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

by Veronica Buckley

  There were other temptations, too, which she may not always have resisted. Despite teasing comments from Scarron about her fondness for Ninon, with whom she often shared a bed in the custom of the time, Françoise had no sapphic tendencies, at least not naturally. But she passed half her days in a highly suggestive environment, marked by erotic language and gesture, with men looking admiringly at her and some propositioning her outright. It is not at all improbable that over years of living in this kind of atmosphere, the demands of her own sexuality grew stronger, and that during her “months on end” in bed with Ninon, there were moments, and perhaps hours, of tenderness or sensuality or even lovemaking between them.

  Ninon had had ample recent opportunity to investigate the pleasures of sex with women. In the summer of 1656, a moral crusade led by the pious Queen Mother and the stringent men of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, the “cabale des dévots,” had cleared hundreds of prostitutes from the streets of Paris, and Ninon, though not technically a prostitute at all, had been swept up with them and locked away in the prison-convent of the Madelonnettes, near her own quarter of the Marais. To the shock of the Visitation nuns who staffed the place, vast parcels of rich food and wines had arrived daily from prominent men wishing to ease the pangs of Ninon’s incarceration, and the nuns’ alarm had been mightily increased when dozens of young courtiers began scaling the convent walls and charging about the grounds, demanding her release. Ninon had been swiftly transferred to the more distant convent of Lagny, twenty miles from Paris, in a town suitably fortified against attack by wartime enemies or impassioned galants. Here she had languished for a year, until the maréchal d’Albret, with a too hopeful guarantee of reform on the lady’s part, had procured her release in the summer of 1657.

  The convent of Lagny was not a reform institution like the Madelonnettes. There were nuns, of course, with varying degrees of vocational devotion, but it housed as well many girls and women, generally of good family, who were there simply because they had nowhere else to go. They lived more freely than the nuns, and among them Ninon had quickly become a star. “A woman’s virtue is nothing more than the art of appearing virtuous,” she had instructed them, no doubt presenting a more attractive option than the joyless sisters, obliged to follow every last letter of their bleak law. Ninon was a libertine, a professional breaker of rules. It was her job to know all there was to know about lovemaking, about the many different ways of eliciting pleasure, for herself and for her partners, about the forbidden sexual positions which had recently made their way into France along with table forks and ice cream and other exotic Italian phenomena. “I can play the man if I choose to,” she had more than once declared. Writing from Lagny to a homosexual friend, she had remarked, “I’m taking a leaf out of your book, and beginning to love my own sex.”

  None of it is certain, but it is clear in any case that Françoise and Ninon were not obliged to share a bed, like the very poor, or like friendly cousins on a brief visit. They lived only minutes from each other; no long, cold carriage ride would have dissuaded either one from returning home after an evening spent at the other’s house. “They had no reason to sleep in the same bed”—for months on end—“unless they found pleasure in it.” Scarron’s teasing may in fact have hinted at a genuinely sensual involvement between his free-living friend and his wife, and if so, it may even have been something of a relief to him. An affair between Françoise and Ninon would have struck less brutally at his already humbled manhood. A woman lover was a different kind of competition, and there would at least be no illegitimate child to humiliate and grieve him further.

  Other than this, despite occasional jibes from her husband, Françoise’s relationships with women were almost certainly innocent. She enjoyed women’s company, and by now could count among her friends some of the city’s most beautiful and distinguished ladies. Even the extraordinary Queen Christina, visiting Paris in the autumn of 1657 after abdicating her snowbound Swedish throne, was moved to request an introduction to Paul Scarron’s enchanting young wife. Scarron himself, having regaled the Queen in advance with gallant declarations of eternal devotion, expected handsome financial advantage from the meeting, but his only reward in the end was a witty backhanded compliment: “I might have guessed it would take a Queen of Sweden to make a man unfaithful to a woman like that,” Christina is reported to have said.

  Though Françoise was proud of her new social connections, she was aggrieved, and perhaps resentful, when her own modest means restricted her movement among them. “My wife is most unhappy,” wrote Scarron to Uncle Benjamin at Mursay, “having no money and no coach to go where she wants, when she has been offered the great happiness of accompanying one of the Mancini misses…”

  The quintet of Mancini sisters, lively to the point of scandal, were the nieces of Cardinal Mazarin. Marie Mancini, the young King’s first love, had asked Françoise to attend her on her journey to western France, where she had been more or less exiled after the arrangement of Louis’s marriage to the Spanish infanta. Though obliged to decline this honour, Françoise was able to console herself with the even more illustrious Marie-Madeleine Fouquet, lovely young wife of the King’s Surintendant des Finances and herself magnificently well born. Madame Fouquet had become quite attached to Françoise since their first outing in the park together in her elegant carriage. “I find my wife so full of Madame’s attractions that I fear something impure may be going on between the two of them,” wrote Scarron to the maréchal d’Albret, in the certainty of their innocence. And elsewhere, ironically: “I’m afraid that débauchée Madame de Montchevreuil is going to get her drunk and have her way with her before sending her back to me”—Madame de Montchevreuil being known for her almost tiresomely good behaviour.

  Tallemant des Réaux records the daughter of a court florist, “well known for her love of women,” visiting Françoise, then indisposed “with a touch of colic,” with a bouquet in one hand and a large purse of coins in the other. “She’d been looking for an excuse to spend the night with her for ages, and in the end she simply got into the bed beside her and kissed her. Madame Scarron leapt up and chased her out.” Françoise had no wish to be taken for a lesbian, and even less to be taken for a prostitute.

  Scarron himself, meanwhile, had been growing ever less able to pay court of any kind to his wife. Years of near paralysis, together with an overindulgence in pâtés and cheese and frangipani tarts—“I’ve always been a bit greedy”—had fattened him to the extent that he was now even breathing with difficulty. His illness was so advanced that for months he had been spending most of the day in bed, in a state of exhausted half-sleep. His wonderful salon had declined with him, and Françoise had begun to take whatever chance she could to slip away to other Marais gatherings, often at Ninon’s house or at the grander residences of Fouquet or the duchesse de Richelieu.

  By the late summer of 1660, it was apparent that Scarron was nearing his end. “The bloody doctor’s got me hexed: He says I’ll be dead by Friday next,” he wrote during a rare lucid hour. “So I’m writing my will.” And so he did, in a last flourish of burlesque:

  To my wife I bequeath the freedom to wed,

  For fear she end up in an illicit bed.

  It’s true in that way she’s endured a long Lent:

  I’d have serviced her better if I’d been less bent.

  To fat Saint-Amant, a good parcel of cheeses,

  To the fop Benserade, as much scent as he pleases,

  To my dearest friend Loret, some wine, quite a lot,

  To that idiot doctor, my chamberpot.

  If the doctor had been banished, Scarron’s friends were still, as ever, more than welcome in his yellow house. They did not desert him now, so that his final days were spent as he had always loved to spend his days—in warm and congenial company. Feeling the approach of death, he admitted that, a hesitant Catholic, he could not decide whether or not to accept the last rites. The maréchal d’Albret and rich Alexandre d’Elbène, steady ath
eists both, dismissed the idea, but Françoise insisted and, perhaps for her sake, Scarron agreed that a priest should be sent for. D’Albret and d’Elbène remonstrated; Scarron changed his mind: there would be no final embrace in the arms of Holy Mother Church. In the end it was Ninon, Our Lady of Love, who brushed past them all with a priest in tow. “Come on, then, Monsieur, come on,” she admonished him, “do your duty, and don’t take any notice of what my friend says. He doesn’t know any more about it than you do.”

  Scarron took the sacrament, with wife and friends weeping around him. “I’ll never make you weep as much as I’ve made you laugh,” he told them, sadly and truthfully. Outside, colporteurs paced about beneath the windows, calling out the news of his impending death, but if Scarron heard them, he was past caring. He had strength enough to dictate an epitaph for his own waiting grave, then, true to ironic form, he produced a lengthy bout of hiccups, before finally breathing his last. His body was carried the following evening to the nearby church of Saint-Gervais, and buried with minimal ceremony. Though it was not customary for a wife to attend her husband’s funeral, Françoise was present—indeed, it seems she was the only mourner there. Where Scarron’s body came to rest is unknown: perhaps in the common grave for the poor, perhaps beneath a flagstone in the nave of the church. Wherever his grave, it was never to bear the irreverent epitaph he had prepared for himself:

  This man knew every pain there was,

  He sighed and groaned and choked,

  And suffered death a thousand times

  Before he finally croaked.

  So keep it quiet as you go by,

  Don’t even make a peep:

  This is the first in many nights

  That Scarron’s got to sleep.

  And despite his facetious last will, Scarron had in fact died intestate, leaving only debts. More than a hundred years later, the parish of Saint-Gervais was still demanding payment from his distant heirs for the cost of the poet’s burial.

  Jean de Segrais, though a good friend of Scarron’s, had not joined those keeping vigil at his deathbed. Segrais had been travelling with the King on his wedding journey, and had not heard that Scarron was failing at last. He arrived back in Paris only days afterwards, and “the first thing I did was go to see him, but when I reached the house, they were carrying out the chair he always used to sit in. They’d just sold it as part of his assets.”

  Scarron’s “assets” were effectively the contents of the house in the rue Neuve-Saint-Louis. On the very day of his death, with his body still in the yellow bedroom, creditors had demanded that the house be sealed so that nothing might be taken out, and in the days that followed, everything was sold to repay what might be paid of his debts. Those of his friends who had furnished the house with their own loans or gifts were too generous now to make any claims to the curtains and books and tables being carted off to auction, though various Scarrons emerged from the countryside to behave with less restraint.

  Françoise, dressed in widow’s black, had left the house in the morning of the seventh of October, just hours after Scarron’s death and before the bailiffs’ arrival. She took with her, presumably, some clothes and whatever small items she possessed of any value, notably a drawing of herself recently made by Pierre Mignard. Several friends had invited her to stay with them, but Françoise accepted instead an offer from Scarron’s cousin Catherine, the maréchale d’Aumont, of her own furnished rooms at the Petit-Charité convent of the Hospitalières, near the Place-Royale in the heart of the town. These rooms, which Madame d’Aumont retained permanently for her own periods of religious retreat, were similar to the lodgings Françoise had taken at the Ursuline convent in the weeks before her marriage. The arrangement provided her with a safe and respectable home that she could treat as her own, coming and going as she pleased and inviting whatever guests she chose to see her there, and she apparently took full advantage of these freedoms, bringing in “a furious number of people, which wasn’t at all to the nuns’ liking.” In any event, it was not intended to be more than a temporary home, possibly until November, when, at twenty-five, she would reach the age of legal majority and be entirely her own person de jure as well as de facto, though, with her father deceased, it is not clear who might otherwise have stepped in to take legal charge of her during the intervening months.

  Françoise did mourn Scarron, but not deeply, and not long. She was always to speak of him with compassion, but their relationship, after all, had been more friendship than marriage, and she could hardly have wished him a longer life of ever more awful suffering. His death had freed her from one great anxiety—the wearying daily care of the invalid himself—but it had also left her in something of a limbo in terms of her own situation. Once again, she was without any real home, with almost no money to hand. Sensibly, she engaged a lawyer in an effort to protect her “widow’s portion,” if indeed it proved to be any amount at all, from Scarron’s circling creditors. On October 23, 1660, she wrote to Aunt Louise at Mursay:

  I have been so overwhelmed these last few days, and Monsieur Scarron’s death has occasioned me so much grief and so much business to attend to, that I haven’t even had time to write to ask you for a copy of my baptism document, which is absolutely necessary. Please send it to me as soon as you possibly can…

  Aunt Louise must have complied directly, for sometime in November, Françoise was able to write to Uncle Benjamin of a modest financial success:

  Monsieur Scarron has left ten thousand francs in assets, and twenty-two thousand francs of debt. Twenty-three thousand are due to me by my marriage contract, but it was drawn up so badly that although my claim has priority…I’ll still have to pay some of the debts…Anyway, after all our representations, it seems I’ll get four or five thousand francs outright.

  That’s all that remains of this poor man…From all this you’ll see that I’m not destined to be happy, but I suppose we have to view this kind of thing as a trial sent from the Lord, and resign ourselves…

  Françoise could not resign herself, all the same, to the idea of living on charity yet again. Madame d’Aumont’s kindness had given her a roof over her head, and she had no doubt been grateful for it. But Madame d’Aumont’s kindness quickly began to run out of control; she began sending food to the convent, then wine and candles, then clothes, making sure at the same time that every detail of her thoughtfulness was broadcast loudly. Finally, when a cartload of firewood from her turned up in the convent courtyard, Françoise stormed outside and sent it straight back. And when the bill fell due for the chambres de retraite, she insisted on paying it herself, though possibly with money borrowed elsewhere, and decamped forthwith for her old Ursuline convent at the rue Saint-Jacques.

  By early December she was settled in there, and relaxed enough to include pieces of ordinary Paris gossip in her letters to Mursay. “They’ve staged a comedy at the Louvre about the King’s marriage. Everyone was delighted by it. It’s a pastorale. They show the King on stage…I couldn’t go, of course.” It was her state of mourning which had prevented Françoise from attending; neither she nor any of her friends was deterred by the fact that the pastorale was the work of the ambitious young Philippe Quinault, who five years before had stolen an entire act of Scarron’s for a play of his own. “I’ll never make you weep as much as I’ve made you laugh,” Scarron had said. Eight weeks after his death, the memory of him, and loyalty to it, was already fading. “But what is there that time does not dissolve? as Scarron used to say,” sighed Madame de Sévigné.

  In one respect, at least, the same phenomenon was shortly to work very much to Françoise’s advantage. Scarron’s pension as Honorable Invalid to the Queen, rescinded after his virulent Mazarinade, was about to be reinstated, thanks to the efforts of two friends from the yellow salon days whose positions at court allowed them regular conversation with the Queen Mother. The ladies painted a glowing picture of the virtuous young widow who might so easily be drawn by poverty and her own beauty into “gallantry,”
namely a life of sin with one or other, or one and others, of the city’s wealthy men. The poor little thing, the ladies sighed, had even been a pupil at the Ursuline convent in the rue Saint-Jacques, which Her Majesty had herself declared open in 1620, in the days of her own beauteous youth. The Queen Mother, tough-minded but very pious, did not take much persuading. “But I’ve forgotten how much the pension was,” she said. The amount had been five hundred livres per annum. “Two thousand livres,” said a quick-thinking courtier; the ladies nodded in sage agreement, and passed the Queen Mother a quill.

  “Virtue alone is our only wealth.” So Françoise had chanted years before, with her thirteen-year-old companions, chasing the turkeys on the baronne de Neuillant’s farm in Niort. For once, the old Pibrac quatrain had been tangibly substantiated.