Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  Yet even though they were no longer lovers at that point in time, she remained his maîtresse en titre. And Athénaïs was keen to remind the court that her social status remained unchanged, even if her sexual one appeared to be in limbo.

  In the spring of 1676, Louis set off for the front again, and Athénaïs, exhausted emotionally and physically from the months-long campaign against her royal romance and her own character, took the spa cure at the town of Bourbon, the Bath or Baden Baden of its time and place. In July, when the pair first saw each other again at the queen’s reception at Saint-Germain, Louis practically launched himself into her arms. The dévots managed to keep them apart that night, and Françoise Scarron volunteered to chaperone Athénaïs during the following day’s visit to Versailles. Louis then announced his decision to call upon the marquise at Clagny, whereupon the clucking dévots assembled a cluster of high-minded ladies to accompany him.

  At Clagny, the king strode over to greet Athénaïs and the pair enjoyed a quiet tête-à-tête by a window. When Louis began to lecture the marquise, she interrupted him, saying, “It’s useless to read me a sermon,” then murmuring, “I understand my time is over.” They both began to weep, although Athénaïs never cried in public. “You are mad,” she added softly.

  “Yes, I am mad, since I still love you,” Louis replied.

  The couple then bowed to the entourage of dévots and disappeared into Athénaïs’s bedchamber—proof, if anyone still needed it, that the king’s immortal soul was no match for the marquise’s corporeal splendor. Madame de Sevigné observed, “Joy has returned and all jealous airs have vanished.” The monarch had never seemed more in love, and their renewed passion silenced the warring factions at court. The king had made his choice, and further remonstrance would not only be futile, but might backfire on the dissidents.

  Reclaiming her role in all aspects, Athénaïs was now referred to as maîtresse regnante, and she celebrated the renewal of her royal romance with lavish fêtes. The poor crowned queen, Marie-Thérèse, wasn’t regnant at all, literally, socially, or in people’s hearts; most courtiers acknowledged that they preferred to be entertained by “the real queen.”

  After Louis’ passion for Athénaïs triumphed over his fear of God, or at least over the fire and brimstone of his preachers, she grew more vain than ever, trumpeting her victory, and the assets that helped gain it, through fashion. Her first influence on the court had been the curly Hurluberlu hairstyle in the 1660s, followed by the loose-fitting “l’Innocente” gowns. In the mid-1670s she ushered in a third era of high fashion with highly decorated garments in costly, opulent textiles. Lace, gold embroidery, and shimmering fabrics became the rage; she popularized flounces known as falboas that ornamented the low, boat-necked bodices, as well as transparents—translucent fabrics embroidered with velvet or lace worn to dramatic effect over a black skirt. Athénaïs also introduced the informal déshabillé, similar to the robe battante that had disguised her early illegitimate pregnancies. Because this new style was easy to remove, it was considered “racy” in a court that was beginning to equate a woman’s moral character with how tightly she was corseted. “Loose” women wore loose gowns. In 1682 when Versailles finally became the permanent residence of the French court, in the monarch’s private bedroom a portrait of Athénaïs in one of her déshabillé gowns was inserted into the canopy of Louis’ solid silver bed.

  While Athénaïs was never afraid of the king, she remained afraid of losing him, particularly after such a close call as the year of estrangement brought about by the sermons of Bishop Bossuet. Although her temper often got the better of her, she had schooled herself to suppress her jealousy over the other women who would fling themselves at the king—from the ambitious mothers who would push their nubile daughters under his Roman nose to the canonesses who should have been leading celibate lives. Louis remained emotionally faithful to Madame de Montespan, although he indulged in numerous flings, treating his casual conquests “like post horses that one mounts but one time, and that one never sees again,” in the words of the marquis de Saint-Geran.

  At her end, Athénaïs went on the offensive, making sure that her entourage was comprised of homely and virtuous women. But in 1676, when she was pregnant with her sixth child by the king, giving birth to Mademoiselle de Blois on April 4, 1677, an interloper slipped through the cracks. Such was the scandal made by the beautiful Madame Isabelle de Ludres that Athénaïs and Madame Scarron patched up their differences and presented a united front against her.

  On September 11, 1676, Madame de Sevigné wrote, “Everyone thinks that Quanto’s star is paling. There are tears, genuine grief, affected gaiety, sulks; in short, all has an end…. Some tremble, others rejoice…. In a word, we are on the verge of a crisis, say the most clear-sighted.”

  But Madame de Ludres proved too conniving for her own good. Louis did not appreciate her faking a pregnancy in an attempt to gain supremacy over Madame de Montespan, or behaving as though she had already superseded her as the maîtresse en titre, when he had given her zero indication that the position would ever be hers. He publicly snubbed la Ludres, equivalent to the kiss of death, and of course the rest of the court followed suit.

  Madame de Sevigné was hard-pressed to conceal her surprise when, after his torrid fling with Isabelle de Ludres, the king seemed more in love with Athénaïs than ever, showering her with diamonds, by cleverly circumventing their mutual rules not to give or accept gifts of jewelry. Louis would organize lotteries for prizes of jewelry, ornamental trinkets, or items of chinoiserie and—quelle surprise—Madame de Montespan always seemed to win!

  While the queen had only a single page to manage her train, in 1678 at the zenith of l’ge Montespan, when the maîtresse declarée “stood forth in the full blaze of her shameless glory” (in the words of her 1936 biographer Gonzague Truc), her train was carried by no less grand a personage than the duc de Noailles. “This whore will kill me,” Her Majesty was once overheard to remark. The cost of Athénaïs’s extravagant entourage far exceeded her annual salary of six thousand livres as a lady-in-waiting to Marie-Thérèse, so Louis gave her a hundred and fifty thousand for child care and the education of their brood. (She gave birth to the last of their seven children, the comte de Toulouse, in 1678). And for her personal expenses, he permitted her to draw upon the privy purse.

  In 1679, after bearing a total of nine children for two men, the thirty-seven-year-old Athénaïs was beginning to lose her looks. Late nights at the gaming tables (cards and games of chance had become all the rage at court) and the stress relief she had sought from the bottle had taken their toll as well. Having fought a lifelong battle against weight gain (no thanks to Louis’ large appetite and his desire for epicurean companionship, as well as her own genetic predisposition to corpulence, in addition to all the pregnancies), she was growing stout. Meanwhile, her sober rival, the royal bastards’ childless nanny, Françoise Scarron (elevated now to the title of Madame de Maintenon), despite being three years older than the king, remained fresher than the proverbial month of May.

  Louis and Madame de Montespan had not been lovers since the birth of the comte de Toulouse the previous year, and as the year 1679 progressed, she became increasingly panicked over the inordinate number of hours he spent closeted with Madame de Maintenon. Rumors spread through the halls of Versailles. “We are talking of changes in love at court. Time will make things clear,” wrote one courtier.

  To distract the king’s attention from Françoise, Athénaïs made the fatal error of directing his interest to a gorgeous blond newcomer, the eighteen-year-old Mademoiselle Marie Angélique de Scorailles de Roussille, Demoiselle de Fontanges. She even had flawless teeth. “Belle comme une ange,” people said about her. “As beautiful as an angel—but as dumb as a basket.”

  La Montespan assumed that la Fontanges—more than twenty years younger than Louis, and the same age as his heir, the dauphin—would be just another flash in the royal pan, like Madame de Ludres. But she woe
fully miscalculated. First, the forty-year-old monarch gave the new object of his admiration a suite of pearl jewelry, the usual precursor to his intentions to bed her and make her his mistress. And after only two months at court, Mademoiselle de Fontanges succumbed. Athénaïs acted complacent at first, biding her time. It was several months before she learned that Louis’ new liaison was serious and realized that after all their years of passion, plus seven children, she had been cast aside.

  In March 1679, Madame de Maintenon wrote to a friend, “Mme. de Montespan complains of her last accouchement, she says that this girl [la Fontanges] has caused her to lose the King’s heart; she blames me, as if I hadn’t told her often to have no more children…. I pity Mme. de Montespan at the same time as I blame her: what would she be if she knew all her misfortunes? She is far from believing the King unfaithful, she accuses him only of coldness. We don’t dare to tell her of this new passion.”

  Although Athénaïs had not been dethroned from her position as maîtresse en titre, the entertainments and diversions at court were now held for the amusement of Mademoiselle de Fontanges. And to la Montespan’s mortification, the middle-aged Louis began dressing like a young gallant again, his garments trimmed in ribbons and lace. The fickle court rushed to curry favor with the new favorite, and regarded Athénaïs like yesterday’s fish. Even the poets whose writing her patronage had helped popularize and enrich dashed over to superpraise the king’s new inamorata.

  Just as her star had been on the ascent during the wane of Louise de La Vallière’s, Madame de Montespan now played the role of the fading, unwanted beauty to the rising Angélique de Fontanges. Hurt and betrayed, she let her temper get the better of her, but the hypocritical bishops had no interest in her rants, for the king’s affair with his unmarried teenage mistress was untainted by the stain of a double adultery.

  Athénaïs became increasingly desperate to rid the court of her new rival. First she tried to compete with Angélique in the piety department, sitting beside her in church as the pair of mistresses clutched their rosaries and rolled their eyes heavenward. Then she denied all knowledge (though the story may be apocryphal, it’s a good one) of how her pet bears “accidentally escaped” from the royal menagerie and utterly destroyed la Fontanges’ apartment at Versailles. Ultimately, and least creatively of all, Athénaïs tried to befriend her naive but supremely arrogant rival.

  She began to joke with Madame de Maintenon (with whom Louis still preferred to privately converse more than he enjoyed anyone else’s company) that His Majesty had three lovers: Fontanges in his bed, herself in name, and Maintenon in his heart. But lovely and young as she was, Angélique could not hold the king after all, unable to match Athénaïs’s cleverness or Françoise’s charm. According to the astute Madame de Caylus, “The King never cared for anything but her face, and was even ashamed when she spoke before others. One grows accustomed to beauty but not to stupidity, especially when one has lived with a person of the wit and character of Madame de Montespan.”

  At the end of 1679, Mademoiselle de Fontanges gave birth to the king’s son, but the infant died right away. Grief, illness, and childbirth caused her to lose her celebrated looks with alarming rapidity. She became clingy and whiny, and Louis tired of her, pensioning her off with a gift of eighty thousand livres and a duchesse’s tabouret, the usual consolation prize for castoff mistresses. At the age of twenty, she died of a pulmonary abscess on June 28, 1681.

  Death had eliminated another rival, and Athénaïs hoped to win back the king’s affections. But something far more insidious than a pretty young newcomer was about to destroy her hopes.

  Back in 1668, two of the charlatans she had patronized for “love potions,” Monsieur Lesage and the abbé Mariette, were convicted on charges of sorcery. The case was not made public at the time.

  The people of pre-Enlightenment seventeenth-century France were often as superstitious as they were religious. Faith in scientific experiments had yet to take hold. Posh aristocrats who never missed a Mass would still visit Parisian soothsayers; it was the chic thing to do, in tandem with praying to the requisite saint for a remedy.

  One of the most popular sorceresses of the age was Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin. A practitioner of black magic as well as an abortionist, she enjoyed a booming business from rich, often sexually frustrated female clients, earning enough to purchase a villa on the outskirts of the capital. Her own lovers were noblemen, and she conducted her hocus-pocus in a hundred-thousand-livre purple velvet emperor’s robe tooled with gold leather embellishments.

  In 1679, La Voisin became the prime suspect in a police investigation regarding a series of mysterious deaths and illnesses among the aristocracy. Known as “The Affair of the Poisons,” the scandal became internationally renowned, exposing the corruption of some of the highest members of the nobility, and most specifically targeting Madame de Montespan.

  Athénaïs had hastily left the court on March 15, her departure attributed to a quarrel with Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Two days later, although the events were not connected, Louis chartered a special court specifically to handle all the poisoning cases. Called la chambre d’arsenal, it was better known as la chambre d’ardente (the burning chamber), a reference to the inquisitional courts of the sixteenth century. Presiding over the proceedings was Paris’s chief of police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie. It was a literal witch hunt; in the three years of the chambre d’ardente’s existence, 194 people were arrested and 104 of them were sentenced. Of those, 36 were executed, 4 sent to the galleys, 34 banished or fined, and the remaining 30 were acquitted.

  During La Voisin’s trial, Athénaïs’s name was raised numerous times, and her family members were accused of purchasing “love potions.” Lesage testified that Athénaïs plotted to poison Mademoiselle de Fontanges. But even under torture, La Voisin herself never named Madame de Montespan, and although she went to the flames kicking and screaming and hurling epithets against the crown, she still never implicated the king’s maîtresse en titre.

  But after her death, Catherine Monvoisin’s daughter Marie, who had psychological and emotional issues that were exacerbated by imprisonment and torture, told one elaborate tale after another, directly accusing Athénaïs of using her mother’s love powders on the king. She also accused the marquise of conspiring to murder Angélique de Fontanges, and alleged that she participated in Black Masses in order to gain the Devil’s cooperation in maintaining the monarch’s love. Marie Monvoisin also claimed that Madame de Montespan was so jealous at having been thrown over for Mademoiselle de Fontanges that she schemed to kill the king with a poison-soaked petition that was to have been delivered by La Voisin and another poisoner, who would each be paid a whopping hundred thousand ecus for their participation.

  With regard to the Black Masses, which allegedly took place in 1667 or 1668, Marie accused Athénaïs of using her naked body as an altar, while a chalice containing the blood of three or four newborn babies mixed with wine rested upon her belly. During the trial, the priest who conducted these inverted Masses quoted verbatim the incantation the marquise had requested him to chant, which any sane person should have known was an absolute fabrication on his part. It asked “that the Queen should be sterile and that the King should leave her table and her bed for me” and “that the King should leave La Vallière and look at her no more, and that, the Queen being repudiated, I can marry the King.”

  The queen was, of course, not sterile—she had already given birth numerous times, and her son, the fat and healthy dauphin, was poised to inherit his father’s kingdom. Louise de La Vallière had quit the court for a convent in 1664, three years before the first Black Masses purportedly took place. And Madame de Montespan, a noblewoman with so many years at court, would certainly know that a king could put aside his queen only for reasons of infertility. Besides, Louis could never have wed Athénaïs anyway; not only was her husband still very much alive, but in 1667 the Montespans had not yet been legally separated. The onl
y one who believed all of the charges leveled against any of the witches’ customers, including Madame de Montespan, was the police chief, the incorruptible La Reynie.

  Despite flinging her name into the mud, none of the witches on trial were able to prove that they had actually seen the maîtresse declarée at any of these events they described. The ambitious war minister, Louvois, intent on bringing Athénaïs down, tampered with witnesses, and admitted years later, in 1682, that the sorcerer Lesage, whom he had bribed, “could never have said a word of truth” with regard to Madame de Montespan’s connection with l’affaire des poisons.

  The woman who may actually have participated in these gothic rituals was Athénaïs’s lady-in-waiting, Claude de Vin des Oeillets, a tall brunette who carried on a clandestine affair with the king and even bore him a love child while her employer was still his maîtresse en titre. A woman of Claude’s physical description is mentioned several times in the witches’ testimony. It was Claude who had more need than la Montespan of magic love philters, as she yearned to replace Athénaïs as maîtresse declarée and to have the king recognize their royal bastard. And it was Claude who in 1675 brought her lover, an Englishman, to see La Voisin and Lesage to discuss assassinating Louis by giving poisons to Madame de Montespan, who would unwittingly pass them on to the king.

  It took a clear head and a dear friend to sort things out for Louis, who didn’t otherwise know what to believe. His trusted finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, whose wife was governess to the king’s two youngest children by Athénaïs, and who was also a close friend of her family, sent La Reynie’s file to an expert criminologist. The lawyer analyzed Madame de Montespan’s motives, as well as Catherine Monvoisin’s. Colbert then presented the facts to His Majesty.

  “Could there be a witness more reliable or a better judge of the falsity of all this calumny than the King himself? His Majesty knows in what sort of a way Mme. de Montespan has lived with himself, he has witnessed all her behavior, all her proceedings at all times and on all occasions, and a mind as clear-sighted and penetrating as Your Majesty’s has never noticed anything which could attach to Mme. de Montespan even the least of these suspicions…. Such things are inconceivable, and His Majesty, who knows Mme. de Montespan to the very depths of her soul, could never persuade himself that she could have been capable of such abominations.”