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

by Hilton, Lisa

  Notwithstanding the efforts of Mme. de Maintenon, Louis had never been able to bring himself to order Athénaïs from court, but between them her own son and Bishop Bossuet managed it. “Mme. de Montespan left the court in a storm of tears and never forgave M. du Maine, who, by this monstrous service, won for himself the love and perpetual devotion of Mme. de Maintenon.” Du Maine’s deceitful treatment of his mother should perhaps have alerted Louis to the nasty side of his son’s character, but with the King’s secret wife as his champion, Du Maine knew he would remain safe from censure. He was even to deprive Athénaïs of her refuge at Clagny, despite the fact that it had been promised to her mother until her death. Du Maine demanded Athénaïs’s lovely house as a wedding “gift,” suggesting to La Maintenon that now his mother was banished, it would be embarrassing, and too tempting for the King, to have her so close to Versailles.

  In her last days at Clagny, Athénaïs must have been surprised that she had gone on living. Suddenly, and by what seemed a banal accident, she had lost the life which she had so loved for twenty years. As long as she remained at Versailles, visited by the King, respected by the court, she could believe that in some measure she was significant. Now she was little more than the ghost of herself, “one of those unhappy souls who return to expedite their faults in the places they used to inhabit.”14 The morning of her final departure, 15 March 1691, she had wryly announced to Bossuet that he could, at last, pronounce her funeral oration. “Yes, Madame la Marquise. The King no longer loves you.” The King no longer loves you, you are as good as dead.

  As she wandered in the gallery at Clagny, Athénaïs may have smiled at the fresco she had chosen in the days when her whim was Louis’s command. Dido, the beautiful Queen of Carthage, who is loved and then abandoned by Aeneas, mourned from her walls. In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas begs Dido to save his fleet, then leaves her desolate when he sails away to found Rome, and Dido commits suicide. “Why should I palter?” she storms at Aeneas. “Why still hold back for more indignity? / Sigh, did he, while I wept? Or look at me? / Or yield a tear, or pity her who loved him?”15 Athénaïs had held on for as long as she could, but was she, like Dido, granted at least the chance to confront her lover? Was there some final parting scene between the King and his mistress? It appears not. That Athénaïs left Versailles in tears is all that is known.

  Embodied at Versailles in the intrigues of the dévot party, the strictures of Bossuet and the triumphant hypocrisies of Mme. de Maintenon, the Catholic Church would perhaps seem an unlikely source of refuge for Athénaïs in her exile from court. However, that strong faith encouraged by her mother Diane in her childhood had remained a constant throughout her life, and in the years after 1691 she came more than ever to rely on it, though typically, it was in the form of action rather than the cloistered contemplations of Louise de La Vallière, that it manifested itself. Athénaïs had, as she famously remarked, never taken the liberty of committing all sins simply because she was guilty of one, and in fact had often left the King to pray privately. She had never missed a fast day or doubted the certainty of her beliefs. Now middle-aged, and deprived of much of her celebrated troubling beauty, she had nevertheless retained all her energy, and she threw herself into good works with all the zeal she had formerly spent on arranging entertainments for Louis. She was determined, it seems, to prove to the world that although she had left Versailles, her life was not over.

  Athénaïs had become involved with the Filles de St. Joseph during the difficult period of the King’s religious crisis in 1676, quite possibly, given Bossuet’s attempts to persuade the King to break with her, in the hope of providing herself with a refuge in the event that the bishop’s mission had succeeded. The order was made up of nuns who devoted themselves to the education of poor or orphaned girls, and so generous were Athénaïs’s donations that by 1681, the order passed an act recognizing her as their “superior” and giving her the power to organize the rule of the order, to choose its nuns and boarders and to supervise “the well-being and utility as much spiritual as temporal of the said Maison de St. Joseph.” Even if this is viewed as a shrewd acknowledgment of the “temporal” benefits Athénaïs’s wealth might bring to the order, it was also a recognition of the strength of her faith, despite her status as France’s most public, and in 1681, as yet unrepentant sinner.

  There was a particular irony in the order’s selection of Athénaïs as its patron, for one of its principal aims was the promotion of modest behavior in young women. The Filles de St. Joseph, who had been installed in Paris since 1639, were a common sight in the streets of the capital, the nuns in their black dresses with square white collars and wimples, the boarders in dull, gray serge. The uniforms were hardly consistent with Athénaïs’s own extravagant tastes, and she must have been amused by the fact that in their promenades through Paris, the nuns taught the girls to walk “modestly,” and not to flirt with or ogle passersby. More practically, the boarders were instructed in housework, knitting and dressmaking, so that when they left the convent at seventeen, they would have a means of supporting themselves in the “honest families” where the nuns placed them. Inspired by this useful program, which sensibly recognized that material support, as well as faith, could help women to a virtuous life, Athénaïs founded a similar society of her own in 1686. She made a large donation to set up a hospital in Fontainebleau, which became known as the Hôpital de la Ste. Famille, with the aim of providing sixty orphaned girls, aged about six or seven, with instruction in religion, writing, dressmaking and lacemaking.

  In the same period, Athénaïs formed two other charitable orders, the Hôpital des Viellards in St. Germain in 1678, and a boarding house for young girls at the Ursuline convent there in 1681. She spent 17,000 livres on the hospital building, and six years later acquired land to extend the accommodation and to add a church. She was acknowledged as the “founder” of the Ursuline school by letters signed by the King and in 1685 provided the funds for new lodgings for the convent. Unlike La Maintenon, whose school at St. Cyr demanded sixteen quarterings of nobility from its students, Athénaïs was too socially secure for snobbery, and her charities were genuinely concerned with helping the poor, and women in particular. She encouraged practicality as well as piety, and she was able to ally her love of artistic patronage with her charitable aims.

  Under Athénaïs’s direction, the Filles de St. Joseph began to produce really beautiful needlework, from designs by celebrated artists such as Simon Delobel, tapestry-maker to the King. As well as embroidered religious vestments, described as “superb” and “perfectly beautiful” by contemporaries, the girls sewed covers for the furniture of the state apartments at Versailles, including — and again Athénaïs must have smiled — a lit d’ange for the King’s bedroom. Other pieces included armchairs, tapestries and screens, stools and folding chairs, all worked in embossed brocade several centimeters thick. The blue velvet and gold embroideries given by Athénaïs to the Grand Dauphin were also a product of St. Joseph, and were included in a piece created by the famous furniture-maker Boulle. Ever one to claim a good idea as her own, La Maintenon presented Louis in 1689 with a bed decorated in embroidered screens from her rival’s workshop: a beautiful gift, though the ambassador of Siam found the subject of the commission — all the kings and queens of France, with the princes and princesses of the blood in the costume of their times — in rather surprising taste. The fact that the school at St. Cyr later became famous for its embroideries may be largely due to La Maintenon’s desire to compete with Athénaïs on yet another front.

  The most impressive work of St. Joseph was perhaps the entablement created for the throne room at Versailles, which was supported by eighteen pilasters of cloth of gold on embroidered bases. In the winter, the spaces between them were hung with red velvet, in summer with hangings upon which flowers, garlands and cupids were chased in 20,000 livres worth of gold and silver. Truly fit for a king, or a queen of France. Did Athénaïs recall, in the days she spent at the conve
nt after her ignominious flight from Versailles, that she had once dreamed of sharing that delicate, glimmering shade? What mortification to know that La Maintenon now lurked legitimately in its shadow!

  It is hard to know whether the pious life towards which Athénaïs seemed to be moving in her charitable activities was motivated by anything more substantial than an observance of the conventional route for women in her position. Discarded mistresses, unmarried girls and widows all found their way to the convent, after all. Yet her energy, as much as her vanity, was unable to accept a quiet, cloistered retreat from the world, and so far as was possible, she made her penitence as public and as splendid as her disgrace. Mme. de Caylus conceded that she was possessed of a “grandeur of soul,” and however limited the scope of her actions, she attempted to achieve something lasting and substantial in her pragmatic charity, something more enduring than a few decades’ worth of Hail Marys. She spent her money as enthusiastically as when it had streamed across the gaming tables of Versailles; she built and organized and bossed her paupers with the same gusto she had once used to construct Clagny and order the courtiers about. Since she could no longer have the King, her vanity needed another outlet, and she was determined to be as successful as a benefactress as she had been as a mistress. Or perhaps her agony was too great to endure the silence of a convent cell.

  Too proud to accept charity at La Maintenon’s hand, Athénaïs requested nothing, either for herself or for her family, when she left the court. She did appear there a few more times, ghostlike: in August 1692, when the Duchesse de Bourbon gave birth to Louis-Henri, her first grandchild, Athénaïs presented her with one of her own sets of pearl and diamond jewelry, and she attended the child’s first communion in 1698. In 1695 she was a guest at a supper in Paris given for her daughter and son-in-law the Duc and Duchesse de Chartres. The host was Langlée, who had once bestowed upon her that gold dress fit for a fairy empress.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Old people are fond of giving good advice:

  it consoles them for no longer being able

  to set a bad example.”

  As director of the order of St. Joseph, Athénaïs was able to take an apartment in their Paris convent in the Rue St. Dominique, near to the church of St. Sulpice, where she had been married nearly thirty years before. From there, it was a short journey through St. Germain and the Quartier Latin to the Carmelite convent in the Rue St. Jacques, where Louise de La Vallière was waiting out the long years of her repentance. Drawn, perhaps, by a hope that they would find some solidarity in what was now a shared loss, Athénaïs paid her old rival a visit, and burst into tears at the sight of her.

  “You weep,” said Louise, smug to the last, “but I weep no longer.”

  “You weep no more?’ asked Athénaïs sadly. “I will cry forever.” True, though, to the dignity which had supported her through so many reversions of Louis’s affection, Athénaïs shed her tears in private. It seems that she and Louis had no personal contact after their separation, not even when she proudly returned her jewels to him. Perhaps she had hoped that this gesture of independence would impress him, or move him to pity. As it was, Louis merely returned to Athénaïs what was hers, keeping back only a pearl necklace which he presented to the mother of the future Louis XV, Marie-Adelaide de Savoie, wife of his grandson the Duc de Bourgogne. Court life, propelled by the unchanging rhythms of etiquette, simply moved inexorably on without her.

  Athénaïs, meanwhile, held a little court of her own at St. Joseph, and if the surroundings were rather more humble than the state of Versailles or the luxury of Clagny, its mistress had retained all her famously imperious airs. “All France went there,” records Saint-Simon. “She spoke to each one like a queen. Everywhere about her there was an air of widespread grandeur . . . She received, but never paid visits, not even to Monsieur, or to Madame, nor to Mademoiselle, nor to the Hôtel de Condé.” The only exception Athénaïs made was for Louise. Her callers were, rather pathetically, expected to treat her with the same ceremony as they would have done at court, and even her children who, with the sad exception of Du Maine, she saw frequently, were expected to perch on flimsy little folding chairs while she reclined in state in the room’s only armchair, set at the foot of her bed. Visiting her crowded little apartment was fashionable, since she was as charming and witty as she had ever been, and the ladies of the court would remind their daughters of the importance of calling on Mme. de Montespan whenever they went to Paris.

  Along with the Comte de Toulouse, the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Duchesse de Chartres, Athénaïs could now count the Marquis d’Antin, her legitimate son by Montespan, among her social circle. Athénaïs had been unable to see Louis-Antoine, who had been taken to Bonnefont at the age of three by his father in 1668, for eleven years. They were reunited when, aged fourteen, D’Antin fell ill at his school, the Collège de Juilly near Versailles, and Athénaïs paid him a discreet, anxious visit. In his journal, D’Antin described his emotions at the time: a mixture of delight at her warmth and resentment at her long absence. He was perhaps unaware of how difficult it would have been for her to arrange a meeting without arousing the temper of her still irate husband. She did manage to visit the boy secretly two or three times during the following years, as he passed through the Jesuit college in Paris and then a military academy. Once he was an adult, it was easier for Athénaïs to help him, and in 1683 she had obtained for him a lieutenant’s rank in the King’s regiment and (with the unlikely assistance of Mme. de Maintenon), a place in the household of the Dauphin. Her caution about Montespan was quite justified. When D’Antin was injured in a hunting accident in 1686 and taken to Clagny to recuperate, Athénaïs nursed her son attentively, and he wrote rather sadly in his journal that he was all the more touched because he had never expected any show of affection from her. Montespan, rather less charmed by Athénaïs’s sudden interest in their son, decided to use the excuse of the hunting accident to make an appearance at Versailles. Terrified that he would make a scene that would damage her precarious status at court, Athénaïs dispatched her son’s confessor to intercept her husband with the excuse that a stormy scene between his parents might disturb D’Antin’s recovery. The priest halted Montespan’s carriage and, amid some shocking language from the Marquis, persuaded him to turn back. He retreated to Sèvres and whiled away his son’s convalescence recounting scandals about his wife to anyone who would listen.

  Athénaïs adored matchmaking, and now, overjoyed to be able to take a role in her son’s life, she set about arranging his marriage, which took place later that year. Whether or not Montespan’s untimely appearance had weakened her status still further, the wedding proved to be a mortifying demonstration of the low regard in which she was now held at court. Athénaïs had selected as her son’s bride Julie-François de Crussol, eldest daughter of the Duc d’Uzès, and the granddaughter of Athénaïs’s friend Julie de Montausier, who had contrived her early meetings with the King. (What must the bride have thought about marrying the son of a man who had quite literally scared her grandmother to death is not recorded.) Athénaïs was livid when Julie-François’s family objected to the match. She was appalled that the Uzès overlooked not only her own position but D’Antin’s precious share of Mortemart blood, seeing him as merely the son of an impecunious Gascon gentleman and a discarded royal mistress. This time her tantrums were of no avail, and the Uzès held firm, refusing to provide their daughter with a dowry until after their own deaths. M. de Montausier was more generous, donating 20,000 ecus and a lieutenant-generalship in Alsace, with an income of 8,000 ecus, for D’Antin. Athénaïs gave her son a pension of 2,000 ecus and furnished an apartment for the young couple. Her wedding gift to the bride was a marvelous necklace of diamonds and emeralds worth 40,000 ecus, and she also thoughtfully presented Julie with a huge bowl filled with everything an elegant woman would need at court: ribbons, gloves, scent and fans. The ceremony itself, though, was another disaster. It was held in August 1686 at the
bride’s family house in Paris, the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where the famous salons had been held, but despite Athénaïs’s anticipation of a splendid party, no one came, not Monsieur, not any of the important courtiers, and certainly not Louis.

  D’Antin had inherited his mother’s ambition to succeed at court, and Athénaïs, spurred on by the humiliation of the wedding, was determined to assist him. In 1695, after her retirement from Versailles, she purchased the estate of Petit-Bourg for her son for 40,000 ecus, and engaged the architect Lassurance to dismantle the existing house and build a smart château with a mansard roof and two wings connected by a doric portico in its place. She was concerned, though, that another inherited passion, gambling, would dissipate the fortune she was spending on D’Antin, and furthermore stand him in poor stead at court, which was far less permissive now that La Maintenon had the ear of the King. She tripled her son’s pension in exchange for a promise that he would surrender his ruinous habit, and commissioned Toulouse to tell the King of the young man’s reformation. Louis greeted the announcement with sarcastic indifference, merely shrugging his shoulders to whoops of malicious laughter from the courtiers. Athénaïs had sunk a long way from the time when her displeasure could invoke terror. To the younger generation, in fact, her attempts to impose herself appeared pathetic and ridiculous.