victory for the French troops. Du Maine procrastinated. He had to go to confession, to reorganize his camp, to reconnoiter the position again. Six times the orders were sent, and all the while the enemy were sneaking closer to freedom. Du Maine’s dithering lost the day for the French. No one at court dared to tell the King of this shocking display of cowardice, particularly as the dispatches were usually full of sycophantic exaggerations of Du Maine’s heroic exploits. Louis finally learned the truth from his valet, Vienne, and “his distress was more than he could bear.”13 That night at Marly he lost control of himself in public, venting his fury on a waiter at table whom he had spotted filching a petit four. Louis leaped to his feet and rushed at the man, beating him with his cane, which was, luckily, made only of bamboo. The company, horrified, were quick to shout out their anger at this “rascal” to prevent the King from even more undignified rage. Later, the Marquis d’Elbeuf slyly asked Du Maine in public where he was planning to serve next, explaining that he meant to accompany him, since anyone who stayed close to the Duc would be sure of preserving his life.