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

by Veronica Buckley

  Though the new regulations had certainly cleaned things up, they had not really succeeded in dampening anything down. Tinkers and fruit-sellers still thronged the streets with trays of half-legal goods for sale. Displaced communities of beggars and thieves had swiftly regrouped elsewhere. Cabarets and gambling dens obeyed the rules when the police were about, and otherwise lustily ignored them. In the beautiful gardens of the Tuileries palace, newly opened to any “decently dressed” member of the public, prostitutes wandered freely about, offering French lessons to foreigners, though “they’re much more skilled in love than in grammar,” as one Italian noted, unnecessarily, in a journal of his visit to Paris in the middle of the decade.

  If the city’s hardy public life had carried on through its own perennial strength, its more delicate cultural and intellectual flowers had been reinvigorated from above by a brisk shower of royal attention and money. The liberal arts, Louis declared, “are the finest ornaments of the State,” and he vowed, “It is the King’s mission to revive them.” A large pot of gold was made available to just that end, prompting a wave of flowery verses comparing Louis to that most celebrated of all patrons of the arts, the Roman emperor Augustus.

  Though some prominent individuals, notably Fouquet, had continued to prop things up during the lean years of the Fronde, there had been no steady royal patronage since the death of the cultured Cardinal Richelieu twenty years before, and the newly available money created terrific excitement among the city’s artists and scholars, each one hoping to see his name on the precious liste of recipients-to-be. Colbert commissioned Fouquet’s decorator, Charles Le Brun, to choose the happy painters and sculptors. Among the writers, Molière, the King’s favourite playwright, was one of the first to be named; he gave his thanks in typically flippant verse, berating his sleepy artistic muse for being still in bed at six o’clock in the morning:

  My lazy Muse, I’m scandalized

  To see you still in bed:

  Get up! And to the Louvre at once

  To bow your grateful head.

  Louis may have viewed the revival of the arts as “the King’s mission,” but as always, the work of carrying it out was left to contrôleur-général Colbert, his “labouring ox.” Happily, Colbert, who claimed to have Scottish ancestry, was more than equal to the task. “I am so constitutionally inclined to work,” he had written to Cardinal Mazarin, “that I cannot bear the very thought of idleness, or even of moderate work.”

  It was just as well for the artists and scholars who benefited from the new, strategically named gratuités. Unlike pensions, accorded until further notice and generally for life, the gratuités for these “trumpets for the King’s virtues” had to be renewed annually: beneficiaries proving insufficiently enthusiastic about the King’s character or martial exploits or dancing were liable to find their names scratched from the list, with countless dramatically unbalanced plays and factually dubious histories the result. But if Louis regarded the liberal arts as “ornaments of the State,” the farsighted Colbert recognized them as among its most vital structural supports, less a reflection of France’s grandeur than a crucial aspect of its creation and maintenance. At home and abroad, propaganda—written, painted, sculpted, sung—was essential for the reign of unparalleled glory that he was determined to build for his egocentric young master.

  There were no objections from Louis himself. Delighting in the details of Colbert’s strategy—the ballets and operas, the amusing Molière plays, the grand entertainments, the military campaigns and building projects—he lacked the capacity to understand the plan as a whole, and to redirect it as circumstances changed. A natural authoritarian, his self-importance inflated by years of deference and flattery, intelligent but never deeply thoughtful, and woefully lacking in education owing to his war-disrupted childhood, Louis understood only those parts of Colbert’s plan that accorded with his personal tastes. Unable to analyze, he criticized instinctively; unable to brook restraint, he thrust aside whatever stood in his way. Before the decade was out, Louis had come to view anything that he wanted himself as conducive to la gloire de la France, and to justify it accordingly.

  For the moment, what he wanted was new plays and operas, and the fruit of his desires enriched the people of Paris, both the “decently dressed” and the greater body of the (literally) unwashed. In the 1660s, the Parisian theatre was still a place where people of every class rubbed shoulders. Attendance at a play was often more like a political meeting than an opportunity to enjoy a comedy or drama. Actors were constantly heckled, whether for the characters they played onstage or for their personal behaviour offstage. Opposing groups were hired to whistle at them, or to boo or applaud; sometimes fights broke out. The strutting young lackeys of the rich were more troublesome than anyone else; some theatres tried to bar their entry. Despite it all, the 1660s was a wonderful period for the playwrights of Paris: Racine, still in his twenties, wrote the first four of his great tragedies; Molière wrote twenty-one comedies; even middle-aged Corneille, now past his prime in art as in life, produced ten new plays; and dozens of lesser men churned out hundreds of lesser works which have since drifted back into the wings.

  It was an even livelier time for the opera, already dominated by the King’s temperamental favourite, Giovanni Battista Lulli, recently naturalized as Jean-Baptiste Lully. Dancer and impresario as much as composer, Lully was ruthlessly ambitious in all three fields; what he failed to achieve by talent and industry he managed by tantrums and intrigue. Now in his thirties, he was busy gestating a plan to strangle the theatre of his supposed friend and collaborator, Molière, by denying him the music and ballet which were as much a part of contemporary plays as they were of the opera. The King, besotted by Lully’s talent and intimidated by his rages, declined to involve himself in this battle of the artistic giants, and so ensured Lully’s eventual victory.

  Lully might have won in any case, since by the middle of the decade the Paris public had already begun to prefer the opera to the theatre. Satirical moralist Jean de La Bruyère explained the trend succinctly: “It’s the machinery,” he said. “Plays don’t need chariots and things flying about, and the opera does. Quite simply, the audience loves a spectacle.” For one English visitor, all the same, the spectacle was not consolation enough: during his evening at the Paris opera, he complained, he was obliged to endure “some gentlemen singing along from start to finish.”

  Louis’s enthusiasms and Colbert’s energies were revitalizing the court as well, with a series of increasingly lavish entertainments to delight the happy invités and to vaunt the young King’s taste and splendour. In the midsummer of 1668, Françoise attended the latest of these, the most magnificent to date, given at Versailles, fifteen miles outside the city. As yet, this royal estate was no more than a charming country house with a few statues in a modest park. Louis had been considering demolishing it to make way for something grander, but, dissuaded by Colbert, he had abandoned the plan, so that when Françoise and her friends drove up to the marble courtyard on that June evening of 1668, they saw before them a near-perfect royal maison de plaisance.

  If they had hopes for its survival, the scale of the evening’s entertainment might have given them pause for thought. The King had dubbed it le Grand Divertissement, and it was to surpass anything that Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte or any prince anywhere else had ever done before. The fête was ostensibly a celebration of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which had put an end to France’s promenade militaire, the War of Devolution, “a magnificent confirmation of the rights of the Queen,” but for Louis it served, too, to boost his still private determination to dismember, in the longer term, the failing Spanish Empire.

  Versailles being comparatively small, the number of guests had been limited to about 3,000, which apparently included “every person of quality, male and female, from Paris and the neighbouring provinces.” Nine lavishly decorated dining-tables had been set up in the garden, but these were for selected ladies only, since it was to t
he ladies in general, if secretly only to their uncrowned queen, that the evening had been publicly dedicated. The exultant Athénaïs sat, with tactical modesty, at Table 4, in company with Françoise and Madeleine de Scudéry. The crowned Queen was naturally seated at the first table beside the King, but, despite her prominent place, she was, as always, outshone from all sides. What little grace Marie-Thérèse might have possessed had vanished in the seven months of a new pregnancy. Though she had borne four children since her marriage eight years before, only two had survived, the dauphin Louis, now aged seven, and his sister Marie-Thérèse, just one year old.

  The King had gallantly intended that he himself should bear the entire cost of the evening’s festivities, and to this end had “strictly forbidden every sort of ornament and gilding,” as the chronicler Montigny recorded for the benefit of the next day’s news-sheets. “But how can you regulate fashion?” he jotted rhetorically—“ornament and gilding” were, naturally, ubiquitous. Payment for the fête had in any case been left to Colbert, in his endlessly useful capacity as Superintendent of the King’s Buildings. Versailles being a royal building, and Colbert being its Superintendent, it was up to him to keep the costs of the evening down, as well as to arrange all the various settings and sittings—not forgetting the fireworks. Of these, as Madeleine de Scudéry recalled, there were first a thousand little cannons firing off “in heroic harmony, if I may so put it,” and then “a thousand things shooting from rotundas, fountains, parterres, bushes, and a hundred other places, and at last from the top of the water tower—so many brilliant stars, they could have dimmed the sun.”

  Louis may well have attained his hope of surpassing anything that had ever been done before, for the whole scene was utterly fantastical. The outdoor ballroom, octagon-shaped, illuminated by “an infinite number of chandeliers,” was decorated with exotic orange trees and fountains spouting water “like a deluge of pearls.” Along the garden paths towards it, statues of antique gods and heroes stood, “all coloured and lit up,” at every crossing. Small though it was considered as yet, the park contained an amphitheatre large enough to seat all 3,000 guests, and facing this was a theatrical garden, constructed especially for the evening. Here the marvellous Molière and his troupe performed their new play, also constructed especially for the evening: George Dandin, or The Confused Husband. It is the tale of a rich peasant who makes a fool of himself by marrying a woman from a higher social class—terribly amusing for the “persons of quality” in the audience, and a reminder to the servants handing out refreshments not to think of getting above themselves. During the interval, the ballet scenes of a new Lully opera were performed, with the composer himself taking a prominent part in the dancing.

  The King danced, too, not onstage, however, as he often did, but in the ballroom, accompanied by musicians perched on four little amphitheatres, “and you know he is the most graceful dancer in the world,” said Madeleine de Scudéry, without undue flattery, since it was well known to be true. And, evidently feeling the need to make some mention of the other royal personage present, she added diplomatically, “As for the beauty of the Queen—well, you know about that already.”

  By the time Françoise stepped back into the carriage awaiting her in the marble courtyard, the dawn of a bright summer day was breaking. It was not her own carriage, of course; as yet, a luxury of that scale remained beyond her pocket, and she had still to rely on the kindness of friends to ferry her about from place to place. The journey back to Paris took three hours or so on the new paved roads, ample time for her to reflect on the evening’s pleasures, and on the distance she had travelled from her aunt’s little château of Mursay.

  Nine

  DutyCalls

  Françoise had not been back to Mursay since 1662, following the death of her beloved Aunt Louise. There she had reestablished her particular friendship with cousin Philippe, who had once taught her arithmetic at a table in the château kitchen. Philippe was now aged thirty-six; he had married soon after his mother’s death, and he and his wife, Marie-Anne, had two little boys, Philippe, aged four, and Henri-Benjamin, still only a few months old. During her visit to Mursay, Philippe had given Françoise a number of d’Aubigné family documents supposedly proving her title of nobility, but now, in July 1668, she decided to rescind them in order to avoid a new tax specific to those of noble birth. It was a good indication of her current ambitions: protecting her financial position was evidently more important to her than taking a step up the social ladder. Provided she could continue to live in decent comfort in her own little Marais house in the rue des Trois-Pavillons, she was content to remain simply Madame Scarron—or rather, Madame d’Aubigné Scarron, as she was beginning to call herself, adding the lustre of her grandfather’s still respected name to the more equivocal sound of “Scarron.”

  In August 1668, Queen Marie-Thérèse, to her delight, gave birth to her second son, Philippe, and in September, to her horror, Athénaïs realized that she herself was pregnant by the King. Though they had by now been lovers for more than a year, Athénaïs was so distraught by the realization that she went on a frantic diet in an attempt to conceal the truth: “She became thin and sallow, and so changed, she was almost unrecognizable.” When the baby arrived, in the late spring of 1669, it was swiftly spirited away, so swiftly, indeed, that not even its sex is known for certain.

  A royal bâtard was of course no novelty. Louise de la Vallière had borne the King children, too, but Louise had been unmarried; there was no Monsieur de la Vallière to lay legal claim to them or to complain of the King’s adultery. Moreover, the King himself had recently taken an untactical public stand on the matter: in 1666, he—or rather, Colbert—had established a new council for the “Reformation of Justice,” effectively the Paris police force, whose complex remit included “the fight against debauchery” and “the tracing of unfaithful wives.” Unwisely, perhaps, Louis had installed at the head of the new council Colbert’s protégé, the exceptionally diligent Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, whose energetic efforts in his new post had been receiving a great deal of public attention.

  Matters were made worse a few months after the baby’s birth with the unexpected arrival at Saint-Germain of Athénaïs’s husband, the marquis de Montespan, back from his latest unsuccessful military campaign, this time against Algerian pirates. The marquis turned up at the palace in a large black carriage, with horns mounted on the top of it to emphasize his outraged state of cuckoldry. The King’s relationship with Athénaïs had been suspected for some time—“Praise the Lord!” her father-in-law had declared. “Here is Fortune knocking on my door at last!”—but officially, at least, it was still secret. The marquis had the effrontery, or the courage, to lecture the King about adultery and to warn him of an eventual divine punishment. Athénaïs was terrified, and Louis outraged. Two days later, he made his response: he gave orders to have the marquis arrested, before setting off for a spell of autumn hunting at the Loire Valley château of Chambord.

  While the marquis fumed in his Bastille cell, Athénaïs and Louis reconsidered. Neither had the least intention of putting an end to their affair. Athénaïs was clearly very fertile: she had presented the marquis himself with a son and a daughter before they had been even two years married; indeed, she was already pregnant again. Beyond that, such contraceptive methods as were known were certainly not of a kind to be contemplated by the King: he was not going to practise withdrawal; he was not going to wear any fish-skin condom; he was not going to allow his “fabulous” Athénaïs to risk her life with poisonous abortifacients. In short, there were bound to be more children. A longer-term solution must be found.

  It was Athénaïs who found it, and she found it in Françoise. Living outside the court, reliable, refined in her manner but practically minded, and above all absolutely discreet, she seemed the perfect person to take charge of a secret household for unwanted royal children. Word had spread of her capable deputizing for Madame de Montchevreuil several years before, but it wa
s probably “mad” and “beautiful” Bonne, like Athénaïs now a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, who suggested a potential saviour in their mutal friend, Madame Scarron. Bonne had married in 1666; she had a two-year-old daughter of her own, and Françoise had already proved a fond honorary aunt to this little girl. The offer was duly made.

  Françoise hesitated. She was happy as she was, in her little house in the middle of the Marais. She did not want the intrigue and work and deception that a sensitive appointment of such a kind would involve. She sought advice from Père Gobelin, who advised her to verify one or two aspects of the matter. Athénaïs’s two pregnancies, in the absence of her husband, had not passed unnoticed, but, despite the marquis’s melodramatic appearance at Saint-Germain, it had not yet been finally accepted that her lover was the King himself. Louise de la Vallière’s determination in refusing to leave the court had in one respect paid off: she had remained the official maîtresse déclarée, still appearing frequently in public with the King, still living in her apartments next to his own.

  Louis’s wish to keep the court guessing had met, it seemed, with some success. The father of Athénaïs’s illegitimate children was rumoured to be one of his own favourites, the duc de Lauzun, maréchal de camp and colonel-général of dragoons. Just a few years older than Louis, Lauzun had served for many years as the King’s unofficial comrade-in-love, arranger of his many brief affairs, provider of fast horses, and general guard outside bedroom doors. Lauzun came from Gascony, a region supposedly peopled by a rabble of puffed-up fast talkers, crafty, showy, and dishonourable, and though this may have been no more than a snobbish Parisian cliché, it was one that Lauzun’s own rather wild behaviour had done nothing to contradict.