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

by Leslie Carroll

  Not only did Colbert manage to convince Louis of Athénaïs’s innocence, but after a scene of tears and reproaches between the lovers, in 1680 the king appointed her superintendent of the queen’s household, the highest-ranking position for a female at court. And she remained at court for another eleven years. Moreover, Louis gave her a gift of fifty thousand livres after the poisons investigation was suspended.

  In 1681, Athénaïs and the king appeared at a ball for their daughter Mademoiselle de Nantes, and that year their two youngest children, Mademoiselle de Blois and the comte de Toulouse, were legitimized. It was a banner year in another way as well. Louis personally burned the documents pertaining to Athénaïs’s involvement in l’affaire des poisons. But he was never again able to fully trust, or to love, Madame de Montespan. Her reputation was forever tarnished, not only to her paramour, but to posterity.

  The scandal had achieved one of the intentions of its perpetrators: By 1680, the relationship between Louis XIV and Athénaïs had dipped to an all-time low. That spring they engaged in an embarrassing public quarrel because she was wearing a very strong perfume. Did he think that she was deliberately trying to make him ill? They had another spat after the king refused to take supper in her rooms, his custom for years. From then on, he would dine with her only in the presence of the court.

  However, Louis ordered La Reynie to keep all documentation with regard to Athénaïs in a dossier separate from his investigation of everyone else. The king also suspended the chambre d’ardente on October 1, 1680, because he thought the investigations could not continue without further damage to la Montespan’s character. La Reynie remained convinced of her guilt; her royal lover not so much. The sordid testimony of the witches and the possibility that infants were slaughtered at her behest for Black Masses was too much for Louis to bear.

  On the romantic front, Louis was clearly moving on. On June 5, 1680, Madame de Sevigné wrote that a new favorite was gaining traction. “The credit of Madame de Maintenon still continues…. She goes to visit him every day; and their conversations are of a length which give rise to numberless conjectures.” Four days later she wrote, “Mme. de Maintenon’s favor is constantly increasing, while that of Mme. de Montespan is visibly declining.” In a popular joke at court, as the marquises pass each other on a staircase, Madame de Maintenon quips to la Montespan, “What, are you going down, madame? I am going up.”

  Horribly jealous of her former friend and her children’s onetime nanny, Athénaïs became desperate to destroy Françoise’s pristine reputation, in an effort to displace her from Louis’ affections. She insinuated that the widow Scarron had dabbled in lesbianism with the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos back in their salon days in the Marais. When no one believed it, or cared, Athénaïs tried to dangle her sister, Gabrielle, in front of the king, in order to tempt him away from Françoise.

  By 1681, Louis spent only a few moments a day with la Montespan, whiling away the entire evening with Madame de Maintenon. Athénaïs’s oldest légitimé, the crippled duc du Maine, also preferred his beloved governess, the woman who had schlepped him across Europe and back in the search to cure his wonky spine and short leg, over the glib and glittering mother who had spent the better part of his childhood in the company of the king.

  And yet, it was during a mission on behalf of the young duc du Maine’s inheritance in September 1681 that Madame de Montespan learned of the death of her six-year-old daughter, Mademoiselle de Tours. As she was en route to Bourbon at the time, her errand kept her from attending the little girl’s funeral.

  The queen died on July 30, 1683. Athénaïs was disgusted at the flippant reaction of both the king and his new inamorata, Madame de Maintenon. True, Louis had never been in love with his wife, but she’d been a good woman who’d never given him cause for complaint. And even if he might be in the throes of a new romance, the couple could at least show a little respect and humility! Hers weren’t crocodile tears; the marquise de Montespan was geniunely appalled that people were making jokes about the deceased sovereign, and that no one had gone to see the poor woman’s body interred. Moreover, now that there was no queen, what would become of the position Louis had created for the marquise as superintendent of Marie-Thérèse’s household?

  “Madame de Montespan wept a lot,” said Maintenon’s cousin, Madame de Caylus. “Perhaps she was afraid she’d be sent back to her husband.” There was talk around the court of getting the monarch remarried as soon as possible, but not to the mother of his brood of légitimés. For starters, the marquis de Montespan was still alive, which immediately disqualified Athénaïs.

  Ironically, she found herself in concord with her old enemy, Bishop Bossuet, agreeing to help His Majesty find a new wife. “Without that, so well do I know him, he will make a bad marriage sooner than none.”

  And yet, after the king secretly wed Madame de Maintenon in the autumn of 1683 in a morganatic marriage (meaning that she would not have the title or rank of queen), Athénaïs could never be contented with the scenario. How could Louis prefer the frigid, self-righteous Françoise to her own sensual brilliance? “And what should I call Madame de Maintenon?” she demanded. “That goose girl, that arse-wipe!” Following one of her infamous tantrums she took to her bed for several days, pleading a migraine.

  Although Louis continued to visit Madame de Montespan’s rooms at Versailles, he annexed her twenty-room apartment for his own use and relocated her to the exotic Appartement des Bains directly below his own, renovating the Turkish-style baths where the couple used to enjoy sensuous romps. After so many years of living by the king’s side, Athénaïs was being placed beneath him, a sad metaphor that was not lost on her. “The real queen” had been displaced by the secret one. Yet Madame de Montespan remained the reigning “favorite,” and nothing could erase her status as the mother of Louis’ legitimized children. As another consolation prize, he gave her the estate of Clagny for their offspring to inherit after her death.

  One of the most controversial decisions of Louis’ reign was to marry his légitimés into the royal family. Twelve-year-old Mademoiselle de Nantes was wed to the grandson of the Grand Condé in 1685. The following year, plump and pretty Mademoiselle de Blois married Philippe, duc de Chartres, the son of Louis’ brother Monsieur and his second wife, Liselotte, the Princess Palatine—much to Liselotte’s disgust. She wrote to her aunt Sophia, electress of Hanover, “Even if the Duc du Maine were not the child of a double adultery but a true prince, I would not like him for a son-in-law, nor his sister for a daughter-in-law, for he is dreadfully ugly and lame and has other bad qualities to boot, stingy as the devil and without kindness. His sister, it is true, is rather kind…. But most of all…they are…the children of the most wicked and desperate woman on earth…whenever I see these bastards, my blood boils over.”

  Madame de Montespan wasn’t even invited to her youngest daughter’s wedding; she read about the event in the Mercure Galant, the popular gossip magazine. But it was the ultimate snub to later be told that Mademoiselle de Blois would be placed with a tutor and that Louis intended to bring their youngest child, the comte de Toulouse, to the front with him. With her last two children taken from her, Athénaïs no longer felt necessary at court. Her pride wounded, she requested the king’s permission to retire to a convent. He called her bluff, at which point she backpedaled and admitted that she had no intention of making a permanent exit from court. She went to Clagny instead, and her ungrateful eldest son, the duc du Maine, who was going to move into her apartments at Versailles, helped her pack—by cruelly tossing her furniture and other possessions out of the windows. Eventually the cowardly and arrogant duc would even deprive his mother of Clagny, demanding it as a wedding gift, despite the fact that Louis had promised it to her for life.

  In 1691, on March 15, Athénaïs did make her genuine departure from court, remarking to her old enemy Bishop Bossuet that he could finally deliver her eulogy. “Yes, Madame la Marquise,” Bossuet agreed. “The King no longer
loves you, you are as good as dead.”

  Athénaïs returned to court only for a few important events: the birth of her first grandchild in 1692, and his first communion in 1698. She saw her children, except for the duc du Maine, fairly frequently and was reunited with the marquis d’Antin, her son by the marquis de Montespan.

  Since 1676, Madame de Montespan had been involved in the Filles de Saint-Joseph, nuns who devoted themselves to educating indigent orphan girls. Her generosity to them had always been magnanimous, and her penitence after she retired from court was just as grand and public as the rest of her life had been. She spent money as extravagantly as ever, but disbursed it philanthropically.

  Athénaïs devoted her final years to charitable deeds, setting up a hospital at Oiron. It was there, toward the end of her life, that she began to wear hair shirts, as well as steel belts and bracelets with iron spikes, beneath her sumptuously hued gowns. She pared down her rich diet to the simplest foods, and exchanged her fine linen sheets and soft petticoats for coarse fabrics in order to mortify her delicate flesh. She developed a horror of being alone and a fear of dying, certain that no amount of atonement could erase her sin of double adultery and send her to heaven.

  On the night of May 22, 1707, she suffered a fainting fit at the spa town of Bourbon. In the absence of a physician, her attendants, thinking they were helping, dosed her with enough emetic to choke a horse. She vomited sixty-three times. After rallying briefly, she gave her confession, and last rites were administered on May 26.

  At three a.m. on May 27, Madame de Montespan died at the age of sixty-five. As a result of family squabbles over where her body would be laid to rest, she was not interred until August 4. After a torchlight procession, she was buried with generations of Rochechouart de Mortemarts in the Church of the Cordeliers. According to the duc de Saint-Simon, “The poor of the province, on whom she had rained alms, mourned for her bitterly, as did vast numbers of other people who had benefited by her generosity.”

  Athénaïs’s memory would not be soon forgotten while her DNA lived on. Through her youngest daughter, Mademoiselle de Blois, who had wed the duc de Chartres, la Montespan’s triple-great-grandson became king of France, the country’s only constitutional monarch. Athénaïs’s great-great-grandson Louis-Philippe d’Orléans (who famously changed his name to Philippe Égalité during the French Revolution and voted for his cousin Louis XVI’s execution) married her great-granddaughter (through the line of her youngest son, the comte de Toulouse). Their child, born in 1773, became King Louis Philippe, a direct descendant on both sides of Madame de Montespan and Louis XIV.

  King Louis Philippe married a cousin, one of Marie Antoinette’s nieces. They had ten children, and through their various marriages Athénaïs’s genes eventually made their way into the royal houses of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Württemberg, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, and Italy.

  On hearing of Athénaïs’s death, her longtime frenemy Madame de Maintenon hid herself in the cabinet of her chaise percée (in other words, she locked herself in the bathroom) and privately sobbed her heart out. But la Montespan’s royal lover of nearly twenty years shed not a single tear. Louis XIV retired to his rooms after a hunt without removing his boots, announcing that he wished to be alone. For hours his footsteps were heard pacing the parquet.

  Finally, the duchesse de Bourgogne dared to ask why he displayed no emotion over the loss of a woman who had meant so much to him for so long. Evidently, his statute of limitations on mourning had expired sixteen years earlier. “When she retired, I thought never to see her again, so from then on she was dead to me,” the king replied.

  LOUIS XIV AND

  FRANÇOISE D’AUBIGNÉ, MADAME SCARRON, MARQUISE DE MAINTENON (1635–1719)

  It’s an old cliché—the wife worrying that her husband will have an affair with the babysitter. But what if the man happens to be the king of France? And it’s not his wife who’s tied herself in knots over his crush on the too-intriguing governess of their numerous offspring, but his official mistress?

  Such was the uncomfortable love triangle between Louis XIV, the voluptuous and fecund Athénaïs de Montespan, and Françoise Scarron, the sexually frigid but tenderhearted nanny of their brood.

  The future Madame de Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné was born in Niort prison, near Poitiers, where her father, Constant, had been jailed for conspiring against Cardinal Richelieu. It was not Constant’s first run-in with the law; he had previously been incarcerated for rape and abduction and had murdered his first wife by stabbing her multiple times after catching her in flagrante delicto. Françoise’s mother, Jeanne de Cardhillac, was the sixteen-year-old jailer’s daughter.

  Françoise was baptized a Catholic but as a little girl she was sent to live with her father’s Huguenot sister at the family’s charming country Château de Mursay. She was eight and a half years old when her family embarked for the “Isles of America,” or what we now call the Lesser Antilles. There, Constant was set to assume the governorship of one of the minor islands, but eventually ended up on Martinique instead. Françoise became so ill on the voyage that she was mistaken for dead. Her shrouded body was about to be tossed overboard when her mother bent over to give her a farewell kiss. Madame d’Aubigné noticed some tiny sign of movement and the child was fortuitously taken down below. The ship’s bishop presciently remarked, “Ah, Madame, one does not come back from such a distance for nothing.”

  In 1647 the family returned to France, but Constant died that August, en route to Turkey to rebuild his fortune. An ambitious baronne who was friendly with her mother enrolled Françoise in a convent school in an effort to restore her Catholic roots and ingratiate herself with the queen mother. Mademoiselle d’Aubigné hated the experience and from then on had “issues” with convents, although she agreed to give Catholicism a second chance.

  When Françoise was sixteen, the baronne brought her to Paris, introducing her to the world of the fashionable salons of the Marais district. There she hobnobbed with the clever minds and the great beauties of the day, including the notorious courtesan Ninon de Lenclos and the stunning marquise de Montespan, who reached out and befriended her. In 1660, Athénaïs and Françoise stood side by side on a balcony as the handsome Louis XIV made his entrance into Paris with his Spanish bride.

  The teenage Françoise appeared sober, serious, and modest, although she would later tell people who had pegged her as a prude that it was all a persona, carefully crafted not for God but for love of her reputation. While her masses of shiny, ink dark hair were universally admired, and her heart-shaped face was considered attractive, her mouth was thought too small and her chin a trifle plump. In this age of paper-white beauties, her complexion, owing to all her years in the islands, was too dark for most French tastes, earning her the nickname la belle Indienne. According to the contemporary writer Madeleine de Scudéry, her best feature was “the most beautiful eyes in the world…brilliant, soft, passionate, and full of intelligence…. A soft melancholy” pervaded Françoise’s personality; “her gaze was gentle and it was slightly sad.”

  “I was what you call a good little girl,” she told her best friend, Madame de Glapion, when Françoise was herself middle-aged. She was always obedient and eager to please. “That was my weakness.” She never complained of her family’s hardships, even though her widowed mother and siblings were so impoverished that she and her younger brother had been compelled to troll the almshouses of Paris three times a week, begging for scraps of bread. “[I]t was my good name that I cared about,” she insisted.

  Frequenting the posh salons of Paris in her mid-teens, Françoise, badly dressed, shy, and melancholy, met the depressive poet and playwright Paul Scarron. He was one of the great wits of the age; at his famous salon, the guests were as vibrant as the yellow wallpaper, but he was often in such financial straits that they were expected to bring their own food, wine, and firewood. It was popularly held that Scarron owed his misshapen and paralytic condition—his body was bent like th
e letter Z—to a prank he had played at the age of twenty-seven during Carnival. Having tarred and feathered himself as a joke, he was ultimately set upon by an angry mob and had no alternative but to leap into a freezing river to escape them. His malady developed gradually, leaving his mind unaffected, as his body grew plagued with acute rheumatoid arthritis.

  The pair began an epistolary courtship when Françoise was only fifteen. Scarron, who was twenty-five years older, was quite the flirt. In 1652, he offered the pretty, intelligent teenager two options that would relieve her poverty and uncertainty: He would fund her retreat into a convent (annual bed and board were as expensive as any private school tuition) or she could become his wife, though it would certainly be an unconventional marriage. Monsieur Scarron assured her that he would not claim the rights of a husband (in other words, he would not expect her to have sex with him).

  Although Françoise was pious, she enjoyed the world of the salons, loved fine clothes and intoxicating perfumes (when she could afford them), and adored Paris. So she selected the lesser of the two evils. Her mother gave her consent to the match on February 19, 1652, and the contract was signed on April 4.

  The union was fodder for the gossips. “At the time of his marriage he couldn’t move anything but his tongue, and one hand,” said his friend Jean de Segrais. The priest who officiated at the wedding wondered aloud how the marriage would be consummated. “That is between Madame and myself,” the playwright snapped.