by Hilton, Lisa
The Duchesse de Bourgogne, Marie-Adelaide de Savoie, was the last love of Louis XIV’s life. The child of Monsieur and Henriette d’Angleterre’s second daughter, who had married the Prince of Savoy, she had been given to Bourgogne aged twelve. Monsieur sulked because his granddaughter would now take precedence over Madame la Palatine, who had been the first woman at court since the Dauphine’s death, but Louis was besotted with her. He took a walk with her every day, on private visits to Marly, he gave her a little zoo and her own theater, and for a while she was the star of the court, bringing new energy to its tired routine. She was not universally popular, but when anyone criticized her she merely pirouetted about, singing, “What do I care? I shall be their Queen!” However, the little Duchesse did not live long enough to achieve such a triumph, her death being one of a series that nearly destroyed the royal family.
The events of the years following Athénaïs’s demise were to see the legitimate line of the Bourbons poised for extinction, with the result that, for a while, only one little boy stood between Athénaïs’s eldest son and the crown of France. At the beginning of 1711, the succession looked strong. Everyone assumed that Louis XIV would in due course be succeeded by his son, the Grand Dauphin, and he in turn by the Duc de Bourgogne. The heirs in the third generation, the children of Marie-Adelaide de Savoie, were aged four and one respectively, and even if they did not live, the Duc de Bourgogne could be succeeded by his brother the Duc de Berry, who was married to Athénaïs’s granddaughter Marie-Louise, the eldest daughter of the Duc and Duchesse d’Orléans. (The Grand Dauphin’s second son, the Duc d’Anjou, had renounced his rights to the French succession when he ascended the Spanish throne.) Louis could therefore be satisfied that his dynasty was assured, despite the fact that only one of his legitimate children had survived into adulthood.
In 1711, however, it became clear that all the power-broking between the different court factions in anticipation of the succession would have to begin again. First, the fifty-three-year-old Grand Dauphin died at his country house at Meudon, the victim of a heart attack after a bout of smallpox. Then in 1712, Marie-Adelaide, the Duchesse de Bourgogne, was lost, ostensibly from an attack of measles, but probably as a result of the enormous doses of emetic which were administered to cure it. Her husband died of the same complaint within days. Now the two children of the Bourgognes were all that remained of the succession, and they too had fallen ill. The newest little Dauphin was seen off by the doctors just as his mother had been, and two-year-old Louis, now styled the Duc d’Anjou, survived only because his sensible governess had pretended that he was quite well and had hidden him in her own room, away from the fatal medicines, until he recovered. Three Dauphins of France were dead in less than a year, and it was whispered that they had been poisoned by the Duc d’Orléans, the husband of Athénaïs’s daughter, in a plot to have his own daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, ascend the throne with her husband. These rumors were undoubtedly unfounded, just as those surrounding the death of Monsieur’s first wife Henriette had been years before, but Berry would now be Regent and, since it was by no means certain that the infant Duc d’Anjou would live, probably the future King. Yet Berry, too, was to die, in a hunting accident in 1714, and his wife was delivered of their last child, stillborn, a few weeks later. Did it seem to Louis a punishment for his double adultery with Athénaïs that his illegitimate children flourished, while his heirs, even into the third generation, were cut down? If the little Duc d’Anjou died, the throne could be contested between Philippe d’Orléans and his cousin, now reigning as Philip V of Spain, and France might have to face another Fronde.
The death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne caused Louis, in Saint-Simon’s words, “the only real depression of his life.” That terrible, tragic year “eclipsed all joy, pleasures, amusements, and all kinds of grace; gloom covered the whole court.” Indeed, the King never recovered, and La Maintenon reaped the fruits of her condemnation of all entertainments as she battled to amuse a man who was no longer amusable. All gaiety had departed, first with Athénaïs, and then with Marie-Adelaide. Now an old woman, La Maintenon seemed to realize how little the fierce ambition of the previous forty years had brought her. “We lead here a strange life,” she wrote. “We wish to display gallantry, wit and invention, but all this is wanting; and we have given it up. We play, yawn, gather some trifling folly from those around us, hate each other, envy each other, flatter each other, abuse each other.” The only source of exciting speculation was the succession, which seemed likely to pass to Philippe d’Orléans.
La Maintenon had other ideas. She was instrumental in persuading Louis to take the unheard-of step of altering his will, so that if D’Anjou died, Louis’s sons Du Maine and Toulouse could succeed. La Maintenon hated the Duc d’Orléans, not only for his dissolute lifestyle, but because of his progressive, some said atheistic, beliefs. The Duc was talented and energetic, a fine soldier, and, as he was eventually to prove, an able politician, but Louis was prejudiced against him because of the threat he posed to the cringing, creeping Du Maine, and had, as we have seen, foolishly allowed this prejudice to influence his judgment. Kept in the background and denied a proper role at court, it was hardly surprising, as Monsieur had once observed, that D’Orléans had sought distraction in drinking, gambling and women. The Edict of Marly, signed in 1714, was designed to limit D’Orléans’s power when he became Regent by creating a Regency Council of fourteen aristocrats, among them Du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse. D’Orléans would merely preside over what was effectively a cabinet, where decisions would be taken by majority vote, while the personal care and education of the little Duc d’Anjou were to be the sole responsibility of Du Maine. And if the child died, Du Maine, not D’Orléans, would have the right to succeed. This controversial will was hidden in a wall of one of the towers of the Palais de Justice in Paris, behind an iron grille within an iron door, and the keys deposited with three separate members of the Parlement.
Although Louis’s will did not produce another civil war, a succession crisis was avoided only by the strength shown by D’Orléans when he eventually became Regent in 1715. Under the arrangements of the Edict of Marly, Du Maine and Toulouse imposed themselves as a new rank between the princes of the blood and the ducs, who were outraged by their effective demotion, for as peers of the realm they expected to take precedence over illegitimate royal children (for Saint-Simon, the recovery of the ducs’ rightful status became a cause célèbre). Held in low esteem by the higher echelons of the aristocracy, Du Maine, encouraged by his wife to defend his rights, sought support among the lower ranks of the nobility, creating a division which made him even more unpopular. He was perceived as a bastard upstart, La Maintenon’s creature, and it was not long before D’Orléans, with the support of the ducs and the Parlement, sought to overturn Louis XIV’s will. Louis had recognized such a possibility, perhaps because in his heart he was aware of the shortcomings of his favorite but cowardly son, predicting to Du Maine: “However great I may make you during my lifetime, after I am gone I can do nothing for you.” Du Maine compared himself morosely to a flea caught between two fingernails, the princes of the blood and the ducs.
Despite the fact that the Du Maines had positioned themselves as champions of the people, and the true representatives of Louis XIV’s legacy, by 1717, D’Orléans was secure in the belief that he could have the Marly codicil overturned a posteriori, and passed an act stripping the legitimized princes of their right to the succession. In future, they would rank lower than the ducs, as their status would be determined by the date of the creation of their titles. Toulouse was spared this humiliation, being allowed by courtesy to retain his privileges during his lifetime in recognition of the solid service he had given to France, but Du Maine was not to escape it.
The Regent’s revocation of the Edict of Marly also made Athénaïs’s sons the inadvertent instruments of the legal precedent that would eventually be employed to abolish the monarchy itself: “If the French natio
n should ever experience this misfortune [the extinction of the legitimate royal line], it belongs to the nation itself to repair it by the sagacity of its choice.”4 Effectively, the overturning of Louis XIV’s will asserted the right of the state to dispose of the throne, and thus by extension to control its power, a claim which was developed and clarified during the eighteenth century and reached its revolutionary fulfillment in 1789.
For Saint-Simon, Du Maine’s demotion was a cause for jubilation. “I was dying of joy,” he recalled. The Duchesse du Maine still fancied herself as a great politician, although it was said of her that even if she held a scepter in her hand, she would manage to transform it into a baby’s rattle. Her ambition simply made her ridiculous. The Du Maine house at Sceaux was a symbol of her “shame and embarrassment, the ruin of her husband by the huge sums of money expended there, the spectacle of the court and the city, who thronged there and mocked.”5 The Duchesse tried to engineer a coup d’état by plotting with the King of Spain, but d’Orléans discovered the plan, known as the Cella-mare conspiracy, and the Duchesse succeeded only in getting herself and her husband arrested.
They were imprisoned for two years, the Duchesse at Dijon and the Duc at the fortress of Doullens, where he passed his time translating Lucretius. Perhaps he was relieved when La Maintenon died, aged eighty-four, in April 1719, her epitaph pronounced triumphantly by La Palatine: “The old whore has kicked the bucket.” There had been no love lost, either, between La Palatine and Athénaïs de Montespan, but they did at least agree on their choice of adjectives to describe their mutual enemy, “arse wipe” and “manure heap” being two favorite selections. Although the Du Maines had three children, the Prince des Dombes, the Comte d’Eu and Mlle. du Maine, none of them left any heirs. It was perhaps appropriate that the legacy of Athénaïs’s ambition should not, after all, be carried through Du Maine, who had always been far more La Maintenon’s child.
Nor did Mlle. de Nantes, Athénaïs’s elder daughter, carry her mother’s bloodline to posterity, despite having nine children by her husband. After the deaths of her husband, the Duc de Bourgogne, and her lover, the Prince de Conti, she took to eating, drinking and intrigue more than ever, and began her very public affair with the Marquis de Lassay. “She sought to drown her sorrows,” commented Saint-Simon, “and she succeeded.” She continued to quarrel with her sister the Duchesse de Chartres, now queening it as the Regent’s wife, and it is likely that her famously sharp and spiteful tongue was responsible for the rumor that D’Orléans was having an incestuous affair with his daughter the Duchesse de Berry.
Athénaïs’s other son, the Comte de Toulouse, made a slightly eccentric, if happy marriage. His bride, Marie-Sophie de Noailles, was the widow of D’Antin’s son the Marquis de Gondrin, and hence Athénaïs’s granddaughter-in-law, so Toulouse effectively married his own niece. They were a devoted couple who, most unusually for the time, shared the same bed for fourteen years and were hardly ever separated. Their son, the Duc de Penthièvre, became one of the richest men in France, having inherited the estates of the Comte d’Eu, his cousin through his uncle Du Maine — the fortune that his grandmother had wangled out of Mademoiselle in return for Lauzun’s release so many years before. Penthièvre married his cousin, Marie-Thérèse d’Este-Modena, the granddaughter of the Duchesse de Chartres (and Athénaïs’s great-granddaughter). Although Toulouse’s offspring did not enter any of the royal houses of Europe via the male line, Penthièvre’s son was the Prince de Lamballe whose wife died so horribly for Queen Marie-Antoinette in the French Revolution.
It was through her youngest daughter, Mlle. de Blois, Duchesse d’Orléans, that Athénaïs’s great-great-great-grandson became King of France, the nation’s only constitutional monarch. The eldest son of the Duc and Duchesse d’Orléans, known as Louis the Pious, married a German princess with whom he had a son, Louis-Philippe, Louis the Fat, who in turn married Louise-Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, and produced yet another Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, who became famous as Philippe Egalité. This great-great-grandson of Athénaïs married her great-granddaughter, Marie-Adelaide de Bourbon-Penthièvre, the daughter of Toulouse’s son Penthièvre, and their child, born in 1773, became King Louis-Philippe, directly descended from Athénaïs de Montespan and Louis XIV on both sides.
Louis-Philippe married one of Marie-Antoinette’s nieces, once again a cousin, Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Naples. Before their wedding in 1809, Marie-Amélie noted in her diary that the Duc had shown her a spiked iron bracelet worn by Athénaïs de Montespan in the days of her repentance. He had carried it over the Swiss border when he escaped from the revolution, using it, along with some letters from Henri IV, as essential proof of his ancestry and his claim to the French throne. By way of Louis-Philippe’s ten children with Marie-Amélie, Athénaïs’s blood made its way into the veins of many of the royal houses of Europe. The royal families of Spain and Portugal, the Dukes of Wurtemberg, the monarchs of Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria and Luxembourg can or could be traced back to Athénaïs and Louis XIV. She may have been the real Queen of France only in name, but it is Athénaïs, not poor, forgotten Marie-Thérèse, who is the ancestress of some of the most important dynasties in Europe.
By the time Athénaïs died in 1707, to the remaining members of the world she lived in — with the exception, perhaps, of the paranoid La Maintenon — it must have seemed that she had already been dead for many years. No service was held for her at Clagny, at St. Germain, at Versailles or even at Oiron. The death notice written by the curé of Bourbon was curt and inaccurate: “Today the 28th May 1707, by I the undersigned, was brought to this church the body of Marie [sic] Françoise de Rochechouart de Montespan, superintendent of the Queen’s household, deceased in this town on Friday the 27th after receiving all the sacraments, where it will rest until otherwise disposed of.” It was left to the Mercure Français, whose gossipmongering had been as faithful to her in exile as it had been in the days of her glory, to issue her obituary.
She received almost every month a considerable sum, and one could say of it that never had money been better employed. It was almost all destined for hospitals and the poor ...One could also say of this lady . . . that she only sought to do good during the time when she could be useful to her friends, to persons of distinction, to men of letters, and in general to all those who possessed some merit. She was a benefactress, she never sought to harm anyone.
The piece also mentioned Athénaïs’s particular interest in the fine arts, and her role as patron to those artists who excelled during her time at court. It was a generous thank-you to a subject who had provided the Mercure with some of its most sensational stories.
The Marquis d’Antin left Bourbon before his mother’s corpse was cold, claiming in his memoirs to have been so overcome by grief that he was forced to retire for some days to Bellegarde. The truth, according to Saint-Simon and the diarist Dangeau, was considerably more squalid. During the night after Athénaïs’s death, D’Antin left his horse at the door of her lodgings, marched into her room, wrenched a key from the neck of the corpse and opened a locked drawer in a cabinet, from which he seized a box and made off to Paris without a word. D’Antin was apparently afraid that his half-brothers and -sisters would profit from his mother’s will at his expense, whereas if she died intestate, he would be the sole legal beneficiary. Saint-Simon asserts that Athénaïs definitely made a will, but none was ever found, which suggests that this was the document kept in the mysterious box, and that D’Antin, as venal as his brother Du Maine, was prepared to rob his mother’s body in order to secure her fortune.
Since D’Antin had left no orders, Athénaïs’s funeral was left in the charge of the most menial of her servants. The Comte de Toulouse, who had set off for Bourbon from Marly, had been given the report of his mother’s death at nearby Montargis and, apparently in great distress, had turned back to Rambouillet, perhaps from a misplaced concern for D’Antin’s feelings. Lucie-Félicité de Couvres had taken refuge in a nearby Benedicti
ne abbey, exhausted and overcome with guilt that her attempts at a cure had probably contributed to Athénaïs’s death. Athénaïs had left some instruction as to how she wished her body to be disposed of — her heart was to be embalmed and placed at the convent of La Flèche, her entrails likewise at the priory of Ste. Menoux, and her body at St. Germain — but there was no one to take responsibility for seeing that her last requests were fulfilled. Her funeral thus became a macabre comedy, with the priests of two local houses, the Ste. Chapelle and the parish of Bourbon, quite literally fighting over her corpse at the very door of the parish church. The coffin was set upon the ground and the church doors closed until the dispute as to who should have the honor of conducting the funeral Mass was resolved. It was finally decided that Athénaïs’s body would be deposited in the common Chapel of Rest (“just like the least bourgeoise,” huffed Saint-Simon, ever conscious of the privilege due to his class), until D’Antin could be found to make a decision. A perfunctory Mass was held in the almost deserted church. More horribly, Athénaïs’s once beautiful body, the body that had been stroked and kissed by the King himself, had been left to the clumsy devices of an amateur surgeon, Mme. Legendre, the wife of the intendant at Montauban, and as it lay neglected in the church, her entrails were given to a porter in a badly sealed casket to be carried to Ste. Menoux. The weather was bad, and the man, disgusted by the odor from the urn, was not inclined to bother with the journey. Peering inside, he was so revolted that he kicked Athénaïs’s remains into a ditch, much to the delight of a group of rooting pigs, who made a fine feast of them. When this story reached Versailles, one Mme. Tencin remarked languidly, “Her en-trails? Really? Did she ever have any?” It was, if nothing else, the kind of joke that Athénaïs would have appreciated.
