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

by Veronica Buckley

  Although she was generally reticent about her personal feelings, it seems that she had taken Ninon into her confidence, or at least that Ninon had ferreted out the truth. There was even a rumour that Ninon herself had attempted to set things in motion between the two innamorati. The reliable Tallemant des Réaux recalled that “Madame Scarron went that spring [of 1661] to the country with Villarceaux and Ninon, whose apparent purpose was to corrupt her.” It seems quite likely. Despite their son, Villarceaux had never been a “favourite” of Ninon’s, but always one of her “payers,” indicating that whatever the gentleman may have felt, the lady had never been in love with him herself. “Ninon wasn’t at all concerned at what was happening between Monsieur de Villarceaux and Madame Scarron,” wrote Ninon’s close friend Antoine Bret, “even though he was still her lover, and that sort of thing would normally end a friendship between two women. They were both at fault with regard to her, but she forgave them both. She put her friend’s fears at rest and reassured the marquis, too. She was content to be their confidante, and she certainly felt no shame in taking on that role.”

  Ninon was now forty-five, Françoise already twenty-five and still, most probably, a virgin. Ninon may well have thought it high time to take the girl in hand before the bloom was off the rose: no one was going to be sighing after a forty-year-old ingénue; she herself had lost her virginity at fifteen, and after all, no woman could live without love, whether or not she charged for it. Like Françoise, Ninon had known years of hardship; indeed, her father, like Françoise’s, had been convicted of murder—in his case, that of a rival lover of his own married mistress—and had been exiled from Paris, leaving his fifteen-year-old daughter to fend largely for herself. Thence, making good use of her wit and charm and of the unusually liberal education which her father had provided for her, Ninon had earned her way to her present prosperity; in recent years she had even grown respectable. Perhaps, at this point, she was envisaging a vie de courtesane for her young friend, who certainly possessed all the natural requirements of beauty and manner. But for the moment, discretion was all. “A woman’s virtue is nothing more than the art of appearing virtuous,” Ninon had pronounced in the convent at Lagny. And since her release, she had kept rather more to herself, still receiving her gentlemen, but without any public show. In Paris, as always, there were simply too many eyes and ears, so she and Villarceaux packed the young widow into a carriage and set off for the privacy of the country.

  They called a halt in Rueil-en-Vexin, some ten miles outside the city, at the château of their friend Charles de Valliquierville, a wealthy old frondeur now devoting all his time to the pursuit of the fashionable occult sciences. Though his château stood at a barely decent distance from Madame de Villarceaux’s own, it was here that Ninon and Villarceaux had arranged so many of their own trysts during the preceding years. Now they had returned, bringing with them a young lamb, or rather not so young, as an overdue sacrifice on the altar of illicit love.

  It seems that the lamb had both priest and priestess, and that Ninon may even have remained with the lovers to oversee Françoise’s deflowering. Whatever the case, for a time the three were regarded as an inseparable society trio, and by some even as a ménage à trois. “Don’t the three of you make love together? Weren’t you yourself the first to initiate her? Didn’t you arrange things between her and Villarceaux?” So Ninon was questioned by her good friend Charles de Saint-Évremond, no angel himself, now exiled in England for having poked fun at the recent royal marriage. Ninon declined to answer, but she did confirm to Saint-Évremond that “I often let Villarceaux and her use my yellow room,” adding disingenuously, “Of course I can’t give you any details about what went on. I didn’t see anything with my own eyes.”

  Two others who may have chosen a tactical blindness at this point were the marquis and marquise de Montchevreuil, friends of Françoise’s for some years already and, in fact, Villarceaux’s cousins. Like Charles de Valliquierville, they had a house in the Vexin countryside, indeed only a mile or two away, and the nearness of the two houses allowed the love affair to blossom further. In moral terms, the Montchevreuils had a solid reputation—it was Madame de Montchevreuil whom Scarron had accused ironically of “having her way with” Françoise—but they were, insofar as château proprietors can be, “as poor as church mice.” If they were aware of the relationship between Villarceaux and Françoise, it is probably this comparative poverty, and the fact that their own children were too young to be aware of things, which persuaded them to keep their cousin’s mistress under their roof; certainly it was said that Villarceaux helped them financially during this summer. Whatever the Montchevreuils’ reasoning, Françoise was happy enough to pack up her belongings at the Ursuline convent and install herself with them, and in so doing, she established one of the firmest friendships of her life.

  “Montchevreuil was a very good fellow, modest, decent, but really dense. His wife…was tall, skinny and sallow, with a stupid laugh and ghastly long teeth, ridiculously pious and affected. Give her a wand and she’d have been the perfect wicked witch.” It is true that no one claimed the marquise was a beauty, nor the marquis a wit or a scholar; he was rather a steady and capable man, perhaps reminding Françoise of her Uncle Benjamin. It is also true that the marquise had a reputation for extreme piety, which at times became too much for her less zealous companions. “She would start talking about vespers two hours in advance. She was worried that her husband and Madame Scarron wouldn’t go.” She was right to worry: the pair were not above staying behind, on impious principle, playing cards conspicuously in the drawing-room.

  All the same, a “ridiculously affected” woman is not likely to have appealed to Françoise, whose preference was always for a straightforward manner. And it had been the delightful Marie-Madeleine de Fouquet, wife of the King’s Surintendant des Finances, who had introduced her to Madame de Montchevreuil in the first place: Madame de Fouquet would certainly have had no need to befriend an impoverished minor aristocrat had she not had some good personal qualities to recommend her. “There is nothing so fine as a sincere heart,” the chevalier de Méré insisted. “It is the foundation of wisdom”—and in this case, no doubt, the foundation of friendship, too. If not a couple to sparkle in salon circles, the Montchevreuils proved good friends to Françoise, and she in her turn was to repay them manyfold, in later life rather grandly, but for the moment in the simplest ways, as she herself related:

  There’s no greater pleasure than obliging others…My good friend Madame de Montchevreuil was constantly ill or confined to bed. And since I was perfectly well I took charge of her household. I did all the accounts and whatever needed doing. One day I sold a calf for her…It was a lot of trouble and I got very dirty doing it…I had the children with me all the time, one of them learning to read, another one learning the catechism…The littlest girl was still a baby; her hips were not quite straight, and there was a particular way of swaddling her that only I could manage. She had to be changed often; they used to come to me even when we had visitors and whisper to me that the baby needed changing, and I would excuse myself and go and do it, then return to the visitors…But there you are, that’s what you do when you want to be loved.

  “The pleasure of doing good, in my opinion, is the purest and noblest pleasure of all.” This, too, she had learned from the chevalier. But all the same, Françoise’s first thought, of obliging others, rings somehow less true here than her last, of wanting to be loved.

  The affair with Villarceaux did not outlast the summer. Perhaps the gentleman found that three months in love with the same woman was, as he had boasted, eternity enough; perhaps the lady was humiliated by whispering and knowing glances where once she had encountered respect. “No one has ever established a good reputation by enjoying herself,” she later sighed. “A good reputation is a wonderful thing to have, but it costs a great deal. The first sacrifice it demands is pleasure. And what I wanted more than anything was a good reputation, to be res
pected: that was my personal idol.”

  For a woman, a good reputation meant, far above all else, a reputation for virtue, specifically sexual virtue. “A debauched girl has no more claim to respectability than a corpse has to the rights of living men,” growled the moralist François de Grenaille. Ninon de Lenclos was thoughtful and generous and clever and amusing, but she had slept with a lot of men, and there were many, many houses where, in consequence, she could never be openly admitted. Françoise had been, to all appearances, a faithful wife for eight years, and she had been widely praised for it, particularly in the circumstances of a marriage bereft of physical love. Marriage in itself had given her some status, but it was her own stubborn virtue, in the face of constant temptation, which had wrapped itself around the penniless prisoner’s daughter in her too-short skirt, and hoisted her up onto her pedestal. The affair with Villarceaux had threatened to topple her, until she made up her mind not to fall.

  Whether she or he decided to end the affair is unknown. If the decision was his, the pain of rejection may have hardened Françoise’s resolve; if hers, the death of Uncle Benjamin during that summer of love in 1661 may have been the first occasion to give her pause. “You were my father, really,” she had written to him only months before. Father or not, the good Huguenot countryman, not to mention his God’s-law-abiding wife, would have been appalled to learn of their niece’s liaison with Villarceaux. In any event, as Françoise herself said, “I wasn’t seeking the esteem of anyone in particular; I wanted everyone to think well of me.” If other lovers succeeded Villarceaux, nothing is known of them; no contemporary diarist or gossip lets drop any name; no sighing admirer hints of being “treated kindly.” Françoise had too much pride, the scarred interior pride that follows scorching humiliation, to risk her reputation again. From now on, every other man, and every other need of her own, would serve only as an offering to her “personal idol,” her own god of respect.

  Françoise’s friend Bonne de Pons, “a bit mad” but “as beautiful as the day,” had narrowly missed becoming the King’s mistress, and she was quite annoyed about it. In 1661, at the age of sixteen, she had been taken to court with the wine-loving maréchale d’Albret, and while there had engaged the interest of the twenty-three-year-old King, one year married and already desperately disenamoured of his podgy Spanish wife. The maréchale’s friends, “perhaps pushed by the maréchal,” persuaded her to pack her niece swiftly off home before anything untoward could happen, and so, on the pretext of an illness on the part of the maréchal, she went. Bonne’s dismay was great when she found her uncle-cousin d’Albret in perfect health, but he managed to console her, “or so the gossips say,” by taking her as his own mistress instead.

  By the time she had managed a return to court in the mid-1660s, Bonne’s hopeful bark had sailed: the King had already chosen a mistress, Louise de la Vallière, another sixteen-year-old virgin, sweet, shy, and attractive despite a small bust, uneven teeth, and a slight limp, these last to Bonne’s sure disgust. Both the King and Louise had at first been so uncertain of each other’s feelings, and of their own literary skill, that each had turned to the marquis de Dangeau, a mutual friend at court, for help with the requisite poetic billets-doux, with the result that the obliging marquis had spent months on end writing love letters to himself before the two lovers could proceed.

  Despite the remonstrations of his pious mother and five public sermons from the thundering Dr. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, his official “counsellor and preacher,” the King had maintained Louise in her position for more than six years, during which time she had borne him three children, of whom one daughter had survived. While retaining her semi-official place as maîtresse déclarée, Louise herself had not survived long as the exclusive recipient of Louis’s affections. “The King…is only too susceptible to illicit passions which have been so much talked about that I shall have to make some mention of them here,” the diplomat Spanheim recorded in his memoirs. “He has had fleeting passions for various lovely ladies at court…” “During all these affairs,” continued the duc de Saint-Simon, “the King never stopped going to bed with the Queen, often late, but without fail, so much so that to make himself more comfortable, he spent the after-dinner hours between two sheets with his mistresses.”

  Every night, as he came to the Queen’s bedroom to say good night, as he did religiously, and only religiously, the King encountered, sitting with his wife, the most gorgeous of her six ladies-in-waiting, Françoise’s friend from the d’Albrets’ salon, Athénaïs de Montespan. She had won her coveted position in 1663, with the aid of the King’s brother, Philippe d’Orléans, an extravagant cross-dresser known at court simply as “Monsieur.” As lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Thérèse, Athénaïs had gained a certain prestige and also a stipend of her own, but neither of these had been enough to satisfy her own sense of grandeur, or her need for money.

  Though her Mortemart family had been noble for centuries, it was no longer rich, and in Monsieur de Montespan, Athénaïs had married, or had been married off to, a marquis of modest means. Though a young man and from a suitably ancient line, his discouragingly rustic Gascon temperament, and more especially his Jansenist connections, had precluded his advancement and consequent enrichment at court.

  The Jansenists were a rather grim sect within the French Catholic Church—the great Blaise Pascal, a firm adherent, had almost abandoned his study of mathematics to escape the sinful pleasure he derived from it—but more importantly, their unorthodox views on theological questions had left them politically suspect: in the civic life of the state, interwoven as it was with religious customs and requirements, no one could be certain where their loyalties lay. Stepping beyond the bounds of orthodox Catholic doctrine, the Jansenists believed that man could not attain salvation by any effort of his own, but only by the grace of God, unasked for and unmerited, as the sympathetic John Milton wrote at this very time:

  Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will;

  Yet not of will in him, but grace in me

  Freely voutsafed.

  The Jansenists further held that those who were to be saved by God’s grace had been predestined for salvation since their birth, indeed since the creation of the world, so undermining the whole vast edifice of Catholic teaching, based as it was on the bargain of good behaviour in this world against salvation in the next.

  The Jansenists’ denial of this ultimate quid pro quo made them political radicals, too, for all the layers of France’s social pyramid were effectively justified by the Church’s authority, with le petit peuple at the base, the divinely appointed King at the pinnacle, and everyone else ranged accordingly in between. The Jansenist doctrine of predestination raised the daring, indeed outrageous idea that the grubby-faced peasant might in fact be one of God’s elect, while his landlord, or his bishop, or even his king, might unwittingly be already doomed to everlasting hellfire. It was altogether too dangerous. Jansenist schools and convents were subject to interference, closure, and even destruction, but the sect was robust, and it persisted. The most that could be done by Church and court was to block the professional advancement of those with Jansenist tendencies, thus denying them money, influence, and political power.

  This was the stone wall which Athénaïs’s husband had confronted. Still only in his twenties and with his fortune yet to make, the marquis de Montespan had consequently decided to take the only real option open to him, that of purchasing a commission in the army. Since he had gambled away what little cash had been at his disposal, Athénaïs had herself been obliged to sell her best diamond earrings in order to help him on his way. But, news of his unimpressive martial exploits arriving at her door, she decided now, if indeed she had not done so before, to abandon her husband and make a career for herself as mistress to the King. To this end, melding détente with subversion, she began to inveigle herself into the Queen’s good graces, making sure to be the last to attend her each night as she awaited the King’s arrival from the apartment
s of his fading violet, Louise de la Vallière.

  The King saw through Athénaïs at once, and even made fun of her attempts. “She’s desperate to make me fall in love with her,” he said to Louise, and they laughed together at all her little tricks. The Queen suspected nothing. “She was fond of Madame de Montespan; she viewed her as a good woman devoted to her duties and to her husband. Imagine her dismay…” Louise, though no fool, fatally underestimated Athénaïs’s determination and her charms, and in her naïvety, as the courtier Primi Visconti relates, actually brought about her own downfall: “She so much enjoyed Madame de Montespan’s elegance and her witty turns of phrase that she couldn’t be five minutes without her or without saying something nice about her to the King. This of course made the King curious to know more about La Montespan, and he quickly came to prefer her to her friend.” In the end, the King would return from his day’s hunting, go directly to Louise’s apartments to take off his boots and change his clothes, “hardly saying hello to her,” and then pass straight into Athénaïs’s apartments, “and there he would remain all evening.”

  In May 1667, with Louise once more expecting, the King “expressed my affection” for her by declaring the little estate of Vaujours a duchy, bestowing on her the title of its duchess, “and I have recognized a daughter I had by her.” Both Louise and Queen Marie-Thérèse understood this apparent promotion as the dismissal that it really was. Louise was instructed to leave Saint-Germain and return to Paris, and, as Primi Visconti remarked, “though La Vallière complained about this, she had no one to blame for it but herself.”