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

by Veronica Buckley

  The Parisian salon at mid-century was one of Europe’s glories, a sparkling mix of minds and manners, elegant, provocative, sensual, intellectual, and, above all, great fun. Everyone was welcome; poverty was no bar. In an age of rigid class distinctions, the salon was a free-flowing social river, its only elite the brilliant and the beautiful. There was no competition from the universities, where learning was confined to law and medicine and theology—no politics, no fine arts, none of the exciting new natural sciences, and of course no women. Neither was there much competition from the royal court; the years of the Fronde had seen the court at once everywhere and nowhere, the Louvre deserted as often as not, and the great palace of Versailles as yet no more than a humble wooden hunting lodge, and the glint in a little boy’s eye.

  There were other salons, of course: even the legendary Madame de Rambouillet, doyenne of the salon français, now almost seventy and in fact an Italian, was still welcoming guests at her beautiful hôtel. But Paul Scarron’s salon in the big yellow drawing-room was by now the best of them. “It’s the one where people talk the most nonsense,” as he himself noted, “nonsense” being literature, philosophy, politics—though with less enthusiasm now—and, of course, plain gossip. And Scarron himself, despite his pitiful physical state, was a very good host: well informed, always amusing, drawing attention to his sufferings only to make fun of them. “It’s one of the miracles of the century that a man in such a condition could laugh the way he did,” wrote Tallemant des Réaux, master of anecdote and one of the younger salon regulars.

  “Scarron’s house was the meeting place for all the most cultured people from the court, and all the clever people in Paris,” said Jean de Segrais, a constant visitor and himself both cultured and clever, supporting six siblings, as he did, on the earnings of his poetry. And along with the poets came the powerful: the great military commander Maréchal Turenne, and Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of the King’s finances, a man with the kingdom’s wealth at his disposal and a generous patron of the arts. There were the brilliant, all the grand names of France’s grand siècle: Corneille, La Fontaine, and the great Racine, still in his teens; the young Italian composer Lully, phenomenally talented and phenomenally arrogant; the painter Mignard, just returned after more than twenty years in Italy, enraptured by the portrait potential in the face of his young hostess; and of course the bluestocking Madeleine de Scudéry, very tall and very thin, and “so extraordinarily ugly that I’m afraid to describe her for fear of upsetting my more sensitive readers,” as the writer Furetière noted coyly. She came with her devoted admirer Pellisson, no oil painting himself, being “a little man, with a very big hump on his back by way of recompense, and one leg longer than the other, blind in one eye and not seeing overly well with the other, the scarlet rims of both providing their only brilliance, but”—thankfully—“with a most attractive mind.”

  And there were the noble, among them the duchesse de Montpensier, la Grande Mademoiselle, cousin to the King, who during the Fronde had famously fired a cannon at the royal troops from the top of the Bastille. “She has killed her husband,” Cardinal Mazarin had vengefully declared, thenceforth waylaying all Mademoiselle’s future suitors. There were the brilliant and noble: the duc de la Rochefoucauld, frondeur extraordinaire and future author of the famous Maximes, a man of the world with, according to his friend Segrais, a perfect understanding of the human heart. With him came his intimate friend the comtesse de La Fayette, one of France’s first novelists, and the marquise de Sablé, herself an author of fine maxims and hostess of an important salon. There were the brilliant and beautiful, first among them Madame de Sévigné, coquettish and unlamenting (her unaffectionate husband had recently been killed in a duel), and already writing her delightful letters; and the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, “Our Lady of Love,” now in her mid-thirties but still with her three orders of lovers in tow—the payers, the martyrs, and, lastly, the favourites, who neither paid nor suffered long.

  And along with all these glittering people came their many, many friends and admirers. Some came searching: young men came looking for literary advice or inspiration or publishers; the satirist Jean Loret came looking for gossip for his weekly gazette; the comte du Lude came looking for Madame de Sévigné the comtesse de la Suze came looking for any available young man, “since my husband makes love to me as if I were a tree-stump” and the portly poet Saint-Amant came looking for dinner, with his doomed confrère Tristan l’Hermite hanging on his arm, looking for one last drink. Isaac de Benserade came looking for help with his libretto for Lully’s new opera, and he came, it is said, preceded by wafts of the many perfumes which he wore to conceal, insofar as was possible, his naturally fishy smell.

  Others came accompanied: Monsieur de la Sablière, with his young wife, sweet and shy, soon to be immortalized in a glorious portrait by Mignard; the marquise du Plessis-Bellière with her parrot; the duc d’Elbeuf with his celebrated pork pâtés; and the maréchal d’Albret with his cheeses “as good as cheeses can be.” Cardinal de Retz came with his new red hat, and the abbé Fouquet, brother of the great minister, came with vengeance in his heart: he had lost his mistress to the Cardinal, and had vowed to cut up his body and salt it—having killed him first—but neither opportunity arose in Scarron’s yellow drawing-room.

  Some of the guests were rich, some fabulously so; some, like their host himself, had no money at all to speak of. No one minded, provided someone could make a joke of it, and there was always someone who could. Wit—l’esprit—or at least a keen enjoyment of it, was the only real entry fee to the Parisian salon.

  Françoise had wit, an abundance of it, as was remarked by everyone who came close enough to hear her quiet voice. She did not seek the limelight in the way of most of the other women, with the confidence of their wealthy background and their easy familiarity with the salon world. Unlike them, she had still a good deal to learn. Scarron’s lessons were expanding her knowledge of books and ideas, but the manner of the salon, the ways of cultured society, could not be assimilated at second hand. A warning from the chevalier echoed every evening in her ears, already assailed by countless things new to them—“One foolish statement will erase the impression of twenty sensible ones”—and she made up her mind to say nothing at all rather than risk making a fool of herself by speaking out of turn. Her exhortation in later life, to a young girl about to enter the same kind of world, reveals how she managed now in the brilliant circle to which her marriage had given her entrance: “Don’t talk too much. Listen instead. Don’t ever appear surprised; it looks provincial. Don’t reveal your ignorance by asking for explanations. You can learn a thousand things without anyone realizing you didn’t know them already…”

  If knowledge meant confidence, money meant confidence, too. The Sévignés and Sablières arrived, of course, in their own private carriages, the women dressed in beautiful gowns, with fans and jewels, taking silver coins for the servants from embroidered silk purses. Françoise had no means of competing with elegance at this level, but her response was masterful. Unable to perform à la mode, she played instead a tactical counterpoint, dressing with deliberate simplicity and disdaining even the plainer jewellery she might have worn. It was a shrewd stratagem for a girl not yet nineteen, and it worked: in her perfectly tasteful, simple frocks, she charmed everyone. What need to gild the lily when it was so young and pretty, with such a lovely figure and such a natural grace? To the women, it looked like modesty; to the men, it looked like innocence. Both found it irresistible.

  “Don’t try to keep up with the great ladies,” Françoise later advised the impoverished young demoiselles in her care. “You’ll only make yourselves ridiculous…If you can’t afford to dress as they do, take precisely the opposite path: choose perfect simplicity. Don’t let people think you’re spending every penny you can on clothes. Show that you have courage enough to place yourself above this weakness of our sex.” That “this weakness” was in fact a strength—the strength, at base, of mone
y—Françoise knew very well. Unable to meet it directly, she chose instead the path of subversion.

  Scarron was more than happy with the quiet simplicity of his wife’s appearance. Despite his raucous verses, he was a fastidious man, preferring a neat and sober dress to any extravagance of style, and he could not have obliged her, in any case, had she asked for silks and satins. He was equally happy with her capable management of his unusually demanding household and, to his surprise, perhaps, with her comportment among his guests. Dignified, tasteful, charming without being flirtatious, never putting herself forward but noticing every requirement, she had swiftly become the perfect salon hostess.

  “And what I admire in such a young person,” wrote the chevalier de Méré to his friend the duchesse de Lesdiguières, “is that she won’t accept any attention from men unless they’re well behaved, and consequently I think she can be in no great danger, though the handsomest men of the court and the most powerful men in finance are attacking on all fronts. But if I know her, she’ll resist plenty of assaults before surrendering, and if she allows so many men to flock around her, it’s not that any of them will succeed with her, but rather that she knows how to keep them at bay.”

  To some extent, Françoise’s new role of virtuous society hostess came naturally to her. She was observant and self-controlled, she had long been accustomed to putting other people’s needs before her own, and inexperienced as she was, she was generally reserved with men. But these natural bricks were held together by a mortar more consciously constructed: the modest dress, the careful listening, and soon a degree of pseudo-piety as well, all came together through a keen calculation. By appearing to withdraw from the fray, Françoise made herself noticed, and eventually admired. If she could not sparkle as the other ladies did, she would glow with a softer light all her own.

  On the fast days of Lent, with Scarron and his guests tucking into their beef in defiance of the religious laws, Françoise, “in the middle of the ragoûts and sauces,” ate nothing but herring and butter and a bit of salad. “I made the ragoûts for them myself,” she noted. “And I have to admit I felt very pleased with myself for not eating them.” Visiting the minister Fouquet at his grand offices to request a pension for Scarron, she dressed in so unflattering a style “that her friends were ashamed to take her there.” Fouquet was impressed by her modesty, though perhaps also a trifle disappointed—he was a noted admirer of the fair sex—but he duly awarded Scarron the pension, and Françoise was thenceforth included in Madame Fouquet’s outings to the park in her fashionable carriage.

  “What I don’t like so much about her, I have to say,” continued the chevalier, “is that she’s too attached to her duty, despite everyone trying to correct this fault in her.” “But I wasn’t doing these things for love of God,” said Françoise later. “It was for love of my own reputation.” She was horrified to receive a visit from a friend one Good Friday: “He shouldn’t have come,” she said. “He should have thought I’d be passing the day in pious reflection. I wasn’t, of course, but he should have thought I was.”

  If Scarron knew the depth of his wife’s careful façade, he made no mention of it. Her calm, pleasing, rational manner, her reputation for speaking truthfully, of “never turning her wit unkindly against anyone,” was one of “my idols,” as he wrote. Her apparent restraint concealed passionate feelings—humiliation, jealousy, fear perhaps, and maybe ambition, too—but it protected her and gave her confidence, and it earned her the respect and even the admiration of a worldly crowd by no means easy to impress, who simply took it at face value. If Françoise paid the price of the deception in a certain loneliness from time to time, there was enough that was genuine to allow her some real friendships, and to keep the façade standing as time went by. Her own construction, built out of need and anxiety in the uncertain days of her first youth, it was to serve Françoise very well, and she was never to abandon it.

  Six

  End of the Beginning

  I’m not going to attempt to describe the King’s entry for you. I’ll only say that neither I nor anyone else could tell you how magnificent it was. I can’t imagine a finer spectacle, and the Queen must have gone to bed last night very happy with the husband she’s chosen.

  Thus Françoise, writing to her friend, Madame de Villarceaux, of the ceremonial entry into Paris on August 26, 1660, of the resplendently handsome twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV.

  If the Queen was happy with her new husband, she had no cause to congratulate herself about it. Far from having any choice in the matter, Marie-Thérèse had simply served as a traded chattel in the time-honoured way of all princesses, happy and otherwise. “I bring Your Majesty peace and the Infanta,” Cardinal Mazarin had declared, neatly summarizing the conclusion of his negotiations the year before with the Spanish. The Peace of the Pyrenees had brought an end at last to twenty-four years of warfare, alternately fierce and desultory, between France and Spain. Behind the declarations of eternal friendship was a clear loss for the Spaniards: the peace had cost them a great deal of land and the handing over of their King’s daughter to her first cousin, the King of France.

  If the augmentation of his realm had flattered Louis’s already substantial political ambitions, his equally substantial vanity had been deflated, if only temporarily, on acquaintance with his new wife—pious, dumpy, and none too bright. Even her French was galumphing. “She has very white skin,” reported the courtier Madame de Motteville in her defence, “and though her face is long, it’s round at the bottom, and her cheeks, if a bit fat, are nonetheless pretty, and if she only had more height and better teeth, she might be classed among the most attractive persons in Europe.”

  “I’m not going to attempt to describe it all for you,” Françoise continued, although she did in fact give a long and exuberant description of the scene. She made no further mention of the new Queen, however; already, on her entry into the capital, as she was to do for the rest of her life, Marie-Thérèse had passed more or less unnoticed.

  Françoise’s letter to Madame de Villarceaux is a delightful series of pages, the voice of a twenty-four-year-old in high spirits, leaning over the balcony at the house of a friend, passing cheeky comments and pointing out her personal friends riding along in the vast entourage: “Rouville was in borrowed plumes. I wouldn’t have gone at all if I’d been him—the King knows he can’t afford that sort of thing…I don’t know which of the gentlemen looked best. They all looked marvellous. If I had to award a prize, I’d give it to the horse that was carrying the seals…Cardinal Mazarin’s retinue wasn’t the worst: it was led by seventy-two mules…Beuvron was trying to catch sight of me, but he was looking in the wrong direction. I was looking for Monsieur de Villarceaux, but his horse was so frisky, he was twenty feet away from me before I recognized him. He looked very fine, not so magnificently dressed as some of the others, but certainly one of the most dashing. He rode very well…We called out to each other as he passed.”

  Madame de Villarceaux would have been glad to know that her husband had looked so fine and ridden so well, though she might have been less pleased at the eagerness with which he and Françoise had no doubt called out to each other. Villarceaux had been one of Françoise’s keenest admirers since his own approach to Scarron some years before, seeking to establish an acquaintance, and his admiration had not passed unreturned. Louis de Mornay, marquis de Villarceaux, gentleman of the royal household, was a recognized “favourite” of the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, and in fact the father of her infant son, but this, in his view and also in hers, did not necessarily preclude an intimate relationship with Françoise as well. Tallemant des Réaux recorded that “Scarron laughed at those who hinted, ever so gently, that his wife had become Villarceaux’s mistress,” but Scarron was aware that the marquis had been writing billets-doux to his wife, and he did take the considerable trouble of going to Ninon’s house to discuss the matter with him privately. As for the long-suffering Madame de Villarceaux, some years older than her
husband, she came frequently enough to Paris to have, perhaps unwisely, befriended Françoise, but in general she maintained a discreet distance at her château, consoled by her fabulous personal wealth.

  Villarceaux was in any case by no means Françoise’s only admirer. The chevalier de Méré was still about, and sundry self-styled poets were rhapsodizing over her, with others providing a chorus of more prosaic sighs. Among them, “the handsomest men of the court and the most powerful men in finance, attacking on all fronts,” as the chevalier had noted, were the young comte du Lude, hedging his bets between Françoise and thirty-four-year-old Madame de Sévigné the marquis d’Hequetot, scion of the Harcourt dynasty, one of Europe’s most ancient; the duc d’Elbeuf, trailing a frondeur’s reputation and a new wife unwillingly behind him; the marquis de Marsilly on his two crutches, broken-legged from musket-shots received in battle; the handsome Alexandre d’Elbène, supported rather differently, by an inherited fortune of stupendous proportions; and Scarron’s physician and alchemist La Mesnardière, triply resigned to failure, more or less, in medicine, chemistry, and love. The King’s counsellor de l’Orme had reputedly offered 30,000 écus (some said 300,000) in return for the lady’s “final favours,” but this would-be “payer” had received short shrift.

  Françoise kept them all on a high-tension leash, a technique she is said to have learned from Ninon, Our Lady of Love herself; but one man, with an appropriately victorious name, certainly stood higher in her favour than any of the others. This was César-Phébus, comte de Miossens, known as the maréchal d’Albret since his moment of glory during the last days of the Fronde, when it had fallen to his charge to arrest the rebel prince de Condé. Now in his mid-forties, d’Albret was an homme galant of exemplary cast: he had already skewered three men, including his own best friend, in duels fought over affairs of the heart. Villarceaux was shortly to find Ninon reclining in his arms and, presumably with a thought to the duels, to resign her there forthwith. Whether d’Albret was also Françoise’s lover, as was rumoured, is unknown. “Up to this point, I don’t think she’s taken the plunge,” wrote Tallemant des Réaux of this time. But the lady was certainly tempted: “Beauty can be a kind of misfortune,” she later sighed. “It makes you liable to lose your reputation, and possibly even your soul.”