The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon

by Veronica Buckley

  The pension of “five hundred écus per annum in good and loyal coin” which Scarron had held as self-styled “Honorable Invalid to the Queen” was now cancelled, and a genuine loathing of Mazarin on his part was not long in developing. Indignation at the injustice done him and anxiety at his sudden impoverishment combined in a bilious fermentation; the result was the outrageous Mazarinade, a tirade of 396 savage lines slandering “Richelieu’s monkey,” a thief and a rat whose only real distinction was his service as “personal urinal” to other cardinals. “Take off for Italy,” Scarron screamed, “with your two hundred dressing gowns and your shitty underpants, and burn the bridges behind you, because if they catch you, they’ll cut off your balls, one after the other, and spread your guts across the pavements, and hang your cock as bait on the end of a fishing rod…Bugger you, you bugger, buggering and buggered, buggering boys, buggering goats, buggering the state, buggering the world…”

  Unsurprising, then, that in the early days of 1652, with the Cardinal likely to reassume power, Scarron was looking to get out of Paris while he could, and nothing closer than South America seemed a haven safe enough: “In a month’s time,” he wrote to his poet friend Sarrazin, “my miserable fate will find me en route for the West Indies…I’ve subscribed a thousand écus to the new Indies company. It’s going to establish a colony three degrees from the equator, on the banks of…the Orinoco. Adieu, France! Adieu, Paris! Adieu, my friends! Adieu, tigresses in the guise of angels!…I’m renouncing burlesques and comedies for a land with no false piety, no inquisition, no murderous winter, no crippling swellings, no war to starve me to death.”

  The “new Indies company” had been formed for the heady mixed purpose, common enough at the time, of gold-digging, missionary work, and plain derring-do. Its members were headed for the Guiana port town of Cayenne, on the northern coast of South America. Scarron had been drawn into the enterprise through a salon friend whose pious cousin was one of the company’s founders, but his decision had been by no means hasty. Swayed by Cabart de Villermont and the delectable frangipani tarts of his Antilles-trained cook, he had been considering the voyage for some time before Mazarin’s expected return had added the strain of urgency, and though he might quip to his friends about it, it held all his serious hopes, with the thousand invested écus, raised from the sale of his prebend in Le Mans, representing almost the sum of his worldly goods.

  But, paralysed, strapped into his wheelchair, he could not make the journey alone, and Sister Céleste, it seems, had declined to make it with him. Instead, she intended to retire, for the second time, to a convent; the disappointed invalid had the grace to help her pay her way into a decent place. He had then approached an old friend, asking him to find him a wife, “a badly behaved woman,” he added incorrigibly, “so that I can call her a whore without her getting upset.” No such woman materializing, his thoughts had at last turned to Françoise.

  It was late in the winter of 1651–52. Madame de Neuillant, normally in Paris at this season, had followed the court to Poitiers, where her younger daughter Angélique had found a place as demoiselle d’honneur to the Queen Mother. Françoise had been deposited en route at the baronne’s house in nearby Niort, escorted by a suffering chevalier de Méré, who by now, according to the amused Scarron, had “damned his soul” through his “desperate” love for her. “She’s caused me some sleepless nights,” the chevalier himself confessed.

  It seems that Françoise was still in Niort when she received Scarron’s proposal, and it seems, too, that the proposal was not exclusively one of marriage. Perhaps to allow her an honourable way of declining, if the idea of an intimate life with him should prove too repugnant to her, Scarron had offered Françoise two alternatives: he would provide her with a dowry to enter a good convent, or if she preferred, she could become his wife.

  His motive was clear enough: he needed a nurse, regardless of any voyage to South America. He liked her; she was intelligent, and she enjoyed his wit and his sociability. What was more, she was of a practical bent: she would care for him and run his household admirably. Helpfully, she was also poor, used to having next to nothing; her tastes were simple; she would make no fanciful demands. And though she was young and beautiful, there were no other serious suitors. Many men admired her, and she might easily have become a kept mistress, but her girlish sense of propriety, and also, it seemed, a hardy grain of pride, had so far kept her from this. Scarron had not much to offer her, but it was more at least than she currently possessed. He knew this, and it gave him the courage to propose.

  The letter of proposal, and Françoise’s response, if indeed she wrote one, have not survived. But there can be no doubt that she considered it all in a very hardheaded way. Though she enjoyed Scarron’s company, she cannot have harboured any romantic illusions about this pitiful man, more than old enough to be her father, who could do little more than scratch his back with a little stick and scribble with one crabbed hand. The offer of a convent dowry was probably not meant to be taken seriously; the average dowry for Françoise’s convent in the rue Saint-Jacques, for instance, was around 10,000 livres, and Scarron certainly did not have this kind of money to spare. Without a good dowry, Françoise would have been obliged to live as a lay sister, effectively a convent servant, with heavy manual work her daily occupation, or else a lowly fille séculière, caring for the sick and poor of the parish.

  Her alternatives were alarmingly few: she could perhaps attempt to return to her uncle and aunt at Mursay, assuming she would be welcome there again as a dependent poor cousin; but legally she was still a minor, and would be so for nine more years. A spiteful word from Madame de Neuillant could have her plucked once again from her Huguenot family and deposited in a convent, or some dreadful hôpital. What else then might she do, if she was not to return to begging in the streets? She was pretty, and very young, and ladylike, and a virgin: there was clearly the alternative of becoming the mistress of some well-to-do gentleman, at least for a time. But if religious scruples did not deter her, the longer-term prospects of such a life would have given Françoise pause: in time, with no legal protection, she could be too easily discarded and left alone, or perhaps with a brood of illegitimate children, an older woman, as her own mother had been, battling for bare survival.

  Marriage to Scarron would be, in any case, marriage. She would at least have the status of a wife, not of a mistress, and never of a pathetic vieille fille, never an old maid, never that “very low figure in the world,” struggling to get by on charitable handouts, with people sniggering and condescending to her. With Scarron, she would be spared any unwanted vie intime; he would not, indeed could not go this far. And he was a gentleman, after a fashion, though he did have to earn his living. His father had been a parliamentary counsellor; he himself was an homme de lettres, despised by some, perhaps, but still admired by many. He was friendly with famous people, including people at court; he had, or he had once had, a pension from the Queen Mother. He had connections and talent and plans: the Antilles might be less of an El Dorado than he supposed, but there was no more hunger in America than Françoise had known already in France.

  Above all, marriage to Scarron was sure to be a temporary affair. He was already more than forty years old, and his health was as poor as it could be; she would certainly be a widow before ten years had gone by. Widowhood, like marriage itself, would confer a certain standing, and perhaps even a pension. Scarron might eventually have some little sum to settle on her; she knew of his family’s two small estates in the country, their ownership disputed, it was true, but still, they might be his in the end. And she would still be young, probably no more than twenty-five, with a measure of respect due her as his widow, and some connections among the well-to-do, and another new life still possible ahead of her. All in all, as she later confessed succinctly, “I preferred to marry him than enter the convent.”

  Thus was the marriage concluded between two vulnerable, sensible people. Neither of them had anything to
lose by it, and each had a good deal to gain. Though many people gossiped, no one made any protest. Only the Queen Mother dared to say aloud what was whispered or pondered elsewhere: “What on earth will Monsieur Scarron do with a wife?” she declared on hearing of the match. “She’ll be the most useless piece of furniture in the house.”

  Five

  Marriage of True Minds

  It was Cabart de Villermont who now took charge of proceedings. Friend of both bride and bridegroom, he quickly became a quasi-father of the bride as well, managing all the administrative matters attendant on the marriage, and escorting Françoise from Niort back to Paris, not to the house of the baron de Saint-Hermant in the cul-de-sac Saint-Dominique, but back to the Ursuline convent in the rue Saint-Jacques, where she was to spend the month or two before her wedding day. Cabart de Villermont had been accorded power of attorney by Françoise’s mother, “the lady Jeanne de Cardilhac, widow of the high and mighty Monseigneur Constant d’Aubigné, chevalier, lord of Surimeau and other places,” who, despite her impressive legal title, was at this point living on the charity of a parliamentary counsellor in Bordeaux, in whose house she was staying as a guest of the family. She had given her agreement to the marriage immediately. A woman better placed might have hoped for something less brutally businesslike for her only daughter, but Jeanne nursed too many memories of a precarious life lived on precarious means. Security, even a modest security, could not be other than her foremost concern.

  Why Françoise had returned to the convent, rather than to the baron’s house, is uncertain, but she does not seem to have raised any objection. She did not return as a pupil, in any case, but rather as a young lady taking temporary lodgings there: no girl over the age of fifteen was admitted as a pupil with the Ursulines, “for fear they should bring a worldly mentality into the convent.” For the nuns themselves, however, things were not quite so straightforward. Given Scarron’s reputation, the impending marriage had not been mentioned to them, and once they realized that their young charge was visiting the infamous house in the rue d’Enfer, they declared she would have to go. Françoise managed to keep her bed and board through the intervention of a reliable Jesuit known to all parties, and it was not until the wedding day itself that she finally left the convent.

  It was April 4, 1652. Cabart de Villermont accompanied the couple to the great tribunal of the Châtelet de Paris, where the marriage contract was signed “before the King’s notaries…between Monseigneur Paul Scarron, gentleman, and the demoiselle Françoise d’Aubigné.” The gentleman was nearing forty-two years of age; the demoiselle was sixteen. They promised “to take each other in legal marriage, to be solemnized in the eyes of our Holy Mother Church…to be united as spouses and to hold all goods, moveable and immoveable, in common, according to the custom of this town, jurisdiction and county of Paris.” As her dowry, Françoise was to provide one third of her inheritance from her late father—in effect one third of nothing, which nothing was to be added to the common marital property. In private, her fiancé detailed her dowry as “two big eyes, very mischievous, one very pretty blouse, one pair of beautiful hands, and a great deal of intelligence.” For his part, Scarron was to provide her, if she should survive him with children, with “one thousand livres to be taken from the value of his possessions, moveable and immoveable,” and all of his possessions if she should survive him alone. Each thus agreed to endow the other with his own worldly goods, not that either possessed much in the way of worldly goods, but the contract was duly signed nonetheless “in the year one thousand six hundred and fifty-two, the fourth of April, after noon.”

  With the legal formalities completed, the couple moved on to the solemnization of the marriage “in the eyes of our Holy Mother Church.” This probably took place at Scarron’s own house in the rue d’Enfer. He had a small chapel there, where a local priest came to say mass for him and, perhaps, to hear his confession now and then. Though not devout, he was a genuine believer, and in any case the marriage could not have been completed without a Catholic ceremony. Scarron was wheeled to the altar with his young bride beside him, sustained by the smallest community of friends and family. On the bridegroom’s side, there was only Cabart de Villermont, and on the bride’s, just the baron de Saint-Hermant and one other relative of his own. Her mother was not there, nor her brother Charles, nor beloved Aunt Louise or anyone from Mursay, nor Madame de Neuillant, nor even Françoise’s friend, the baron’s daughter Marie-Marguerite: she was at court, “setting the courtiers’ hearts on fire,” with far grander wedding plans in her head.

  Scarron, of course, had a wide circle of friends, and it is curious that none but Cabart de Villermont was with him on his wedding day. Almost certainly Scarron himself had chosen to keep the ceremony as private as possible. “He liked teasing people, but he didn’t like it if anyone teased him,” remarked his young friend, the writer Jean Regnault de Segrais. Scarron the pitiless satirist was, on his own account at least, a sensitive man, anxious to avoid the satire of others. Twisted and trapped in his wheelchair, taking to wife a beautiful sixteen-year-old, the master of burlesque had become a burlesque character himself. Even the priest felt obliged to ask him, in the middle of the wedding ceremony, whether he was “in a condition to exercise the rights of marriage.” “Why, Father,” replied Scarron slyly, “that’s between Madame and myself.”

  “He really was just like a Z, there’s nothing more true,” said his friend Jean de Segrais. “At the time of his marriage he couldn’t move anything but his tongue, and one hand.” It was rich food for the gossips. How far could “the rights of marriage” be exercised, even with a lovely young virgin as temptation, when you could move no more than your tongue and one hand? “He couldn’t even turn from one side of the bed to the other,” glowered the frustrated and envious chevalier de Méré. Contemporaries concluded, smirking or repelled, that the couple’s vie intime was probably not “white,” in the euphemism of the day, but a rather sordid grey. “Scarron said of his wife, ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid to her, but I’ll teach her plenty.’”

  So reported Jean de Segrais, and it may have been true. But it may also have been nothing but a bit of sad bravado in response to a very insensitive question. Françoise’s devoted care of Scarron, which did not flag over the eight years that their marriage was to last, suggests that in any case, he did nothing, or asked nothing, that she did not accept. Sexual intercourse itself was probably impossible; many of Scarron’s acquaintance spoke of his impotence, and he was not the man to have lived in chastity if he had not been obliged to do so. And there was certainly no pregnancy, which might otherwise have been expected for the healthy young woman that Françoise was. Not least, a child would have meant considerable financial gain for them both: the “small farm” which Françoise had heard talk of did exist, and was in the hands of Scarron’s half-siblings; he stood to gain four thousand livres from it, by his own reckoning, though the siblings reckoned it at three thousand (and Scarron’s lawyer at five). But for this, as the memoirist Tallemant des Réaux noted, “someone would have had to give his wife some children.”

  Segrais himself, only in his twenties at the time, admitted to having broached the subject with Scarron, as he relayed in company more than forty years later: “You can’t satisfy a woman just by marrying her, I said to him. You have to give her at least one child as well. And I asked him whether he was able to do it. And he said to me, laughing, Are you telling me you’d like to have the pleasure of doing it for me? I’ve got Mangin here who’ll take on the job whenever I say. Mangin was his valet and a good fellow. Mangin, he said—I was there when he said it—Will you give my wife a child? And Mangin said, Yeah, all right, if it’s God’s will. We told this story a hundred times. Everyone who knew Scarron laughed like mad.”

  Satisfaction, sexual or maternal, was in any case a low priority for Françoise in the first six weeks of her marriage. Her immediate concern, apart from the daily care of Scarron himself, was the impending voy
age to America. Though no written record remains of her feelings about it, her agreement to marry Scarron, with the voyage already in the planning, implies that, on balance, they were positive. Having returned to France as a twelve-year-old, she was not exactly an old hand at colonial life in the islands, but all the same, she had spent three years there, she had weathered the sea voyage there and back, and she knew something of the climate and the food, the people, and the general way of life. She seems to have enjoyed the modest prestige of the connaisseuse which this afforded her, engaging Jean de Segrais with reminiscences of her “Indian” life, eating pineapples under the palm trees—“their taste is a cross between apricot and melon, and their flower is like an artichoke”—and alarming him, too, with stories of the less idyllic aspects of the place: “She and her mother were sitting outside one day, eating their curds and whey, when along came a snake, five or six feet long, and they fled, leaving everything for him to swallow up.”

  A convoy of boats was due to sail on May 18, 1652, from Paris to Le Havre, the first stage of the voyage to the Caribbean, and sail it did, with “seven hundred men and seven dozen girls, going forth to multiply, according to God’s command.” Scarron and Françoise, however, expected to be among them, were not on board. The reason is unknown, but it was as well for them that they were not, since the expedition deteriorated step by step, from comedy to farce to tragedy.