by Hilton, Lisa
With the exception of Toulouse, who was perhaps the dullest but the most decent of her children, Athénaïs was unlucky with her sons. Although D’Antin was happy to make use of her wealth to fund his extravagant tastes, his gorgeous equipage and his prodigious Mortemart appetite (he, too, grew fat from his gourmandizing), he made no real headway at court until he formed an alliance with La Maintenon after his mother’s death. Mme. de Maintenon had originally hated and feared D’Antin as “the son of an enemy who might conceivably return to favor, whom she could not forgive for what she had been to her, for what she owed her, nor for the coin in which that debt had been paid,” according to Saint-Simon. In other words, D’Antin was a reminder that the poor widow Scarron had repaid her benefactress with treachery and spite. Later, though, La Maintenon came to believe that as the half-brother of her beloved Du Maine, D’Antin would provide a useful ally if he were rewarded with advancement, and she set about rehabilitating him, much to his dis-loyal pleasure.
D’Antin’s half-brother-in-law, the Duc de Chartres, once described him as “exactly as a real courtier should be, without humor and without honor.” He was certainly a breathtaking sycophant. Only a matter of months after Athénaïs’s death, D’Antin’s new friend the Marquise de Maintenon contrived that Louis should spend a night at the house Athénaïs had bought for her son. At Petit-Bourg, Louis found “the furnishing of the rooms, the comforts of all kinds, the abundant and delicate fare served at a vast number of tables, the profusion of all manner of refreshments, the prompt and willing service at the turn of one’s head, the care, the forethought, the luxury, the charming novelties, the excellent concert, the games, the ponies, and numerous decorated carriages for driving in the grounds ...everything to indicate most tasteful and elegant extravagance.”1 The only royal objection was to a beautiful chestnut avenue, a fine feature of the grounds but one that unfortunately obstructed the view from the King’s bedroom. When Louis awoke the next morning, the avenue had vanished, apparently soundlessly: there were no cart tracks, or anything at all in fact, to suggest that it had ever existed. D’Antin was made governor of Orléans for his toadying, exclaiming when he heard the news: “I am thawed at last!” and eventually achieved the summit of his ambition with a dukedom and a street named after him in Paris. Athénaïs, though, would probably have found the gesture unworthy of the dignity of a Mortemart.
Athénaïs retained her enthusiasm for building, and her most important purchase of the years following her removal from Versailles was also made in D’Antin’s name, though she retained a life interest in it for herself. This was the château of Oiron in her ancestral province of Poitou, which she bought for 340,000 livres in 1696 from the Duc de la Feuillade, son of her brother Vivonne. Like all of Athénaïs’s houses, it was beautiful, dating in part from the Renaissance, when it had been improved by Artus Gouffier, chamberlain to François I, who added a grand staircase to the north wing and an arcaded gallery. In the seventeenth century, the main house was remodeled in the fashionable classical style and supplemented by two pavilions, joined by a doric portico. Athénaïs was responsible for the reconstruction of the buildings, which had fallen into disrepair, including one of the two bell towers that surmounted each wing. Along with the house, Athénaïs bought the estates of Curcay and Moncontour, adding a third, Tersay, six years later. The expense consumed a considerable part of her fortune, but D’Antin agreed to pay her an annual rent of 3,000 livres in exchange for his eventual ownership of the property, as well as 100,000 livres to be distributed among charitable causes selected by his mother.
If the exterior of Oiron was impressive for its size and its beauty, the interior was a sadder, more personal reflection of the life Athénaïs lived there. In the gallery, the stucco ceiling, inlaid with flowers, fruits and pastoral scenes, echoed Oiron’s idyllic position amid the placid beauties of the Poitou countryside. On the walls, frescoes told the story of Helen of Troy, a salutary reminder of the humbled pride of their faded owner. To these ornaments Athénaïs added many pictures of her own — of her children, of her sister Mme. de Thianges, and of the royal family, but mostly there were pictures of the King. Louis was everywhere in the house: framed in ormolu, silver or enamel, rearing in sculpted miniature on his horse or gazing translucently from an engraved goblet. The centerpiece was the King’s bedroom, featuring a great oak bedstead with a gilded rail, a black velvet canopy and curtains embroidered in silver and gold. There were ten armchairs of gilded wood, upholstered in a tapestry showing the Sibyls, the oracles of ancient mythology, and a green chalcedony table with a pedestal of gold. Athénaïs had a bust made of Louis in silver, with gold hair, and at Beauvais, she commissioned tapestries showing him as a young man, charging on his horse in a plumed hat, victorious on the battlefields of Flanders where he had first loved her. In her bedroom alone, there were four portraits of Louis. Indeed the whole house was a shrine to the love that for twelve years had astonished and scandalized the world.
Despite the sumptuous décor, and the ceiling so bedecked with garlands and voluptuous goddesses that visitors feared it might fall on their heads, the King’s room had a funereal air about it, which was not surprising, considering that it was never used. Louis never slept there, never admired his portrait with the feather in his cap. Two pictures of Athénaïs showed her not as la reine sultane, the real Queen of France, but as Mary Magdalene, weeping and repentant (though it must be said that, true to form, the Mignard version is more erotic than regretful). In the new bell tower, blue and white tiles in the Delft style showed a pattern of waves which recalled the Mortemart family motto, Ante mare undae. Was Athénaïs trying to remind herself of her family’s “superiority” even as she recalled the blue and white porcelains of her pleasure house at Trianon?
If the apogee of Louis’s reign can be said to have been 1678, then the following decades might broadly represent a slow process of reversal and decline, marked by compromises to French military strength abroad and economic collapse within the nation, largely as a result of the cost of the King’s ambition. The royal family also suffered: from four generations of Bourbon heirs at court in 1704, by 1715 the line had dwindled to Louis himself and his sickly five-year-old great-grandson. Versailles was becoming so paralyzed by the rigidity of its etiquette that even Louis was glad to escape more and more often to Marly, and the chilly influence of La Maintenon spread through the drafty corridors of the great house, petrifying the court into monotonous and grudging devotions animated only by a mechanical round of “pleasures” as predictable as the litany of the Mass.
Politically, this new era had begun in 1686 with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Ratified in 1598, the edict had given French Protestants the right and liberty to worship, preach, marry and work, and though the prejudices of both Catholics and Protestants prevented it at times from functioning properly, there was nevertheless a new degree of religious toleration in France that was considerably more enlightened than, for example, attitudes in Holland or England in the same period. Cardinal Mazarin had adopted a broadly pro-Protestant policy, guaranteeing the acceptance, if not tolerance, of the Protestants, and until the conclusion of the Dutch wars, Louis had taken a similar line. However, spurred on by La Maintenon and the dévots, their influence now unchecked by the stabilizing voice of Colbert, who had died in 1683, Louis was encouraged to revoke the agreement. Since the collapse of the Spanish bloc, France had represented the main stronghold of Catholic power in Europe, and Louis was concerned at the increasingly hostile Protestant ambitions of William of Orange, soon to reign in England as William III in place of Louis’s deposed Catholic cousin James II. Louis declared that he would give his life to see his subjects united in the bosom of the Church, and the flattering entreaties of the dévots persuaded him that the conversion of Protestants was the greatest work so great a king could accomplish.
The period after the revocation was one of the most shameful in the history of France, but while atrocities were being committed against the
Protestants in the provinces, Louis’s ears were being filled with triumphant tales of conversions by the thousand, and Masses were said in thanks at Versailles for the souls of those who were in fact desperately attempting to escape with their lives. Altogether, 200,000 Protestants fled into exile, 1 per cent of the entire French population, as the revocation helped to draw France into yet another war.
On the death of Elector Charles von Simmern, ruler of the Palatinate, in 1685, Louis made an aggressive move on the small Rhineland state. In the same way as he had demanded Spanish territories in the Netherlands on behalf of Queen Marie-Thérèse nearly twenty years earlier, he now claimed about half of the Palatinate for his sister-inlaw, the Princess Palatine. To oppose him, William of Orange formed the League of Augsberg, an alliance consisting of Spain, the Hapsburg Empire, Sweden, and a number of smaller German states, joined by England in 1689 after William came to the throne there. Louis welcomed to France his exiled cousin James and his Queen, Mary of Modena, put St. Germain at their disposal and set about burning the Palatinate to ashes. La Palatine was heartbroken at the destruction of her homeland, and could never reconcile her affection for Louis with the ruin of her country, preferring to blame Louvois for the scorched-earth policy pursued by the French. Louvois died in 1693, largely unmourned — thanks to La Maintenon, who had turned against her former crony when he begged Louis not to make his marriage public, offering the King his own sword with which to kill him rather than make him witness such a disgrace — and from then on Louis decided to command his armies himself. The war dragged on, successfully for the French with the captures of Mons and Namur, but disastrously for the Catholic cause in England after James was defeated by William III at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. A peace of sorts was concluded at Ryswick in 1697, but the whole of Europe held its breath, knowing that there would be more conflict to come when the King of Spain died.
In 1693, at the age of fifty-five, Louis decided to retire from accompanying his armies on campaign. Marie-Thérèse’s cousin with the blue feather would ride no more to war. Unfortunately, the Duc de Luxembourg, whom Louvois had jealously tried to compromise in the Affair of the Poisons, died two years later, having never lost a battle in his long and distinguished career as a general, to be replaced by Villeroy, who was frankly incompetent. (More of a bon viveur than a soldier, Villeroy, it was said at court, was irresistible to women, but never to the enemy.) Without their King or their greatest general, the French armies were no longer invincible.
Charles II of Spain died in 1700, bequeathing the crown of Spain as well as Spanish dominions in Italy, the Netherlands and the New World to Louis’s eighteen-year-old grandson the Duc d’Anjou. (The Spanish King had no children from his marriage to Monsieur’s daughter Marie-Louise since, as she reported dutifully before her suspected death by poison, he was impotent.) It was an incredible compliment to Bourbon power, and after lengthy consideration, Louis decided that D’Anjou should accept. In a dramatic announcement, he had his council chamber opened to the whole court, and presented D’Anjou as the new King of Spain. The Spanish ambassador fell to his knees to kiss the new monarch’s hand, murmuring, “The Pyrenees have ceased to exist.”2 The next day, their Most Catholic and Most Christian Majesties arrived for Mass side by side, as equals, and Louis offered his grandson his own cushion to kneel on. D’Anjou, who had been disregarded by most of the court, shyly demurred, and the two kings knelt side by side on the bare floor. It was a beautiful scene, a fitting close to the last century of undisputed Bourbon power in France. Protestant Europe was already rallying itself for a challenge to the Catholic hegemony established on the continent by the Spanish succession. By 1702, London, the Hague and Vienna were filled once again with declarations of war on France, and Denmark and the German princes quickly followed. The principal objective of the new alliance was to bring about the abdication of the new King of Spain in favor of the Austrian Emperor Charles, and the recognition by Louis of the rights of the house of Hanover (France still supported the Stuart claim to the English throne).
The next eleven years were disastrous for Louis as his glorious armies suffered defeat after defeat. The losses of Malplaquet and Oudenaarde destroyed French confidence, the country was bankrupt, the soldiers unpaid. A series of terrible winters brought famine year after year, and half the livestock in France was lost. Louis melted down his gold plate to pay the troops, and issued desperate proclamations to the provinces, urging his subjects to yet further endurance. Many people blamed Mme. de Maintenon’s bad influence for the King’s apparent loss of judgment, and a parody of the Lord’s Prayer was recited on the streets, which ended, “Deliver us from La Maintenon.” By the time the Peace of Utrecht was signed in 1713, France was on its knees. Although Louis had not succeeded in enforcing the Catholic claim to the throne of England, his grandson remained King of Spain, so the war of succession had to some degree ended honorably. Louis, however, was a dying man. He had not doubted himself since Athénaïs de Montespan had first taken him in her arms nearly fifty years before, but now he was deeply troubled that his obsessive pursuit of la gloire had reduced his people to beggary. Louis the Great continued his unerring daily routine, but the Sun King’s radiance was irrevocably dimmed.
At Versailles, Louis was finding it difficult to keep his large and increasingly unruly family under control. By the turn of the century, the royal household comprised not only Louis, Monsieur and La Palatine with their daughter Elisabeth-Charlotte, but the Grand Dauphin and his three sons, the Duc de Bourgogne and his wife, the Duchesse Marie-Adelaide de Savoie, the Duc d’Anjou and the Duc de Berry. Also living at court were Monsieur’s son, Philippe de Chartres, his wife, Louis and Athénaïs’s daughter the former Mlle. de Blois, and their daughter Marie-Louise-Elizabeth, who would become Duchesse de Berry, and Louis and Athénaïs’s elder daughter, now Mme. la Duchesse de Bourbon, and the Duc, not to mention the Princesse de Conti, the King’s daughter by Louise de La Vallière. The Duc and Duchesse du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse made up the younger generation. All these young people — and they were very young, Athénaïs’s daughters having been married in their early teens — found the changeless round of the court extremely dull. Since Louis had continued with his policy of absolute control, even the Dauphin, in theory the next King, was barely allowed to speak a word at council meetings, and the other young men had nothing apart from soldiering to occupy them. In 1698, the Dauphin sketched pen portraits of his sons and daughter-in-law.
Bourgogne, a masterpiece. Delicate health. Very gay but not very chatty. Loves to study science, languages, philosophy, mathematics and history ancient and modern . . . rather proud and intimidating.
Anjou, sweet nature and also a clever boy. People prefer him to Bourgogne.
Berry, very chatty, lively and full of promise.
Duchesse de Bourgogne. Sharp and spiteful . . . She and Bourgogne completely indifferent to one another. Servile to Mme. de Maintenon.
The young ladies had even less to amuse them than their husbands. They gossiped and gambled and stole one another’s lovers. The Princesse de Conti and Mme. la Duchesse were jealous of the Duchesse de Bourgogne, who would one day be Queen of France. They considered her spoiled and precocious, and their own beauty was insulted by the King’s favoritism, which required that the ugly little Duchesse, with her monkey face and snaggle of teeth, be regarded as a beauty. Mme. la Duchesse was also annoyed by her younger sister’s enormous pride. “She is granddaughter of France even on the privy,” people said of her. But with the exception of the Duchesse de Bourgogne, who had been educated by La Maintenon when she came to Versailles aged twelve, and called her “Aunt,” everyone was united in one activity: complaining about “the old woman.”
La Palatine’s letters give a picture of the dreariness of Versailles after Athénaïs had retired. “There is an old German proverb,” she wrote, “that comes to mind now. ‘Where the devil cannot go, he sends an old woman.’ This is something that all of us in the royal family
have come to experience.” In another: “Court life is becoming so dull that one can hardly stand it any longer. For the King imagines that he is pious when he sees to it that everyone is properly bored and bothered.” Even elegance seemed to have become a thing of the past. “I am certain,” declared La Palatine to her aunt, the Electress of Hanover, “that if Your Grace could see the great care and trouble that the women are now taking to make themselves repulsive, Your Grace would have a good laugh . . . the coiffures are getting higher every day. I think they will finally have to make the doors taller, for otherwise these ladies will no longer be able to go in and out of the rooms.”
The natural coiffure à la Fontanges was out of fashion now. Instead of imitating the spontaneity of the hunting field, the women were plastered in paint and hair grease, and creaked through the Galérie des Glaces like wooden dolls. It was a pity that La Maintenon should have ended her life with a crusade against everything that was beautiful and joyful, for her intelligence could have been channeled into creating an elegant and amusing court, of which Versailles was sorely in need. Instead, having spent the years of her youthful poverty in the salons of some of the most intelligent and educated conversationalists in France, in her powerful old age, La Maintenon chose the most ignorant and vulgar for company, and the shrieking nonsense that replaced cultivated conversation at the court became known as babil de St. Cyr in a dubious tribute to the school’s founder. Saint-Simon notes that Athénaïs’s salon had been the center of esprit at court, and there was no one to take her place.
