But in fact there was nothing that could keep him for long away from Versailles. Beyond the thrill of the chase, beyond the pleasures of his many mistresses, building was Louis’s passion, and if his planning was erratic, his ambition overall never wavered. He was determined to make of his Versailles the best, the most beautiful, the most impressive edifice in France, indeed in Europe. There was solid competition: from his cousin, the prince de Condé, a wealthy and enthusiastic embellisher of his already graceful château of Chantilly, just north of Paris; from his brother, Monsieur, duc d’Orléans, with his famous garden fountains at Saint-Cloud (a marvel in France, Bernini had conceded, though barely acceptable in a proper Italian garden); and even from the ghost of his deposed minister Fouquet, dead in his cell in the fortress of Pignerol, still haunting Louis’s imagination through his magnificent château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, designed for Fouquet by Le Vau, Hardouin-Mansart, Le Brun, Le Nôtre—in short, everyone subsequently captured by Louis himself for Versailles. Not least, in his vast new residence Louis was at last overtaking his own uncle and father-in-law, the “Planet King” Felipe IV of Spain, with his country château of Buen Retiro and the Segovia palace of Alcázar. Louis had never seen either of these acknowledged splendours of contemporary royal architecture, but descriptions of them by his ambassadors, and perhaps even by Felipe’s timid daughter, Queen Marie-Thérèse herself, had roused his jealousy: in the Alcázar especially, the glittering Sala de Espejos, with its Rubens ceiling, had been a definite spur to Louis’s own Galerie des Glaces thirty years later, with its ceiling by Charles Le Brun.
“The King admits himself that there are faults in the architecture of Versailles,” wrote Liselotte. “To save the old château, he’s had to add new buildings all around it, covering it with a cloak, as it were, and that’s ruined everything…” Without any beauty of her own, Liselotte had revealed, all the same, that she was not devoid of aesthetic sensibilities. The little hunting lodge, now spreading out unendingly on its swampy ground, was turning into a vast architectural jumble, with one designer after another struggling to maintain the old and construct the new under the eye of the demanding and interfering King. Yet, in the same chaotic metamorphosis, Louis’s Versailles was on the way to becoming the premier palace of Europe, and his court the arbiter of taste and splendour for the whole continent.
By the time of the formal move there in the spring of 1682, the “putrid” canal at least had been completed, with the impatient King insisting on using it even while the last work went on. Small ships and launches had been transported to it from the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles, and for pleasure trips à l’italienne there were two gondolas, carted (with their four gondoliers) across the Alps from Venice. Most remarkably, the Grand Canal was also serving as a harbour for miniature versions (maximum draught just over a yard deep) of all the new ships of the Marine which Colbert was gradually building up into a force fit to challenge the mighty Dutch navy. In this way, the King was to be kept abreast of developments of the fleet into which he, or his minister, was pouring so much money. For a time, it seemed that the canal might even be linked to one of France’s great rivers, so making it part of the country’s internal navigational network. But in the end, it remained above all a place for pleasure—including ice-skating on the frozen winter water—and for courtly display.
The King preferred its summer delights, gliding up and down the canal in his own splendid galère, painted in his royal colours of blue and gold, with red damask sofas inside to recline upon and forty-two red-faced rowers outside to power it. At six every evening—the King was a punctual man—he would set off in the galère with Françoise and Athénaïs both, while Marie-Thérèse, attended by assorted princesses, followed sadly behind in a lesser bark. Maîtresse secrète and maîtresse déclarée were courtiers enough to maintain appearances during these excursions. “Let’s not make fools of ourselves,” Athénaïs had said to Françoise. “We can keep up a front of perfect agreement. That won’t oblige us to like each other any more than we do. We can take up the cudgels again when we get back.” “They weren’t visiting each other’s apartments any more,” Françoise’s niece reported, “but wherever they met, they greeted each other and conversed so cordially and so animatedly that anyone who saw them without being in the picture would have thought them”—as Françoise had once described them—“the best friends in the world.” “Madame de Montespan and I went for a stroll together today, arm-in-arm, both laughing a great deal,” Françoise wrote to the marquis de Montchevreuil. “We’re not on any better terms, for all that.”
Athénaïs’s final defeat began with a death, the sudden and quite unexpected death of Queen Marie-Thérèse. At the age of forty-five, she had appeared to be in good health, and in fact, like Françoise three years before, had just completed a five-week tour with the King, inspecting Vauban’s impressive military fortifications in France’s eastern provinces. Louis, rarely sympathetic to those who could not enjoy the rugged, pounding travel of an unsprung coach for hours on end, had noticed for once that the journey had been tiring for the Queen. Within a week of returning to Versailles, she had come down with fever, and four days later, as Liselotte relayed to her aunt, “in the afternoon at three o’clock, she died, and all through the ignorance of the doctors, who’ve killed her as surely as if they’d plunged a dagger through her heart. She had a boil under her arm, and they pushed it through her veins back into her body. And in the end, last Friday, they gave her something to make her vomit, and the boil burst internally.”
The doctors themselves recorded that the Queen had died of “a cruel and malignant fever,” and prescribed a week of “morning drops in a few spoonfuls of wine and half an ounce of thériacquedans [an opium extract], also in a bit of wine,” to prevent the King from succumbing, too, after which ministrations, apart from a stomachache and a bitter taste in the mouth, both treated with more wine, he remained “in perfect health.” An autopsy performed on the Queen’s body revealed that “all her lungs” were gangrenous. In Paris, the Mercure Galant news-sheet reported Louis’s own rather pathetic epitaph on his unremarkable wife: “In the twenty-three years during which I lived with the Queen, she gave me not a single anxiety, nor did she once oppose my will.”
Marie-Thérèse, long-suffering in life, had at least not suffered long in death. “She died quite quickly and easily,” as Liselotte reported, inspiring more attention and more praise in a single week than she had done in the previous forty-five years. In Paris, chansonniers wandered the streets singing sentimental songs about her, to which the cultured police commissioner La Reynie, looking up from his Aristotle, listened with indulgent condescension: “Let them,” he said. “The people must have something. They seem really touched by the loss of the Queen. Of course the words are ridiculous, but the people like them; they express their kind of feelings.” At court, the response to the news was as Marie-Thérèse herself, slow as she had been in most respects, would surely have foreseen: “With too little intelligence and too much devotion,” noted the diplomat Spanheim, “she could only have made the court less gay and less lively…”
On hearing the news, a shocked Françoise had turned at once to retire to her own apartments, but the duc de la Rochefoucauld, taking her “quite violently” by the arm, had “pushed” her instead to Louis. “This is no time to leave the King,” he told her. “He needs you.” The duc’s loyalty to his sovereign evidently outweighed his personal feelings, as suggested, perhaps, by the violence of his gestures, since, as Françoise’s secretary was to record, “he didn’t like her at all.” She remained no more than a few moments with the King before being escorted out by the war minister Louvois. He took advantage of the opportunity to express his own dislike of her, instructing her to go to the dauphine, who was pregnant and who had just been bled, and tell her not to go to the King, but to stay in bed instead. “The King doesn’t need your demonstrations of friendship,” said Louvois nastily, “and the state needs a prince.”
&nb
sp; Forbidden by tradition to remain under the same roof as his deceased spouse, the King set off the same day for his brother’s château of Saint-Cloud, and Françoise set off for Fontainebleau, where Louis encountered her four days later, he with his mourning already behind him, and she so greatly afflicted, to all appearances, that he could not resist teasing her about it. “And I can’t promise that she didn’t respond like the maréchal de Gramont,” wrote her niece, the maréchal having famously concluded, observing the lukewarm grief of a newly bereaved countess, “Oh well, if you’re not upset I don’t see why I should be.”
“Madame de Montespan wept a lot,” continued Françoise’s niece. “Perhaps she was afraid she’d be sent back to her husband…I saw Madame de Maintenon from close at hand, and her tears seemed to me sincere.” But although she may have shed some tears sincerely for the otherwise unregretted Queen, most of Françoise’s tears were in fact for herself. In recent months, it was true, Marie-Thérèse had been singing her praises, grateful for the increased attention from her husband which Françoise had prompted. But the prompting had been for reasons of Françoise’s own: since Athénaïs’s fall from grace, Marie-Thérèse had been a vital part of her personal rationale for remaining at court, her real work not the superintendence of the dauphine’s wardrobe, but the superintendence, as it were, of the King’s salvation. Louis was to be kept from sinful sexual liaisons (her own excepted), and sent back to the bed of his legal wife.
This noble work was now bound to be compromised. The King would surely press Françoise to be more obliging than she had lately been, or he might return to Athénaïs, or take a new mistress, or even a new wife, and what would become of her influence then? “You’re quite right to think that the Queen’s death has distressed me,” she wrote to Charles a few weeks after the event. “No one has more reasons to be so, and I’m aware of them all, and very forcibly.”
Liselotte felt she had reason of her own to miss the Queen. “In all my troubles she always showed me the greatest friendship in the world,” she wrote two days after Marie-Thérèse’s death. But in later years, she recalled having to exaggerate her feelings, just as Françoise may have done. “We were all very concerned, very worried,” she wrote, “because we were going to be travelling in the same carriage as the King, to Fontainebleau, and we all thought he’d be downcast and impatient and in a bad mood, and that if we didn’t look sufficiently grief-stricken, he’d be telling us off. We were agreeably surprised to find him so lighthearted. It put us all in a good mood.”
As Françoise’s niece observed, the King was in fact “more touched than afflicted” by the Queen’s death. Of all the women he had ever known, as he himself remarked, she was the only one he had never loved. Liselotte felt that he had been “very moved to see her die,” but added spitefully, “Madame de Maintenon found a way of consoling him, though, and within four days.”
Liselotte was not far from the truth. The Queen had died on Friday, July 30. On Monday, the King met with Françoise at Fontainebleau, and by the following Saturday, she was already writing to her importunate brother, “No, you can’t come and see me, and if you knew the reason why, you’d be overjoyed, it’s so advantageous and so marvellous.” If the King had found consolation already, as Liselotte saw through eyes more green with jealousy than red with any weeping of her own, Françoise had evidently found it, too. Her letter expresses her extraordinarily good spirits and a high confidence for the future. Charles had been complaining about his wife’s failure to produce a child. His sister dismissed this out of hand. “You’ve got the vapours, that’s why you’re looking at things so bleakly,” she wrote airily. “The misfortune of having no children is common enough in the world, and I think you’re too sensible to be worried about your name dying out…You’re old [Charles was forty-nine], you have no children, you’re not in the best of health. What you need now is rest and ease and piety. All these things are already at your disposal, and I’ll contribute with pleasure. If you want to buy an estate, I know of a good one. If you prefer to eat up all your money at Cognac, don’t hold yourself back. You have more than 30,000 francs a year for the next six years. After that, if I’m still alive, we’ll have something else, and if I’m not, you’ll have Maintenon.”
“We’ll have something else.” What Louis had said to her, what “advantageous and marvellous” thing, can only be assumed, but it is likely that during these days at Fontainebleau, less than a week after the death of his wife, he had informed Françoise of his intention to marry her. A few days after her letter to Charles, Françoise wrote to Marie de Brinon, a former Ursuline nun whom she had met some time before through the Montchevreuil family, and who had become an increasingly close friend. Madame de Brinon was now superintendent of a school for poor girls in which Françoise had been taking some interest, providing money and clothes, and also a number of the girls themselves, bereft of means or prospects, who had come to her notice in the parish of Maintenon or who had been recommended to her protection through people at court. Françoise thought highly of Madame de Brinon and trusted her discretion, though not absolutely, it seems. She admitted that she had been unable to sleep, and hinted at some great change afoot for the King—“I ask your prayers for the King. He has more need of grace than ever, to endure a state contrary to his inclinations and habits”—but insisted at the same time, in reply to a now lost enquiry on Madame de Brinon’s part, “There’s nothing at all to say about the matter of Louis and Françoise. That’s just foolishness. Though I’d like to know why the lady wouldn’t be willing. I would never have thought she’d be the one to rule it out.”
It was a cautious letter, disingenuous even, and perhaps a touch embarrassed—hence the reference to “the lady,” deflecting her own feelings somewhat—but Françoise need not have worried. Before she had even sent it from her modest rooms at Fontainebleau, the King had insisted she be reaccommodated in the late Queen’s own apartments there.
On the first day of September 1683, a full month after Marie-Thérèse’s death, Bossuet delivered a grand and lengthy eulogy for her at the Paris cathedral of Saint-Denis, final resting-place of the royal bodies of France. There being only too little to say about the Queen herself, Bossuet was reduced to reciting her family history and the circumstances surrounding her path to “the most illustrious kingdom that ever existed under the sun, and the most glorious throne in the universe,” praising the “happy simplicity” of her temperament and, in the absence of any other beauty, the “striking whiteness of her skin, symbol of the innocence and candour of her soul,” and fibbing that France’s people had attributed all the King’s military victories to the power of their late Queen’s prayers.
Even in full flight, Bossuet was unable to change the minds of his flock of courtiers about the unachieving Marie-Thérèse. His effort was pronounced a fine eulogy all the same, and the dauphin, if no one else, appeared to be genuinely moved. Twenty-two-year-old Louis, pudgy and slow, was Marie-Thérèse’s only surviving child, “because, according to one of the physicians here, the King never gave the Queen more than the dregs of his glass. And it’s true: one often notices that debauched men have very few children,” noted Liselotte, overlooking Louis’s nine recognized illegitimate offspring, and various other little rumours besides.
Louis recorded no comment on the side-swipe that Bossuet had taken at him towards the end of the eulogy: “All salvation comes from this life, and we know not when our hour will come. I come like a thief in the night, says Jesus Christ. And He has been as good as His word. He came, surprising the Queen at a time when we thought her in perfect health, and at her very happiest…Misled by our pleasures, our amusements, our health…our flatterers…and by our false penitence followed by no change at all in our behaviour”—Athénaïs was still, to all appearances, in her accustomed place—“we shall arrive all at once at the end of our days…Like a thief in the night, the Lord has said—an ungracious comparison, you may say, but what does that matter, provided it gives us al
l a good fright now, a good fright which will lead us to salvation. Tremble, fellow Christians! Tremble every moment, in the sight of the Lord!…The scythe that has cut off the Queen’s days is raised above our own heads…”
And as if to confirm the threat, the very next day, out chasing deer in the forest of Fontainebleau, proudly dressed in his favourite blue and red hunting costume, the King took a bad fall from his horse. “Kings aren’t centaurs,” he is said to have remarked, but a letter about it from Françoise to her brother indicates the gravity of the accident. “We’ve hardly got over the loss of the Queen and here we’ve been, fearing for the King’s life. We thought he’d broken his arm, but it’s only half broken, and he’s doing so well that, thank God, it seems we needn’t fear anything further. This accident has opened his eyes…”
The fall had not in fact “half broken” the King’s arm, but rather, as his physicians recorded, had “completely dislocated the left elbow.” The elbow was set by a Doctor Félix—regarded, extraordinarily for a physician of the day, as an exceptionally capable man—and the lump rubbed with a warming ointment of rose oil, egg yolk, vinegar, and plantain water, then wrapped morning and evening with a hot poultice of strong wine, absinthe, and myrrh. Louis’s forearm, bruised and swollen, was massaged with “a pomade of ox hooves, washed several times to get rid of some of the smell, and afterwards with another pomade made of orange blossom.” The anticipated further treatment, “according to the correct method,” was a bleeding, “but His Majesty was so cruelly distressed by this that we could not manage it, and we decided instead that a complete abstinence from meat for four or five days, and an almost complete abstinence from wine, would achieve the same result, and it seems to us that it has done so.” The royal elbow was subsequently encased in a plaster of wax and resin, and thus the King gradually recovered, spared the infection and gangrene that were the too frequent accompaniments of an injured limb.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 31
