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

by Veronica Buckley

  The determined Françoise, “who had been paying her a lot of affectionate attention,” issued an invitation to Olympe, together with her aunt and sisters, to visit the apartments set aside for her use at Liselotte’s palace of Saint-Cloud, near the lovely Paris park of the Bois-de-Boulogne. They came, and found prepared for them a sumptuous repast, at which Olympe’s personal servant turned out to be—the King himself. While Françoise sequestered the aunt and sisters in polite conversation, Louis took Olympe away for a few private words of his own. She was subsequently observed driving to and fro between Paris and the court, though it was noted that she was always home by midnight.

  The King’s many dalliances were, naturally, prime matter for gossip at court, and they seem to have misled the ambitious Bossuet and his dévots into imagining a decline in Louis’s eight-year-long passion for Athénaïs. Towards Easter of 1675, they opened a new front in their campaign against his sinful way of life, flamboyantly typified in his too-public affair of double adultery with Madame de Montespan. A ferocious sermon, delivered by the court’s second orator extraordinaire, the Jesuit Louis Bourdaloue, condemned Athénaïs outright as a “stumbling block” on the King’s path to salvation.

  But it was Bossuet’s stern private lecture, threatening hellfire or the loss of France to the Huguenots or, worst of all, perhaps, a slipping in his subjects’ esteem, that brought Louis at last to his repentant knees. “Madame de Montespan had had a dream that all her hair had fallen out,” wrote Primi Visconti. “Her maid came to tell me.” And a few days afterwards, to enormous scandal, a humble local priest refused la belle Montespan herself the Easter absolution and Communion required of all its adherents by the Roman Catholic Church. Bossuet advised that she be sent away from court, and shortly after Easter she retreated to, of all places, Françoise’s new château of Maintenon.

  Françoise went with her. “Madame de Montespan and I were always the best friends in the world,” she later told her niece. “She used to speak to me quite openly and tell me whatever she was thinking. We never expected our friendship to end because, although we certainly had some fairly lively quarrels, that didn’t change our feeling for each other.” At this point, their “feeling for each other” probably included a good measure of mutual consolation; both had retreated rather bruised from their various battles with the inconstant King. Athénaïs did not know that he and Françoise had become lovers, but she was keenly aware of the possibility of it. In fact, it seems that by this time Françoise had drawn back from the King, not through any pious remorse, but rather through remorse at her own foolishness in joining the already too-large ranks of royal mistresses.

  For the recent attacks of the dévot battalion she had shown no sympathy, as her confessor Père Gobelin had noticed. In annoyed tones, she had dissuaded him from visiting her at court, though he was anxious to do so. “No, it wasn’t me who asked you to come here,” she wrote. “Of course I can’t stop you, and naturally I’m more concerned for your convenience than my own pleasure…but you know I’m not mistress of my own time here…As to the devotions you’ve suggested for Lent, I’d like to follow them, but really, I can’t possibly, I haven’t a moment to spare in the morning, and it’s all I can do to get to mass every day. As for what you say about my dress, it’s not as easy as that; I’m not wearing anything colourful as it is, and if you want me to wear less gold on my gowns, I’ll have to have new ones made especially…Père Mascaron preached against the King today; it was quite out of place, exceeding the bounds of good taste…”

  The dévots’ victory was in any case brief. In the weeks following Athénaïs’s separation from the King, Bossuet paid several visits to each of them, determined to keep them on the straight and narrow road which he had laid down for their salvation. But a bare month after Easter, the primrose path was already beckoning. In July, the King returned from Flanders, and Bossuet agreed that Athénaïs might return to court, “provided she was accompanied at all times by three or four prudes”—women of unimpeachable respectability. “From now on,” wrote Madame de Sévigné in early July, “her friends will be advising her to do just what Bossuet says.” But by the middle of the month, Bossuet’s directions were passing completely unheeded. At a reception hosted by Queen Marie-Thérèse and chaperoned by a roomful of dévots, the separated lovers met for the first time in more than two months. They greeted each other, shed tears, exchanged a few words in lowered tones, bowed to the guests, and retired to the nearest bedroom.

  Françoise was not present to witness this startling victory of passion over piety. She had left the court at the end of April, not to escape her “disagreeable situation,” but pursuant to a victory of her own, in the matter of little Mignon’s crippled leg: despite his mother’s wishes, he had not returned to the “prison rack” at Antwerp, but instead had set off with his governess to the healing waters of the Pyrenees spa town of Barèges, far to the south near the Spanish border. It was a rough coach journey of almost two months—“It took less time to get to America”—and Barèges itself proved “a place more frightful than I can tell you; and what’s more, even in July it’s freezing.” But despite frequent migraines and “dreadful company,” Françoise felt well during her six-week sojourn in Barèges, “since I have less trouble and aggravation here than elsewhere,” as she told her brother Charles.

  “Elsewhere,” at Saint-Germain, the trouble and aggravation had not passed unnoticed. “My dear, here’s a turn of the cards that will surprise you,” a riveted Madame de Sévigné relayed to her daughter the following month. “The bosom friendship between Madame de Montespan and her travelling friend [is] an absolute aversion…It’s all bitterness, it’s dislike, it’s white, it’s black…There’s been a rumbling underground for six months or more, and now it’s starting to come to the surface. The friend’s friends are all very upset about it…”

  Françoise, no doubt also “very upset about it,” had in any case managed a temporary escape. “It seems a thousand years since I heard anything from the court or from Paris,” she wrote to Père Gobelin only a week after her departure, “and I assure you I haven’t been bored for a moment. Monsieur le duc du Maine is the most delightful companion. He needs constant care, but I’m so fond of him that it’s a pleasure for me to give it.” At Barèges, Françoise took daily spa-water baths in her room, and “our prince,” now five years old, was also bathed and massaged every day, with the joyful result that “he’s walking, not very vigorously yet, but it seems that eventually he’ll walk normally. You can’t know how tenderly I feel towards this child, but you know enough to guess how tremendously happy I am about this.”

  En route back to court from Barèges, she spent a happy fortnight in her native Niort, staying at the Ursuline convent with Sister Céleste, kind-hearted rescuer of her early days there, and at the château of Mursay with her cousin Philippe and his wife Marie-Anne. Françoise greatly enjoyed the company of Philippe and Marie-Anne, whom she had not seen since her visit to Mursay in the summer of 1668, seven years before. Their two boys, Philippe and Henri-Benjamin, had grown beyond recognition; they were now aged eleven and seven respectively, and their little sister, Marthe-Marguerite, was almost three years old. Françoise was delighted with the three children, particularly the girl—“my little angel”—and determined to do whatever she could to advance their prospects as they grew older. Philippe and Marie-Anne were naturally pleased, and showed their well-placed cousin “every sort of consideration and friendship.” Young Philippe, too, not far off his naval apprenticeship, was already old enough to appreciate the possibility of influence at court; within the next few weeks he wrote several letters to Françoise, enclosing information about himself to be passed on to the marquis de Louvois, Minister of War.

  In October 1675, Françoise arrived back at Saint-Germain. Hand in hand with the little duc du Maine, limping along beside her, she made a triumphal entry into the King’s apartments. “People bring up children too delicately here,” huffed a jealous Lisel
otte. “If I were master, they’d all be sent to my aunt in Osnabrück.”

  Athénaïs, though no doubt relieved to see her five-year-old son walking at last, was also less pleased with the praise accruing to the new marquise de Maintenon because of it. Françoise’s six-month absence had allowed Athénaïs’s relations with the King to settle back into much their old pattern, with herself the undisputed queen of Louis’s affections and, as La Sévigné noted, “calmly taking precedence of all the duchesses.” But beneath the happy surface, things were no longer the same as they had once been. Though still sexually enamoured of Athénaïs, Louis was growing tired of her constant tantrums and demands, her wild extravagance—in a single evening she had lost, then rewon, four million pistoles (forty million livres) at cards—and her jokes, in company, at the Queen’s expense: “Remember, Madame, she is your mistress,” he had at one point to remind her.

  “The King’s attachment for her is still extreme,” wrote Madame de Sévigné later that summer. “It’s certainly enough to annoy le curé [Bossuet] and everyone else, but perhaps it’s not enough for her. There’s a sadness behind her outward triumph.” If Louis was still attached to Athénaïs, his heart was certainly not hers alone. “They’re all good enough for him,” noted Liselotte, “provided they’re women: peasants, gardeners’ daughters, chambermaids, ladies of quality, as long as they can pretend to be in love with him.” Athénaïs still had confidence enough to sit down to cards with Marie-Thérèse, draped in nothing more than a dressing gown, with the poor Queen herself “only too happy to be invited at all, and often enough sent on her way with the sort of wink you’d give to dismiss a servant.” But, beyond any doubt, her star was waning at last. “They say she’s happy,” began Madame de Sévigné, “but one is speaking of Madame de Maintenon now as his first or second friend.”

  For two further years, the Queen wept and prayed and gambled at hombre, all to no avail, while Françoise became lethargic, fell ill with migraine, bewailed her “situation” to Père Gobelin, and sought periodic sanctuary at Maintenon. During a second visit to the southern spas in 1677, she even stooped to using seven-year-old Mignon to further her cause: a long series of charming letters to the court, penned by the little boy but clearly dictated by herself, kept the King’s attention on her throughout the four months of her absence. As for Athénaïs, she began to overeat seriously and even, it seems, to drink. These indulgences had the effect which eight pregnancies had been unable to achieve: already struggling with a strong family tendency to embonpoint, she was soon of a very generous circumference. The courtier Primi Visconti, seeing her struggling out of her carriage in her long skirts, caught sight of one of her legs, “and it was almost as fat as my own torso,” he declared, adding gallantly, “though it’s true I have lost quite a bit of weight recently.”

  In April 1677, Athénaïs had borne a sixth child to the King, a daughter who was named Françoise-Marie, and soon created Mademoiselle de Blois. The little girl was born at Maintenon, where Françoise and Athénaïs had retreated together while the King was away with his armies in the Netherlands. “I’ve had Monsieur le duc du Maine [Mignon] and Madame de Montespan here for six weeks,” Françoise had written to her cousin at the beginning of the month, “so you can imagine I have plenty to do.” The three had remained at Maintenon until the middle of May, a sojourn of some three months, which suggests that the friendship between the two women remained strong, despite their “lively quarrels” and the court gossip relayed by Madame de Sévigné. The new baby’s name was perhaps an indication of the friendship—Athénaïs’s four previous known children by the King had all been named either Louis or Louise—but it may equally have been a rather tactless indication of the King’s own continuing interest in Françoise: their previous daughter, born during the days of Louis’s secret visits to the Paris house, had been named Louise-Françoise. In August 1678, separated, reconciled, separated, and reconciled again, Athénaïs gave birth to the last of her children with the King—not at Maintenon, however, but in her own château of Clagny, near Versailles. The newborn comte de Toulouse was named Louis-Alexandre, so completing, with his brothers Louis-Auguste and Louis-César, Athénaïs’s trio of little heroes.

  One love story of these years, at least, had ended more or less happily, albeit in the “state that makes three-quarters of the human race miserable.” Early in 1678, at the age of forty-four, Françoise’s brother Charles had finally married. His sister had been correct in regarding his governorship of the town of Amersfoort as a temporary establishment. Following further efforts on her part, albeit not noticeably on his own, he was now governor of an entire region, that of Cognac, in southern France.

  Charles, so like his father in so many ways, had mimicked him in marriage as well, taking a bride almost young enough to be his granddaughter. The new Madame d’Aubigné was Geneviève Piètre, only daughter of a provincial counsellor, and just fifteen years old. Charles had said nothing at all to his sister about the marriage until it was a fait accompli. Françoise had pretended not to care, but in fact she was deeply offended, having been for a year or more in the process of arranging a marriage for Charles herself, in fact no fewer than five times. Charles had apparently been happy to leave things in her hands, specifying only the (large) size of dowry he expected, but in the end he had made his own impulsive match.

  Geneviève was neither rich nor pregnant, and Françoise was baffled by the step Charles had taken. “I hope you didn’t get married just for the sake of getting married,” she wrote to him a few days after the event, with her new sister-in-law en visite at Saint-Germain, “and I hope you’ll try to make a reasonable person of your wife.” First impressions had not been good. “She seems very spoiled to me,” Françoise continued snappily. “The middling classes always bring up their children worse than anyone else.”

  Her letter, hectoring and disappointed, reveals as much about herself as about the unpolished fifteen-year-old Geneviève. There is good sense in it, and much affection, but also anxiety about social standards, and above all an assumption of authority which must at times have rankled with Charles, the more so, perhaps, since he had been relying for years on his younger sister for his very daily bread. For whatever reason, Françoise evidently regarded herself as entitled to advise, if not dictate to Charles how he and his wife should set about their married life, “and if you don’t take my advice,” she warned, “you’ll be sorry one day, because she won’t be fit for decent company.”

  Don’t let her get up late—she’s a slug; she’s been having breakfast at eleven…Don’t let her go out alone, don’t let her mix with low types, and don’t let her play the grande dame, either, or you’ll both end up looking ridiculous…She spends two or three hours a day in front of the mirror, painting her face, but that’s just her age…She’s modest and pious—that you should encourage…Her manners are atrocious, and she speaks like a fishwife, but that’s the least of our problems; she’ll soon learn to speak proper French…

  It is revealing of the earthy nature of this brother-sister relationship that Françoise also felt free to give Charles advice about his sex life:

  If you want to be happy, try not to get tired of your wife. Don’t behave crudely in front of her, and don’t let her behave crudely in front of you. I advise you not to sleep together all the time—you have two nice bedrooms which will suit you both perfectly. Don’t take any notice of what anyone says about it; nothing matters except your own happiness. Don’t let her get dressed or undressed when there are men present, and don’t get undressed in front of her yourself, if your valets are in the room…Don’t ever talk about your wife in public…

  And she added:

  You’ll find it strange that a woman who’s never been married herself should be giving you so much advice about marriage, but honestly, with everything I’ve seen—people make each other miserable, and it’s through the tiniest things, but when these things happen day after day, in the end they really loathe each other. I do so
want to see you happy. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to help you.

  It is curious that Françoise describes herself here as “a woman who’s never been married,” despite her eight years of admittedly unusual marriage to Scarron. This is probably a reference to the absence of sex between them, though in the rest of the letter she seems to be speaking of something that she has experienced for herself as well as observed in many other marriages: the need for a certain reserve, a kind of self-containment in daily life, not less than the politeness shown to others known less intimately. “Try not to get tired of your wife. Don’t behave crudely in front of her…” If you want to be happy, she is telling her brother, you and your wife must respect each other.

  Whether Charles ignored his sister’s advice, or whether it was simply no good, he did not manage to avoid “getting tired” of young Geneviève. Five years later Françoise was transferring money to “that poor creature Garé,” one of his several mistresses.

  In London, in the same year of 1677, another couple had entered the marital state, and though no one had expected it, least of all themselves, it was to make this particular couple quite happy. In November, the Catholic-leaning English King Charles II had married off his niece, Princess Mary, to the daring young Dutchman Prince Willem of Orange. Like Geneviève Piètre, Mary was just fifteen years old, though unlike Charles d’Aubigné, Calvinist Willem was still a youthful twenty-seven. The marriage sealed an alliance between England and the United Provinces, a perilous alliance for the Catholic French, which would eventually lead England to the dual reign of William and Mary and a firmly Protestant crown at last.