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

by Hilton, Lisa

  That year, Athénaïs expressed her new spiritual awareness in a long letter to a friend.

  For much of the time, we are to ourselves a great world, and we often converse in our souls with a numerous populace of passions, desires, plans, inclinations and tumults which agitate us with their worries, trouble us with their disobedience, and prevent us from hearing God, who speaks to our hearts, and who alone ought to be our world and our everything . . . there is no more time to lose, because if this grievous night surprises us, all is lost for us, without reprise . . . look for God while he can be found, for fear of searching for him uselessly at the end of a life which will not be very long, and shrink from dying in sin and disorder.7

  Now aged sixty-three, and seeing the tomb closing on her beloved friends and relations, Athénaïs was struggling to prepare her soul for death. Such preparation (which is a central theme of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, to give one example) was a convention, but one viewed as vital, since a sudden, ill-considered death was considered both tragic and shameful. Its importance can be gauged from contemporary inventories of the possessions of those who had died. In 1700, 80 percent of such inventories contained some sort of essay or pamphlet on what was known, quite seriously, as “the art of dying,” and many more people than those represented by such figures would have heard such works read aloud.

  After the death of Marie-Madeleine, Athénaïs began to reflect on the principles of Jansenism, the puritanical, severe order that had once caused her husband’s family such embarrassment. Since Jansenism taught that “works,” that is, charitable activities, were insufficient in themselves to secure a salvation only obtainable through grace, Athénaïs, who had recently devoted so much of her energy and fortune to precisely such activities, had to accept that her struggle for reformation would be much more private and difficult. That the majority of the works in her library at Oiron were religious, if not Jansenist texts, attests to her search for the elusive spiritual essence of grace. They included writings by St. Augustine and David’s Psalms, Grenade’s Catechism in four volumes, a Guide for Sinners and the works of Jansen, along with at least eight other theological collections. Such texts were crucial to the essential preparation for death, which necessitated a gradual drawing away from the distractions of the world and a humbling of the flesh in readiness for communion with God. Athénaïs, never one to do things by halves, took her new studies very seriously, now directing her intelligence and energy to this austere discipline as well as to the supervision of her charities.

  She was helped by an old friend, Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches, whom she had encountered at court during his time there as an undertutor to the Grand Dauphin. Huet was an appealing character, not sour and joyless like Bossuet, but almost as learned — a talented mathematician and philologist as well as a skilled theologian — and it is a testament to Athénaïs’s intellectual ability that he was prepared to correspond seriously with her. It was with Huet that she debated the value of letters over conversation. Athénaïs, that great talker, suggested that there was necessarily something rather static and lifeless about letter-writing, while the Bishop countered that conversation was too anarchic and spontaneous, that the cleverest remarks could fall unrecorded on the stupidest ears, or worse, that the speaker might express himself thoughtlessly merely in order to amuse. This objection encapsulates both the charm and the deficiency of Athénaïs’s conversational gift, for its ephemerality was the very source of its wit. Another discussion recalled the précieuse questions that had entertained Athénaïs and her friend Mme. Scarron many years before at the Hôtel d’Albret, such as “Which is better, illusion or truth?” Predictably enough, Huet expostulated at length on the desirability of the truth, but perhaps Athénaïs, who had lived for so long within the theatrical myth of the Sun King, saw some whimsical advantage in the attractions of illusion.

  The correspondence did not always take such an elevated turn. Sometimes the friends exchanged poems, as they did when Huet wrote in verse to tell her that he could not visit her until the following spring.

  N’attendez pas donc mon retour

  Qu’au retour de chaleurs nouvelles.

  Je n’irai vous faire ma cour

  Qu’au premier vol des hirondelles.8

  By way of reply, Athénaïs tries to tempt him to come sooner:

  Là, vous receviez de mes mains

  Fruits, pois verts, artichauts, salades

  Tandis que tous les médecins

  Les defendoient a leur maladies.9

  Elsewhere in her letters to Huet, and in those to her friend the Duchesse de Noailles, Athénaïs is anxious to emphasize that she has conquered her love of the world, embodied for her in the life of the court. “Of the intrigues of the court, I no longer wish to hear talk of them,” she asserts, or, “I assure you, I have no ambition in this world, and I dare say that I am empty of desires, and that this spares me from all sorts of pains.”10

  In spite of such protestations, there is a lingering sense of need in her letters to remain informed of the events at Versailles, partly because she missed Louis and her children so terribly, and partly to reassure her that she had chosen a better path in retiring from the world. “When one acts in good faith, one would rather be far away than near, and I have found in the short time I have spent in Paris so much need for care and circumspection, especially in regard to appearances, that it seemed to me the pain greatly exceeded the pleasure.”11 Is Athénaïs speaking here of apparence, the duty to preserve a good social face, or of the mortifying efforts required to make her dead beauty presentable? The need to step away from worldly concerns also meant the relinquishing of vanity, at once a relief and a torment for a woman whose beauty had once been a legend in Europe.

  La Palatine, who had always been cheerful about her own absolute lack of attractions, nevertheless exulted in Athénaïs’s vanished looks. “I see that those whom I used to see when they were so beautiful are now as ugly as I am: Mme. de La Vallière no one in the world would know any more, and Mme. de Montespan’s skin looks like paper when children do tricks with it, seeing who can fold it into the smallest piece, for her whole face in closely covered with tiny little wrinkles, quite amazing. Her lovely hair is all white, and her face is red, so her beauty is quite gone.”

  According to Saint-Simon, however, Athénaïs remained “divinely beautiful” until the day she died, so perhaps it was still possible to see the vestiges of the imperious young goddess in the placid elderly woman. And however faded her beauty, Athénaïs certainly retained her air of majesty, a truly royal mystique which proclaimed her, always, queen of her surroundings. This new placidity, the sense of peaceful resignation that Athénaïs tried to cultivate in her correspondence, was sometimes little more than a mask for the torments she created for herself in pursuit of a state of grace. While appearing ready to welcome death with an easy countenance, she was terrified of dying and seemed to be attempting quite literally to outrun her own mortality. Suffering at the same time from a disgust with the world and a horror of being alone, Athénaïs careered all over France in an effort to escape her fears. One year she moved from Clagny to Paris, from Paris to Fontrevault to Saumur to Jargueneau; after a brief pause at Oiron, it was off to Bellegarde, now the residence of D’Antin, then back to Clagny before a season at Bourbon. The very difficulties and rigors of traveling were perhaps a blessed distraction from her preoccupations. Athénaïs was still famous enough for her activities to attract attention. “I am not surprised that she has run off to the country,” remarked La Maintenon of the precipitate journey she undertook after the death of Monsieur. La Bruyère, in his Characters, satirized Athénaïs under the name of Irene, who travels to Epidaure (Bourbon) to consult an oracle about her ailments. First she says that she is exhausted, which the oracle attributes to the ardors of the journey; then that she has no appetite, for which the cure is to dine lightly; then that she has insomnia, that the wine is undrinkable, that she has grown too heavy, that she has indigestion, that he
r sight is failing, to all of which the oracle responds with practical advice. Then Irene complains that she is feeble and unhealthy.

  “That is because you are aging,” replies the oracle.

  “But by what means can I cure this languor?” asks Irene.

  “The quickest cure, Madame, is by dying.”

  Afraid that she would indeed die before she had expiated her sins, Athénaïs redoubled her efforts to ensure her salvation. As a form of penitence, she worked for several hours a day with her ladies at rough tasks such as shirt-making for the paupers, punishing her white hands with the stiff needles. She prayed incessantly, and while keeping up the elegance of her social position on the surface, she imposed secret privations on herself. Not content with the hair shirt and steel belts and bracelets, she now slept between the coarsest linen sheets under her luxurious bedcovers, exchanged her lawn petticoats for un-bleached shifts beneath her fine clothes, and took to wearing a spiked girdle. She also renounced her sensual love of eating, sticking with difficulty to a simple and sparing diet, punctuated by frequent days of fasting.

  Yet even such extreme gestures were not enough to convince her that she would not go straight to hell. Saint-Simon heard that as her fear of solitude increased, so she employed women to sit up with her at night, lying “with her bed curtains drawn back, her room ablaze with candles, her watchers around her, whom, whenever she woke up, she wished to find talking, playing cards, or eating, to assure herself they were not drowsy.” Thus the long nights dragged their way towards dawn punctuated by the gentle slap of a card as the ladies propped up their sagging heads. No fortunes were thrown on Athénaïs’s table now, no provinces won or lost, and the only louis in the Marquise’s chamber were the four who observed the dreary gathering from the walls. Did Athénaïs remember little Marie-Thérèse, with her shy allusions to “my cousin with the blue feather,” now that she, too, was reduced to loving a portrait? Or perhaps, since the King was not permitted to remain in the presence of a corpse, the portraits were talismans against the horror that crept in among the shadows as the candles burned low, insinuating itself through the thick curtains of the bed. Was Athénaïs frightened because she had indeed dabbled with the friendship of the Devil in Lesage’s room in Paris in 1668, and had no wish to renew their acquaintance? Or maybe the fear of death was so strong because Athénaïs knew in her heart that despite her prayers and her mortifications, her repentance remained insincere. She could regret the vanity and extravagance of her court life, her duplicities, the fact of her double adultery, but could she truly renounce her great love for Louis, claim that she did not care for him, that she wished she had resisted his affections? She may have been unable to reconcile her knowledge that their love had been a sin with her feelings for her lover; may have seen herself as an Eloise, caught between the denial of one form of grace or the other. If so, according to the spiritual rules she had imposed upon herself, she had every reason to fear that she would be damned.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Neither the sun nor death

  can be looked at steadily.”

  One night in 1705, Louis was seized with a fit of the vapors as he looked through a sheaf of faded, highly scented papers. The heady perfumes that had once been his delight now sickened him so much that no one would dare to approach him wearing scent, so why did he risk an attack of nausea to burn the papers himself ? In the solitude of his wife’s sitting room, he was amusing himself by reading his old love letters, for La Maintenon had not been able completely to eradicate his nostalgia for his old mistresses. Four years later, again alone with his wife, Louis burned with his own hands secret records of the verbal processes of the Chambre Ardente, which he had kept in their black leather coffer to protect Athénaïs during the Affair of the Poisons. How did he remember Athénaïs, this old, sick man, his country bankrupt and beleaguered, his ministers, Colbert and Louvois, both dead; this warrior prince who no longer rode to war but remained closeted in his vast, cold house, a prisoner of his decaying body? Did he recall, sentimentally, the beautiful young woman in Flanders in the days of his first great victories, when he rode beside her carriage sweeping off his hat to sing to her in the sunshine? Or did he recoil in horror at the insinuations in La Reynie’s pages that the woman he had made his true consort had also consorted with Satan? Did he remember the furious pleasures of her bed, her sweet mouth and her scented hair? “I want,” Athénaïs had said. “I want, I want.” And Louis had given her a Queen’s fortune and a palace, made princes of her sons, defied the Church, scandalized the nation, created miracles in her honor in the passion of his great love, whose mementos were now charred in his hands. Yet when he had heard the news of her death, he had not given her so much as a tear.

  Athénaïs-Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan, died at about three o’clock in the morning at Bourbon on 27 May 1707. She had arrived at the spa early in the month, in the company of Lucie-Félicité d’Estrées, Maréchale de Couvres, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of her friend the Duchesse de Noailles. Perhaps Athénaïs had had a presentiment that this journey would be her last, as before she departed she had arranged her affairs, doubling her alms-giving and dispatching all the pensions she had bestowed two years in advance. She was well enough when she arrived at Bourbon to attend the blessing of a bell at nearby Couzon with Lucie-Félicité and her brother, but on the night of the 22nd she was taken ill with a fainting fit. Her ladies called for vinegar and cold water, but she remained unconscious, and Lucie-Félicité was summoned. In the absence of a doctor, Lucie and Athénaïs’s attendants attempted to cure what they suspected was apoplexy by the amateur administration of emetic. The dose was so powerful that the Mercure Français, still fascinated by Athénaïs, reported without much consideration for her dignity that she had vomited sixty-three times. When doctors eventually arrived they declared the case to be hopeless, and Lucie sent a messenger to fetch D’Antin. Athénaïs rallied, and was able to ask for a priest to hear her confession and furnish the sacraments. D’Antin arrived, having interrupted a hunting trip with the Grand Dauphin, on the 26th. Athénaïs told him wryly that he found her in a very different state from when they had last been together at Bellegarde.

  As the end approached, Athénaïs seemed less frightened. Lonely for so long, perhaps she believed she was to be reunited with her sisters, her brother and the many friends she had outlived. She called together her household servants and asked their pardon for her bad temper and for the scandalous life she had lived “with so deep and penitent humility that nothing could be more edifying.”1 She thanked God for permitting her to die far away from “the children of her sin,”2 and begged the priest who confessed her to do so simply, as though he were dealing with an ignorant person. She did not speak of her family or her affairs, beyond some instructions for her charities, trying to keep her mind fixed on the mercy for which she hoped so fervently. D’Antin recorded her last moments. “Arrived at Bourbon the evening before her death, I made the sad witness to the most firm and Christian death that one could see, and the merits of good works and of a sincere penitence have never been raised so high as in her favor.”3 In her death, Athénaïs seemed finally at ease, concerned only with the expectation of salvation — “a hope,” remarked Saint-Simon tartly, “with which [they] were pleased to flatter her.” Athénaïs had always been excellent at getting what she wanted, and after years of discipline and struggle, it seems she realized even the most unworldly of her ambitions.

  As for her material hopes, many people had continued to believe, right up until her death, that Athénaïs might once more triumph over La Maintenon. The Noailles family had certainly shared this delusion, for although they were already related to La Maintenon by marriage, they were prepared to risk her wrath by marrying their youngest daughter to Athénaïs’s grandson by D’Antin in the hope of the return of the favorite to power. This explains the presence of the Maréchale de Couvres at Bourbon. The family flattered Athénaïs with these “ex
pectations” to the last, but she was merely amused, treating the Maréchale like a doll and sending her out of the room for chattering. She would have been gratified, though, to know that her influence was still considered important enough for the marriage to come off after her death.

  And what of Athénaïs’s ambitions for those “children of her sin”? As Louis’s formerly indomitable strength waned, and with it his authority, the cabals of the court began to realign themselves in preparation for the reign to come, and as is clear from La Palatine’s letters, those children were in the thick of the plotting.

  The entire court is in a ferment. Some are trying to gain the favor of the all-powerful dame, others that of Monseigneur, others again that of the Duc de Bourgogne. He and his father do not love each other, the son despises him, has ambitions of his own, and wishes to rule. The Dauphin is completely dominated by his bastard half-sister, Mme. la Duchesse. All of them are against my son, for they fear that the King may look upon him kindly and arrange an alliance between his daughter and the Duc de Berry. Mme. la Duchesse would prefer her own daughter to marry the latter, and she therefore monopolizes him. The Duchesse de Bourgogne wishes to rule both the Dauphin and the King; she is jealous of Mme. la Duchesse and has made a pact with the Duchesse d’Orléans in order to thwart her . . . Meanwhile, the old woman sets one against the other and rules all the stronger for it.