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

by Veronica Buckley

  He was not, however, spared the sight of the grim death, just four days after the accident, of his extraordinary first minister Colbert, at the age of sixty-four. From his doubtful beginnings as manipulating nemesis of the minister Fouquet, Colbert had ended, after twenty years of herculean work, Comptroller-General of Finances, Secretary of State for the Navy, “a very fine capture since the navy included warships and galleys, ports and arsenals, coastal fortifications, control over the sea-going navy as well as the interior waterways…plus the colonies and foreign trade…And he was also surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi, another key sector: all the royal demesnes and control as well over all kinds of urban development and land management. And then he bacame surintendant of the King’s household,” not to mention that “waterways and forests, the mint, bridges and highways, tax collection, provincial administration, all landed in Colbert’s pockets.” Thus history’s reckoning of the man who had, in effect, created the various glories of Louis’s reign to date. It was not enough, all the same, to prevent Colbert’s dying in atrocious suffering, from stones obstructing his kidneys. And if the King had admired his apparent successes, the cost of them had been decidedly unappreciated in the country at large—to such an extent, in fact, that Colbert’s body was buried at night, in secret, for fear of rioting by the ungrateful taxpayers of Paris.

  “We shall arrive all at once at the end of our days…I come like a thief in the night, says Jesus Christ.” If Bossuet needed support for his ministry of fear, he had it now in the sudden deaths of the Queen and of Colbert, and in the King’s own alarming accident. But Louis, for one, had already been persuaded. To begin with, he had indeed had a fright: the death of Marie-Thérèse, the very same age as himself, had startled him into a realization of his own mortality. And helpfully, the sins of debauchery had become less interesting of late: the lovely Athénaïs was, by general admission, less lovely than she had been, and beautiful, basket-silly Angélique was dead—at the age of twenty, if further weight were needed for Bossuet’s already heavy argument.

  “But the King couldn’t do without women,” as the abbé de Choisy observed, and as Louis himself well understood. “Better to marry than to burn,” as the apostle Paul had insisted, and as the King no doubt believed. Not that marrying Françoise was any sort of last recourse for him, if the diplomat Spanheim is to be believed. Observing the two firsthand, he writes of “the attachment to her that the King displays openly…the visits he makes to her, the long conversations he has with her…And she is a most intelligent, sweet, amiable woman…” Only reasons of state, it seemed, and “the King’s excessive passion for glory” prevented Françoise, “with no land and no fortune…formerly living on charity,” from becoming his wife and Queen.

  It is true that, concerned to avoid the possibility of civil strife in the future, Louis did not want to raise up a second royal family, but, as the abbé Choisy pointed out, at almost forty-eight, Françoise was in any case “beyond the age of having children.” It might have been useful for Louis to remain officially available for a second strategic marriage with some European princess—for a time, French courtiers talked of the Portuguese infanta—but a feint of this kind could not have been maintained indefinitely. There was in fact no reason of state why a marriage with Françoise could not have been openly acknowledged, and she herself crowned Queen. It would even have served to declare a great spiritual victory, the triumph of virtue over worldly considerations of kingdom or caste. But Louis’s new-found interest in saving his soul had not progressed so far. For “the greatest of all men,” the public humbling of his princely self, even for eternal advantage, was simply impossible.

  Louis had trouble enough announcing his intention of even a secret, morganatic marriage with Madame de Maintenon. The horrified reaction of his war minister, Louvois, admittedly one of Athénaïs’s circle and certainly no friend to Françoise, gave a good indication nonetheless of what he might expect from almost everyone else at court, and everyone else at every other court, besides. The King had approached Louvois in confidence, “as if the thing hadn’t yet been quite decided, and asked his opinion of it. Oh Sire! Louvois had gasped, Has Your Majesty really considered this? The greatest king in the world, covered in glory, to marry the Widow Scarron? Do you want to bring dishonour on yourself? And he threw himself at the King’s feet and burst into tears. Sire, pardon the liberty I take. Relieve me of all my posts, throw me into prison, but I will never look upon such an indignity. And the King said to him: Get up! Are you mad? Have you lost your mind?…And the next day Louvois could see from Madame de Maintenon’s cool and awkward manner to him that the King had had the weakness to tell her everything. And from that point onwards she was his deadliest enemy.”

  Louvois was present, all the same, at the nuptial mass, which was conducted at midnight, as was customary in order to avoid a long fast before Communion, and in almost total secrecy, which was not customary at all. “It was rumoured that the King had secretly married her…At first it was dismissed as nonsense…but then…most people came to believe it, imputing it to the King’s piety, a penitence for his sinful liaisons…” The ceremony took place, it seems, during the night of October 9–10, 1683, in a chapel at Versailles, and was conducted by François de Harlay de Champvallon, the sixty-year-old Archbishop of Paris, himself in well-known need of salvation from the many women who had been keeping him for years from closer attendance to his priestly duties. Apart from the grudging Louvois, the only other certain witnesses were the King’s Jesuit confessor, Père François de la Chaise, and his faithful valet, Bontemps, “the best valet ever,” in the abbé de Choisy’s view, “rough on the outside, but refined on the inside.” “He had the King’s entire confidence in every intimate or personal matter,” said the duc de Saint-Simon. Though the dauphin was not present, he had been informed of the wedding, as had the marquis and marquise de Montchevreuil, Françoise’s friends from the long-ago days of her affair with Villarceaux, and her trusted maid, Nanon Balbien, “as capable as anyone else of keeping a secret, and with sentiments far above her station in life.”

  But at the momentous hour of the ceremony itself, it was only from Bontemps that Françoise can have received much moral support. Louvois’s antagonism had long been apparent, and the two priests, as she knew, regarded the marriage as a matter of the King’s religious duty, and no more. True, or nearly true as this might have been, it was humiliating for her to be reminded of it in the presence of the stern confessor and the hypocritical archbishop. In all their talk about salvation, they might have acknowledged some love for her, as there surely was, on the King’s part, and some respect for her, as she felt there ought to have been, on their own. Bontemps at least behaved towards her with respect, extremely so, in fact, and on his own initiative, with the King’s acquiescence, he began to address her from now on as “Your Majesty”—though only when in private.

  It had indeed been weak of Louis to relay Louvois’s insults to Françoise, as if they shed new light on a matter still under discussion, or were something they could laugh about together, or if she needed reminding of the discrepancy between her position and his. But he had told her the story, very probably, not for her sake, but rather for his own. If he was vastly her superior in terms of rank, in human terms, in intellect and character, it was she who was the stronger. This he knew, and it made him uneasy. Egocentric and vain, shrewd enough to see his own shortcomings, Louis had not the humility to turn them to spiritual or personal advantage. There was room for a little modesty, but only in things that he did not care about: the courtiers might laugh at his anonymous bad poetry, and he would laugh to see them, and the natural order, as he understood it, would remain undisturbed. But in his own house, as within his own kingdom, he must be master, and his wife, of all people, must acknowledge that. A reminder now and then of how the world perceived them would maintain a useful dent in her pride, and add a little prop to his own.

  And there would be no public acknowledgement of their m
arriage. It would remain a secret, morganatic, dynastically ineffectual—as if it could have been otherwise, given Françoise’s age—and giving to her no powers, no income, no patronage, no new standing at court, nothing, in fact, but the same clear conscience gained by Louis with the regularization at last of their mortally sinful liaison.

  Françoise was, in any case, in no position to have asked for more, nor indeed to have rejected the King, if she had wished to do so. “I preferred to marry him than enter the convent,” she had said of her marriage to Scarron thirty years before, and this would have been a likely alternative now, if, having known him for eleven years, having been his mistress, off and on, for nine, she had declined to marry Louis. And after all, as she had written to Madame de Brinon, why would the lady not have been willing? No greater worldly honour was ever likely to be bestowed upon her. “When I think of all your gifts,” the chevalier de Méré had written to her when she was just a girl of fourteen or fifteen, “it seems to me that the greatest princes…could never be happy without you…Alexander and Caesar would have preferred you to all their conquests.” Now she was a woman in middle age—old, in fact, by her own reckoning—and she knew something of the world and its Alexanders and Caesars. She had met and talked and lived with le Grand Condé and la Grande Mademoiselle and Louis le Grand, and she knew that even “the greatest princes” concealed weakness beneath their fighting armour. In short, the King’s uneasy need to keep her in her place was in part a response to the personal strength which shone through Françoise’s modest demeanour. “The King loved dignity,” said the duc de Saint-Simon, “but only for himself.”

  Louis was a natural autocrat, admiring and rewarding competence in others, but brooking no real opposition. As a young man of twenty-two, at the start of his “personal reign” following the death of Cardinal Mazarin, he had swiftly banished his still powerful mother to a cold political exile. His Queen, Marie-Thérèse, far from posing any threat to his authority, had not even been capable of maintaining a sphere of her own in entertainment and fashion, as Athénaïs had done so splendidly. Now, at the age of forty-five, after more than two decades of unchallenged rule, Louis had no intention of allowing any alternative court to emerge under the aegis of a new “Queen Françoise,” cleverer by far than Marie-Thérèse, less self-absorbed than Athénaïs, more astute, perhaps, than Louis himself. He did not want any woman about him interfering in public affairs, not because she would not be able to do so effectively, but rather, he feared, because she would.

  As for the Widow Scarron herself, she was honoured, greatly honoured, by her marriage to so great a king, but if she took pride in her extraordinary new position, this she would keep to herself. She would not be seen to be claiming more than others would regard as her due. She would not seek to be crowned Queen. Were she to do so, the court would see only the Widow Scarron, a woman come from nothing, from doubtful blood, from beggary, perched on a throne in borrowed finery, a figure of outrage—or worse, of ridicule.

  In her marriage, Françoise had been confronted with a bitter truth: more fit to be Queen than any other of Louis’s women, more naturally fit by far than the poor late Queen herself, she could not ascend the throne without losing the one thing she wanted above all else: the respect of those about her. In her heart, she felt entitled to be Queen, but rationally, she knew that it would undermine thirty years and more of work and discipline and risk and amazing good luck. It would relegate her, at a stroke, to those who sought to live above their natural station, to a courtly version of Molière’s famous bourgeois gentilhomme. “Will you look at Madame High-and-Mighty, playing the lady,” says the playwright’s Madame Jourdain, “and both her grandfathers were linen-drapers.” “Did she think the first volume of her life was always going to remain unread?” Madame de Sévigné had written, rhetorically. Françoise, of barely noble birth, born in a prison, the child of a murderer and traitor to his country, widow of a crude and disfigured beggar-poet, living on charity—“and the stories have been retold so maliciously,” Madame de Sévigné had continued. As Queen, Françoise would be a laughing stock.

  So there would be no coronation, and the marriage would remain a secret. Suspicions there might be, but they were not to be confirmed. “Madame de Maintenon would never have agreed to make it public,” her secretary was to write in later years. “That would not have been conducive to the glory of so great a King, which was more important to her than her own.” This at least was to be the version of events which it suited Françoise to circulate, for the roundabout purposes of her own bonne gloire.

  And in the meantime, there were one or two supposed compensations. She was at last permitted to ride with the King in his own carriage: with Françoise a dame d’atour, there was nothing officially to prevent it, and Louis turned a blind eye to the humiliation inherent in the deception. He had insensitivity enough to propose a little promotion for Françoise shortly after their marriage, on the death of the unfriendly duchesse de Richelieu: La Richelieu had been the dauphine’s dame d’honneur, “and after her death…the dauphine asked this favour of the King as something she wanted passionately,” wrote Françoise’s niece, with Louis evidently unable to comprehend how a plea to serve as lady-in-waiting might be offensive to a Queen manquée. “Owing to her modesty, Madame de Maintenon repeatedly refused this honour, regarding it as above her,” added Marthe-Marguerite, improbably and, possibly, ironically. And every morning Françoise received a sulky homage from the dauphin in the form of a compulsory visit, which both endured in almost complete silence. “He’ll quite happily go three or four hours without saying a word to anyone,” sighed Liselotte, and it seems that he made no particular effort now to converse with his unwelcome new stepmother.

  Athénaïs was receiving daily visits, too, only marginally less reluctant, on the part of the King. From maîtresse déclarée, still her acknowledged position, she had become an effective red herring royale in her grandiose apartments, deflecting suspicion from Françoise through Louis’s regular appearances between mass and dinner in the early afternoon. The trick seems to have worked, with even the most hawk-eyed observers, including Athénaïs herself, never sure whether or not the King had married the former governess. Like all courts, Versailles was full of “open” secrets, known by everyone though never actually declared, but even so, a real secret might be genuinely kept if those who knew its truth were few and discreet. Those best placed to glean private information were, naturally enough, the valets and maids, involved as they were in lighting the midnight corridors and guarding the doors and serving the intimate suppers and changing the bed linen. A trustworthy servant, like Françoise’s Nanon or Louis’s Bontemps, was worth a fortune to a highly placed man or woman in need of secrecy, and many a clever servant made a small fortune out of that inescapable fact of courtly life.

  “I knew I had nothing to fear from her ambition,” Louis had once written of his regent mother. “He knew that Madame de Maintenon was incapable of abusing her intimacy with him,” wrote the abbé de Choisy now. Françoise’s reward, a few months after the wedding, was to see Athénaïs demoted from her twenty sumptuous rooms flanking the King’s to a former large bathroom on the ground floor—refurbished, it must be said, “to make it habitable in winter”—with the grand staircase leading from this up to Louis’s own apartments blocked off. Other than symbolically, however, Françoise was not the beneficiary of this change. Louis himself seconded the twenty vacated rooms for his own collection of paintings and objets d’art, including gifts from the King of Siam and the Emperor of China, “and one most remarkable pearl.” It is not known whether Athénaïs ever took the long way up to see it.

  Fifteen

  LaVie en Rose

  “Think about your pleasure and your salvation; they’re not incompatible.” So Françoise wrote to her brother Charles, shortly after her wedding and six years after his own. Charles, however, had already given up hope, if indeed he had ever entertained any hope, of melding the two, and his indul
gent sister was already sending money to one, at least, of his mistresses.

  But Françoise was happy and excited. “I’m dying to see you,” she wrote to her friend Madame de Brinon the day after her wedding, “but I can’t say when that will be. I’ve hardly had time to turn around, and even now I should be asleep…” “The greatest of all men,” for whom “most of the court ladies would have given themselves to the devil,” was her very own husband, and he was handsome and virile and devoted to her; and, more or less unexpectedly, he was faithful. Even Athénaïs, as she herself lamented to a sympathetic nun, “hadn’t touched the tip of his finger since the comte de Toulouse was born [six years ago].” “The good sister could have done without knowing the details,” remarked the abbé de Choisy, though he was interested to hear them from her nonetheless.

  Françoise had no such complaints. “You ask whether it’s true that the King has married Madame de Maintenon,” Liselotte wrote to her Aunt Sophie. “I can’t honestly tell you. Few here doubt it, but I think that as long as it hasn’t been declared, I won’t believe it. And knowing as I do how marriage is conducted in this country, I think that if they were married, their love wouldn’t be as strong as it is now—unless perhaps keeping it secret adds a bit of spice that they wouldn’t have if it was all out in the open.”

  While Athénaïs was demoted to the redecorated downstairs bathroom, Françoise now moved into a fine new suite overlooking the central, “royal” courtyard at Versailles. Allotted her own stables alongside the palace, she at once appointed a young nephew of Scarron’s her personal equerry. Before long she had also been accorded spacious private apartments at Saint-Germain and the châteaux of Compiègne and Marly, as well as the late Queen’s rooms at Fontainebleau and, of course, her own château of Maintenon. Even the beautiful little Porcelain Trianon in the park at Versailles, with its thousands of blue and white tiles, built as a love-nest for Louis and Athénaïs, was soon demolished in favour of a new, larger Marble Trianon, complete with Ionic columns outside and Chinese-style furnishings inside, where the new royal couple could retreat together from the press and fuss of the court. Here, Françoise’s own ground-floor apartment, with its enormous floor-length windows, opened out into a secluded garden, as if the rooms themselves were part of it.