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

by Veronica Buckley

  The quietly spoken, womanly, capable governess of the royal bâtards thus suited his inclinations very well, and it swiftly became clear that he suited her own. By the beginning of March, four years after beginning her charge and two months after her arrival at court, the strain of resisting both the King himself and her own strongest feelings had made her quite unwell. “My sufferings…You’ve been so thoughtful…I’m feeling better…I hope I won’t fall ill again…My delicate health…I shall have to take more care of myself…” So she mumbled to Père Gobelin, in a sort of code which he understood only in part. He knew very well that Françoise had not caught cold or come down with a fever or broken a leg. He realized that her illness was moral, in the term of the day; he saw that she was distressed in mind, and that naturally, this had affected her health.

  The situation was difficult. The King’s habits were only too well known, and after all, he was not just any man. Françoise was his subject, his servant, and his employee; most people at court would have considered her honoured to become his mistress as well. The very priest she had appealed to had told her as much: “He didn’t understand at all,” she told Père Gobelin. “He said there was nothing sinful in it. I’m sure you would have thought differently.” Only two months after arriving, she had been ready to leave the court, “to remove myself from a situation very far from assuring my salvation…If a pious and sensible person advises me to stay, I’ll do so, whatever it costs me, but if I had my own way, I’d leave…” Ah, no, Père Gobelin had replied, there were the children to think of, there was their future as Christian souls; this was the reason she had come to court, against her will, in the first place. Understanding the King’s designs on Françoise, but failing to understand, from her roundabout phrases, that she herself had been tempted, he counselled her to stay at her post, warning her at the same time to keep away from Louis if she could.

  It is true that the children were important to Françoise, though probably only Mignon could have kept her at court. “If he were walking, I’d be happy with them all,” she wrote. “He’s always ill, though not in danger of his life, but that doesn’t comfort me much; it’s terrible to see someone you love suffering…I wept about it all through mass today. Nothing could be more stupid than loving a child so much when he isn’t even mine…It’s really foolish of me to stay in such a disagreeable situation…”

  The “disagreeable situation” was being made worse by the involvement—or, as Françoise saw it, the interference—of Mignon’s mother. After years of more or less ignoring her children, Athénaïs had begun to take an interest in their upbringing. Needless to say, her erratic views did not accord with those of their steady governess, and daily disagreements between the two swiftly became the norm. It was not that Athénaïs had experienced any sudden surge in maternal affection; rather, she had noticed the attention the King had been paying Françoise, and, reluctant to challenge either of them directly, she had given vent to her anxiety by niggling about the children, countermanding instructions, and generally getting in Françoise’s way wherever she could.

  Françoise had managed to endure the “situation” until it touched the question of the children’s health—indeed, given the medical practices of the time, of their physical safety. Athénaïs had been talking to the physicians. The duc du Maine, she decided, was to return to Antwerp for more stretching treatments on his afflicted leg, and his little brother, the two-year-old comte de Vexin, sway-backed or round-shouldered, was to have thirteen cauterizations along his spine in an attempt to flatten the offending curve. Françoise protested the grotesque propositions regarding “my little princes.” “How could you know better than I what’s best for my children?” challenged Athénaïs, and Françoise lost her self-control at last. That evening, she wrote an impassioned missive to Père Gobelin:

  Madame de Montespan and I had a dreadful argument today. I cried and cried, and she told the King all about it, from her point of view, anyway…I can tell you it’s not easy at all being here with this sort of thing happening every day…I’ve thought a thousand times about becoming a nun, but I’m afraid I’d regret it…I’ve been wanting to leave here ever since I arrived, but I’m afraid I’d regret that, too…Please, I beg you, think of my peace of mind. I know my duties here are one path to salvation for me, but I’m sure I could get there more easily from somewhere else, and I can’t see why God would want me to put up with Madame de Montespan. She’s incapable of friendship, and I can’t do without it. Every disagreement we have is another reason for her to hate me. She complains of me to the King, undermining his respect for me, saying whatever she likes, so that now he thinks I’m some kind of madwoman. I dare not appeal to him directly; she’d never forgive me if I did, and anyway, I owe too much to her, I couldn’t say anything against her, so I won’t ever be able to do anything about it. I suppose I’ll be dead sooner or later in any case…

  Thus, with stoic melodrama, Françoise concluded her complaint. Père Gobelin urged less melodrama and more stoicism, and in the end, stoicism triumphed. A fortnight later, she informed him as follows:

  I spoke to Madame de Montespan yesterday morning…We had quite a heated conversation, but frank on both sides. Then I went to mass, and afterwards dined with the King…The upshot of it all is that I shall try to reconcile myself to things here for the time being…but I’m quite determined to leave at the end of the year…God will guide me to do whatever is best for my salvation.

  Whatever was “best for [her] salvation,” there was increasingly little chance of her leaving the court at all. It was infuriating to have to deal with Athénaïs’s tantrums and interventions, but at the same time, only the court could provide salvation in another, worldly sense. “[Françoise] was born with nothing,” as her secretary was later to write, “and staying at court with the King was her only means of getting away from that. She said that many times.”

  And that was not all. “Keep away from the King if you can,” Père Gobelin had warned her. But she could not. It was not just that she was living at the heart of the court, seeing the King and speaking to him every day. It was not just a question of staying in the background, avoiding his glances, pretending not to notice certain gestures and hints and, if it came to the point, refusing him outright. All of this she could have done, as Père Gobelin well knew; in a battle of moral strength with the King, Françoise would surely be the victor. What Père Gobelin had failed to realize, and Françoise had not dared to say, was that the enemy was not in fact the King himself, in all his strength, but rather her own weakness. At the age of thirty-eight, for the second time in her life, she had fallen in love.

  Athénaïs had sensed it, and, as her ever more aggressive behaviour over the children revealed, she had sensed the King’s response as well. In July 1674, she had taken spirited action in her own defence, by presenting Françoise with an offer of marriage from the duc de Villars-Brancas, an embarrassing and decrepit old hunchback who had buried three wives already. “She and Madame la duchesse de Richelieu are trying to marry me off,” wrote the supposed fiancée to her confessor. “It won’t succeed…As if I hadn’t already enough trouble in my present enviable state without looking for more in a state that makes three-quarters of the human race miserable.”

  No more was heard of the duc de Villars-Brancas, but in the same month of Françoise’s indignant refusal, the King presented her, for no apparent reason, with 100,000 francs (about 35,000 livres), of which, perhaps to assuage her conscience, she distributed 1,000 to several convents. In September he accorded her a lucrative thirty-year monopoly on the manufacture of oven and furnace hearths for the baking and dyeing trades. In October he gave her another 100,000 francs outright, then another 50,000, then yet another 50,000. Unsurprising, then, that somewhere in the first few days of November 1674, she apparently overcame her religious scruples, or her fear of discovery or rejection or dismissal, and became Louis’s mistress at last.

  It is a measure of Françoise’s discretion, and o
f the King’s preference for secrecy in his private life, that no one seems to have discovered the fact, at least not at once. “We’ve had a horoscope read for my younger son,” wrote an unaware Liselotte to her aunt. “It seems he’s going to be the Pope; to be honest, I think it’s more likely he’ll turn out to be the Antichrist.” Primi Visconti noticed only that the going price for the office of gentleman of the bedchamber, with the right to attend the King as he answered his evening call of nature, had risen to 60,000 écus, with one or two hardy souls prepared to pay 100,000. “So you see how the French value everything that comes from the King, even the most repugnant things.”

  Though almost eveything at court had its price, Françoise was not a woman to be purchased. Years of virtuous widowhood had made that clear; the gifts of francs and oven monopolies might as easily have insulted as persuaded her. She had at first been startled by the King’s admiration, then disbelieving, then flattered, and finally responsive. “A good reputation is a wonderful thing to have,” she had said, “but it costs a great deal. The first sacrifice it demands is pleasure.” If she had determined to make that sacrifice at the age of twenty-five, now, at thirty-nine, she had changed her mind. From the summit of glory, the demigod King of France had turned towards her with a delightful invitation on his lips, and she had accepted. “Virtue alone is our only wealth,” came an echo from her girlhood. “Not so,” she replied. Pleasure was wealth, too, and the love of a King was wealth, and she would rejoice in them both while she could.

  On November 10, Françoise wrote brightly to her brother Charles:

  You may have heard that I’m buying an estate…It’s Maintenon, fourteen leagues from Paris, ten from Versailles, and four from Chartres. It’s beautiful and grand, and will bring in ten or eleven thousand livres a year. So if the worst comes to the worst, you’ll always have somewhere to retreat to…I hope I’ll be able to see you before the end of the winter. I’m feeling very well indeed…

  Two days later, Athénaïs gave birth to her fifth child by the King, a daughter, Louise-Marie-Anne, Mademoiselle de Tours, swiftly dubbed “Toutou.”

  If Françoise thought, for a few glorious weeks, that she was on the point of replacing Athénaïs as the King’s maîtresse déclarée, her illusions did not last long. The courtiers’ gossip and her own clear eyes reminded her daily that she was in fact just one more link in the daisy-chain of court flowers plucked by Louis. “The King fucks them, the Lord saves them,” declared Madame de Sévigné’s cousin, the comte de Bussy-Rabutin, newly released from prison, as he observed yet another cast-off royal mistress making her way to the convent, and avoiding a second spell in the Bastille only by his oblique flattery of the King’s masculine pride.

  That Françoise had not plotted to become Louis’s mistress, as was common, and even expected of more or less every eligible woman at court, but had given in at last, after a year or more, may have been a mark in her favour as far as her “salvation” was concerned, but it made no difference now. The King had made a conquest of her, just as he had made of so many before her. The first excitement once past, Françoise’s deep-seated pride, her sense of herself as beyond such things, above such things, was wounded to the core. She could not pretend to be so special, after all. She had lowered herself, and become just one more pretty skittle in a common row, like every other sexually obliging woman at court.

  Humiliated, she watched as the King continued with the many amours he regarded as his due: young Anne Lucie de la Mothe; mature and lovely Lydie de Rochefort; the “divine nymph” Marie du Fresnoy, daughter of a laundress, elevated to the King’s bed via that of his minister Louvois; lively Olympe de Soissons, niece of the late Cardinal Mazarin; Anne de Soubise in a particular pair of emerald earrings, indicating her husband’s absence and her own availability; red-haired, blue-eyed Isabelle de Ludres. “I am sure, Madame, that those eyes have caused plenty of damage,” Louis said to her suavely, while Athénaïs spread the improbable rumour that Isabelle’s body was covered in scabs. “Not as much as I would wish, Sire,” Isabelle replied. She was soon satisfied. “He liked almost all women,” Françoise’s niece later wrote, “except his own wife.”

  As Françoise watched one mistress succeed the next, so the maîtresse déclarée watched as well. The casual affairs Athénaïs tolerated, and at times even encouraged, regarding them as kind of a safety valve for the King’s powerful appetites, and at the same time no real challenge to her own position. In due course Athénaïs was promoted to the position of surintendante of the Queen’s household, a deep humiliation for Marie-Thérèse, but a triumph for la belle Montespan herself. The troupes of virginal demoiselles d’honneur and sophisticated dames d’honneur, two traditional royal harems, were thenceforth to be chosen by her. She took care to fill them, as far as possible, with the least attractive blossoms of France’s noble family trees.

  But Françoise remained her chief rival. Unable to dismiss her, Athénaïs took to battling with pettier weapons. She began to argue again over the care of the children: the King took Athénaïs’s part, but gave Françoise a present of four hundred livres to have some new gowns made for herself. In February 1675, overhearing Athénaïs berating Françoise in public for her lowly birth and her marriage to the disfigured Scarron, the King responded in the time-honoured way of rewarding a favoured commoner: he raised her to the nobility, naming her marquise de Maintenon, after the pretty estate she had recently bought, leaving Athénaïs “berating Louis for pandering to her pride.”

  In a last-ditch attempt to distract the King from the new marquise de Maintenon, Athénaïs cast at his feet a pair of lovely but manipulable rosebuds: her own niece, Mademoiselle de Thianges, who was, however, too much of a huntress herself for Louis’s machismo temperament, and, more successfully, the marquise Marie-Angélique de Fontanges, just seventeen years old and perfectly suited to the purpose at hand, being “a sweet and simple girl,” according to Primi Visconti. “As beautiful as an angel, and as stupid as a basket,” was the assessment of the less indulgent abbé de Choisy, who ought to have known: a connoisseur of female beauty and intelligence, he had glided through many a drawing-room, and into many a lady’s boudoir, convincingly disguised as a woman himself.

  Madame de Sévigné would no doubt have agreed with his assessment of La Fontanges. She reports having watched the young marquise and her mentor dancing at a court ball. Despite her heavy figure, Athénaïs had danced well, but the lovely Marie-Angélique, “all dressed up by Madame de Montespan,” lacked rhythm, it seems, as well as mental powers. “She wanted to dance a minuet…but her legs wouldn’t do what you know they have to do; the courante went no better, and in the end all she could manage was a curtsy.” “Her astonishing beauty made the King get carried away without thinking, and almost in spite of himself,” said Choisy. “No amount of good qualities can make up for stupidity,” wrote the chevalier de Méré, shaking his head from the sidelines.

  Though Athénaïs was evidently more convinced of the King’s interest in Françoise than Françoise was herself, both seem to have been equally anxious about it. Humiliated that she had not replaced Athénaïs, after all, as first in the King’s affections, Françoise had retreated altogether from his bed, but if the maîtresse’s laurels were not to pass to her, she was still unwilling for Athénaïs to keep them. In consequence, taking a leaf out of Athénaïs’s own book, she decided to try to distract the King with a sexually appealing but otherwise less powerful rival, a pretty young girl who could tempt Louis away from Athénaïs’s embraces, but who lacked the maturity and discretion to replace Françoise herself in his esteem and confidence.

  At thirty-nine, a grandmotherly age at court, Françoise could not easily compete with an ever-replenishing flutter of freshly seduceable girls, but real friendship, real intimacy with the King, perhaps even real influence over him—these she could aim for. And if they brought with them physical love, so much the better, but not if she must share the King with half a dozen others. She had known littl
e enough of love, had so rarely dared seek it, had given herself to the King at last, and had been repaid with his infidelities—she wanted him to desire her, but more importantly, she wanted him to need her, to esteem her. Not least, in assuming the role of alternative supplier of casual mistresses to the King, Françoise would be striking a blow at Athénaïs’s ability to manipulate him.

  In the longer term, if she could not seduce the King, Françoise could persuade, or guide, perhaps even control him, while his basic sexual needs were attended to by some pretty demoiselle. Naturally, cleverness of any kind would be a disadvantage: a simple, sweet, manipulable girl would suit her purpose best.

  Athénaïs having already selected the ideally dim but luscious Marie-Angélique as her own pseudo-rival, Françoise fixed on nineteen-year-old Olympe de Piennes, lately arrived at court with two pretty little sisters and a stern old aunt. Olympe was exceedingly beautiful, and, unlike Marie-Angélique, an excellent dancer as well; indeed, during her performance in a carnival ballet, she had captured the hearts of half the King’s courtiers, including the dissolute old gourmand duc de la Ferté: “For her sake,” Primi Visconti relates, “the duc abandoned his gluttony and drinking, and from a big, fat, greasy man he became a skinny little well-behaved fellow, but he was wasting his time; he was married, and the girl was spoiled for choice where lovers were concerned.”