In debt now to the tune of forty-eight thousand livres, the marquis rejoined his regiment so he could remain a step ahead of his creditors. He left Athénaïs with a power of attorney over his affairs and didn’t return until the end of the summer.
Meanwhile, Louise de La Vallière was playing the “beard” in the king’s affair with Athénaïs, for as far as the queen knew, she was still his maîtresse declarée, and the marquise de Montespan no more than another witty lady-in-waiting. At first the scenario had been humiliating for Louise, because the sovereign had to pass through her rooms at Versailles to reach those of Athénaïs. But by this time Louis had long since tired of Louise and rarely made love to her anymore—which makes one wonder how both inamoratas felt about the whole arrangement. In 1667, the king made Louise duchesse de Vaujours as a consolation prize. Meanwhile, His Majesty’s grand passion, whom he supposedly made love to three times a day, had to remain clandestine.
In September 1668, Athénaïs realized she was pregnant. Obviously it was not her husband’s child, as the marquis had been away at war for far too many months for the conception to be fudged. However, Louis-Henri could still legally claim the child as his own, ruining its opportunities for a life of great wealth and privilege. Athénaïs panicked. The marquis knew nothing yet. She almost considered sequestering herself and begging Louise, of all people, to pretend the baby was hers.
If ever there was a time to make the proverbial pitcher of lemonade out of a bag of lemons it was now, and the oh-so-fashionable Athénaïs was the perfect woman to do it. After all, she had already popularized her Hurluberlu hairstyle with every woman at court. She invented a loose-fitting chiffon gown called a battante, a style ironically dubbed l’Innocente. Soon all the ladies were dressing à l’Innocente.
Louis anonymously rented a house near the Tuileries for her lying-in, but insisted on being present at the birth. Legend has it that the accoucheur, or male midwife, was compelled to perform his duty blindfolded the entire time. When he insisted on something to eat, followed by a glass of wine to wash it down before commencing, he demanded it be fetched by the young man (unbeknownst to him, his sovereign in disguise) who was hovering by the bedcurtains, ordering the anxious father-to-be about as though he were a lackey. “Have patience; I can’t do everything at once,” muttered the agitated monarch, clearly unused to waiting on anyone.
The arrangement was such a clandestine one, it’s possible that the gender of Athénaïs’s infant was not formally recorded (historians presume the baby to have been a girl, Louise-Françoise, who died at the age of three; Athénaïs would give her second daughter by the king the same name). Nor were the proud parents permitted the luxury of cooing over their illicit bundle of joy. The baby was probably spirited away by Mademoiselle des Oeillets, one of the marquise’s maids.
Nevertheless, the news of the royal romance was eventually leaked. Athénaïs’s father, the rakish duc de Mortemart, was delighted by it, as was, rather shockingly, her father-in-law, who exclaimed, “Praise the Lord! Here is Fortune knocking on my door at last!”
His son, however, wasn’t about to take his wife’s lying-in lying down. Although the older Montespan took the pragmatic view, he wasn’t the one being cuckolded by the king. The marquis made an embarrassing nuisance of himself by rampaging all over Paris, loudly denouncing His Majesty as another King David (a biblical reference to his adulterous affair with Bathsheba) and a vile seducer. Evidently Montespan’s own kidnapping of lowly serving wenches near the Spanish border didn’t count.
To the marquis’ astonishment, his tirades were scoffed at. Among the French aristocracy of the seventeenth century, marriages were made purely for financial gain, adulterous affairs were de rigueur, and spouses who were in love with each other were mocked for their sentimentality. Most people wondered why he didn’t behave like the traditional mari complaisant, and just put up and shut up, taking his wife’s infidelity to the bank like every other husband anointed by the king with a set of cuckold’s horns. Who knows—he could end up with a dukedom and wealth beyond his imagination. He was deeply in debt; he certainly could have used the bailout. To be fair, at the time the marquis was making a nuisance of himself, the public didn’t know Athénaïs was carrying the king’s bastard. But Montespan didn’t want a dukedom. Besides, the title would benefit his wife even more. It would grant her the “right of the tabouret,” permission to sit upon a stool in the sovereign’s presence, when lesser mortals, and nobles, had to stand. So he was determined to punish her by refusing any offer of a dukedom for the rest of his life, and no matter how powerful Athénaïs became at court, Versailles’ rigid etiquette would deny her a privilege that even poor discarded Louise de La Vallière enjoyed.
Not only did the marquis de Montespan perversely trumpet his cuckoldry; he wanted all of France to know about it, which he achieved by ostentatiously affixing a pair of stag antlers to his coach.
Things progressed from the merely embarrassing to the genuinely frightening when the marquis began to stalk his wife. She had sought refuge in the home of Julie de Montausier, whose elderly mother was a celebrated hostess of one of Paris’s poshest salons. After Louis-Henri finally located Athénaïs, he went berserk. On more than one occasion he broke into the marquise’s bedroom at night and ransacked it; at other times he would lie in wait for her there and beat her up. Then he would boast of his intentions to visit the skankiest brothels in Paris, with the near-certainty of contracting syphilis, which he would pass on to the king by raping Athénaïs and transmitting the disease to her. One night the marquis de Montespan broke down the door and assaulted Athénaïs. Screaming for help, she clung to Julie de Montausier. Fortunately, the servants rushed in and were able to prevent her violation.
Surprisingly, the ostensibly omnipotent king was legally powerless to intervene in what was considered a domestic dispute between spouses. There was no law against a man beating, or abducting, or even raping his own wife. It was a delicate predicament for Louis. He could assign a team of bodyguards to protect his paramour, but he had to tread cautiously so as not to alert the queen to his love affair.
Athénaïs’s royal romance sent the marquis de Montespan over the edge, but his embarrassing—and violent—behavior was hardly the way to regain her affection and fidelity. The glue that at first cemented their marriage was sexual attraction, but the relationship quickly soured when he revealed himself to be an inveterate gambler and wastrel, squandering her dowry, and philandering with various women of low birth.
Finally, for Athénaïs’s safety, her lover did something that was within his power: He issued a lettre de cachet, a notice of imprisonment without trial at the king’s behest. Traditionally, the monarch did not need to specify a reason for issuing a lettre de cachet, but this time Louis enlightened his prisoner. Behaving as though Montespan had merely leveled a professional complaint against the crown, the king sentenced the marquis because he had dared to challenge His Majesty’s choice of the duc de Montausier as the dauphin’s governor or tutor.
After a week of exceptionally unpleasant confinement, Monsieur de Montespan revoked the power of attorney he had made in Athénaïs’s favor. A few days later he was released on the proviso that he remain in exile on his country estate.
Perhaps the marquis might have gone quietly if he had been paid off, but his reaction to his wife’s affair was so vitriolic that no remuneration was forthcoming. He fired a parting shot at Athénaïs in the only other way he could legally do so, by taking their three-year-old son Louis-Alexandre back to Gascony, where his mother was already caring for their daughter. Madame de Montespan was not allowed to see Louis-Alexandre again until he was fourteen. The loss of her legitimate offspring was the first casualty of Athénaïs’s liaison with the king.
At his country estate in Bonnefont just north of the Spanish border, the marquis declared that his “dear and beloved spouse” was dead, due to “coquetry and ambition,” and staged a mock funeral for her at the village church, complete
with a church service and a coffin.
It was trendy in seventeenth-century France for posh ladies to consult devinesses, or fortune-tellers, and “sorcerers,” from whom they would purchase aphrodisiac powders or love potions. Athénaïs visited two of the popular ones, Lesage and Mariette, whose emporia lay in the slums of Saint-Denis, to purchase a concoction that would permanently net her the king, and allow her to replace Louise de La Vallière as his maîtresse en titre. The abbé Mariette recited some mumbo jumbo over her head and gave the marquise a packet of powder (possibly Spanish fly, which in small doses would rev up Louis’ heartbeat). Since he routinely took emetic “purges” for his bowels, the other powder would pass undetected. The king’s doctor turned a blind eye to Athénaïs’s secret administration of aphrodisiacs, figuring that whatever was in the “love potions” was fairly harmless, and certainly no worse than whatever he was prescribing for His Majesty. But there would come a time when her little excursions to the local witches wouldn’t be deemed so innocuous, and the marquise would wish she hadn’t established such a well-known pattern of visiting sorcerers and clandestinely feeding their products to the king.
After the 1668 Grand Divertissement, thirty thousand workmen had been brought in to transform the existing structure of Versailles into the masterpiece of Louis’ vision. “Versailles, c’est moi,” he declared, and it would be a palace with no rival on earth. It was not completed until 1682, when it became the French court’s permanent residence. In 1670, the king built a pleasure palace for Athénaïs on the grounds of Versailles, located on the site of a razed village. Known as the Porcelain Trianon, this series of miniature pavilions dedicated to their love was covered with fragile blue-and-white Delft tiles and surrounded by lush gardens that bloomed with their favorite fragrant blossoms: tuberoses, Spanish jasmine, anemones, and orange trees.
That year, Athénaïs instituted proceedings for a legal separation from her husband on the grounds of “cruelty and improvidence.” She also requested permission to live apart from her spouse, known as “separation of bed and board,” and demanded the return of her dowry (which for the most part remained unpaid, although the sums had been pledged to the marquis’ numerous creditors).
Although Louise had still not been dethroned, in practice, Athénaïs was now Louis’ maîtresse en titre, and he was clearly head over heels in love with her, whether genuinely so or chemically induced. She was conspicuously at his side at a lavish fête hosted by his cousin the prince de Condé in Chantilly, and that spring, when the court toured the towns in the Spanish Netherlands (Flanders) conquered by the French. Writing of that excursion years later, during the reign of Louis XV, Voltaire observed, “It was to Mme. de Montespan that all the court paid homage, all honors were for her save those reserved by tradition and protocol for the Queen.”
Yet Marie-Thérèse, astonishingly, had yet to deduce what was hiding in plain sight and what everyone else in France seemed well aware of. Under the assumption that Athénaïs was merely her attendant, she had nothing but smiles for her, while she remained openly rude to Louise de La Vallière, the acknowledged maîtresse declarée.
Even the German mercenaries they encountered during Louis’ hail-the-conquering-hero tour seemed to know what Her Majesty did not, and had no such difficulties expressing their views. When Athénaïs accompanied the king during a review of his German troops she was greeted with cries of “König’s Hure, Hure!”—the king’s whore.
Where others might have pitched a fit, Madame de Montespan accepted the epithet with good humor and grace, archly informing her lover, “Since I had the German translated, I find they are very naïve to call things by their proper names.”
As long as the other “whore,” Louise, remained in the picture, Athénaïs could never be confident of the king’s love; she certainly didn’t have a hundred percent of it. While the two women pretended to cordiality, genuine friendship was impossible. Nicknamed “the Dew” and “the Torrent” by the witty memoirist Madame de Sevigné, on one occasion they argued over possession of a costly pot of rouge that Louise refused to lend to Athénaïs. The king himself was compelled to referee the quarrel, and the duchesse de Vaujours would surrender the cosmetic only if Louis would agree to honor the women equally. As a result, Louise became pregnant and Athénaïs became angry. The child was probably miscarried or stillborn, because no further mention of it exists, and Madame de Montespan grew even wearier of Louise’s maddening tenacity.
Louis XIV had a pattern of extramarital affairs: His current maîtresse en titre would introduce him, in a manner of speaking, to the new one. Louise and Athénaïs had begun as bosom friends (or so Louise had thought). In later years, it would be Athénaïs who would introduce the king to Madame de Maintenon. Yet not only did the monarch juggle simultaneous mistresses; he also enjoyed “meaningless” quickie trysts with additional paramours—ladies who were well-known to his more permanent lovers. For example, Athénaïs’s older sister, Gabrielle, Madame de Thianges, scratched the king’s itch on occasion. Louis would also tumble one of Athénaïs’s lady’s maids if the urge struck. These dalliances, even with her own sister, didn’t seem to bother Madame de Montespan, because she knew the king was not emotionally involved with any of these minor conquests. His attachment to Louise de La Vallière, on the other hand, remained a source of consternation.
The birth of Athénaïs’s first royal bastard, her purported daughter, in 1669 was followed a year later by the arrival of a son, the duc du Maine. It was imperative that these infants, smuggled out of the palace as soon as they were born, were raised by a discreet, trustworthy person who could be relied upon to care for them in relative secrecy. Even if her role as Louis’ mistress (not to mention her job as lady-in-waiting to the queen) had permitted her the time, Madame de Montespan could not have openly cared for her illegitimate children, because they were born with the taint of their parents’ double adultery. Louise’s royal by-blows were adopted by Madame Colbert, the wife of the king’s Pooh-Bah of ministers, but as she’d met the king when she was a virgin of sixteen and had never wed, she didn’t have a husband to make trouble. Athénaïs and the king had to keep the existence of their offspring a secret, or the marquis de Montespan might perversely try to claim them as his own blood.
As governess for their rapidly increasing royal brood Athénaïs recommended the widow Scarron, a pious woman of impeccable moral rectitude who was also a friend from her days at the Hôtel d’Albret, one of the fashionable salons in the Marais. Françoise Scarron was housed with Athénaïs’s children (and a couple of others, including her own niece, so that things wouldn’t seem too suspicious), in an anonymous-looking building in the Marais district. So seriously did Françoise take her role as gatekeeper that she often did the laborers’ jobs to prevent strangers from traipsing in and getting a glimpse of the kids. Few babysitters would suffer that much for their young charges!
But in 1672, after the birth of Athénaïs’s third royal bastard, the comte de Vexin, it became clear that a better system had to be devised. The king purchased a charming townhome across the Seine in the rue de Vaugirard near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Françoise Scarron could live quite retired from society and care for the royal children she was growing to love. In 1673 and 1674 Athénaïs bore the king two more daughters, Mademoiselle de Nantes and Mademoiselle de Tours, respectively.
Over the years, Athénaïs lost a number of her children. Not only did her husband remove their legitimate offspring to his family’s seat in Gascony, but their daughter Marie-Christine passed away before reaching her teens. Athénaïs’s firstborn child by the king died in her third year at the house in the rue de Vaugirard; the little comte de Vexin would die at the age of eleven in 1683; and Mademoiselle de Tours was only six when she perished. By that time, the semiroyal children were all openly acknowledged and living at court, but proximity could never lessen the pain of parting.
As a mother, however, Madame de Montespan found herself in a terrible bind. For years
she was deprived of the ability to see her children very often, or even to acknowledge their existence, ironically to protect them from her lawful husband. Were Montespan to claim them as his own, it would damage their brilliant futures as the offspring, even illegitimate, of the king of France. The children, too young to be aware of the societal rules and behind-the-scenes machinations, saw only that their maman was an absentee, and consequently directed their devotion toward their governess.
Unsurprisingly, this dynamic engendered countless spats and a good deal of tension. Athénaïs and Madame Scarron, although they were ostensibly friends, and the widow needed her job, often disagreed on child-rearing methods. The maman would arrive for a visit with sweet treats in an effort to overcompensate for rarely getting to see her children, while the nanny was the firm but benevolent disciplinarian who supplied the tots with routine and stability.
In time a new form of tension developed between the women; they became rivals for the king’s attention and his love. The quietly virtuous and somewhat sanctimonious Madame Scarron made Athénaïs feel guilty about her lifestyle. “In God’s name, do not make any of your great eyes at me,” la Montespan once snapped at the governess, when she’d paid a call on the nursery, pregnant with another of the king’s by-blows.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 7
