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

by Veronica Buckley

But Lully’s passion, on paper as onstage, could no longer sway the King. Following his disgrace, there was a sharp decline in court entertainments of all kinds. The thrice-weekly performances in the King’s apartments were reduced to a single performance per week, which may at least have pleased Liselotte. Newly favoured composers at court, notably the later famous Marc-Antoine Charpentier, were encouraged to turn away from profane operas and ballets, devoting their talents instead to sacred music. Though the change produced much that was lovely and lasting, it also increased the generally dampening effect of the new habits of piety at court. Alongside Lully, in his grave, lay the noonday glory of Louis’s golden reign. The reprobate genius was to be long and sincerely mourned by his wife and his ten children, and by all the courtiers, newly garbed in the buttoned-up coats and plain stockings of the dévots, mourning no less the riotous old court of his heyday.

  The King himself, though personally eschewing buttoned-up coats and plain stockings, also seemed, quite suddenly, past his heyday. He was now approaching fifty and, though still vigorous, was no longer the strikingly handsome man he had once been. He had lost most of his hair, pleasing at least the local wigmakers, since where the King went, so went the court; wigs had become fashionable, providing new employment, too, for street thieves, who quickly developed an innovative “fishing” technique to pluck them from the heads of passersby.

  Less easy to take advantage of was the King’s loss of teeth—most of his teeth, in fact—and even part of his jaw, removed by surgeons, whether intentionally or not, while attending to some rotted molars. Unable to chew, Louis now ate in gulps, wolfing down his food, and not infrequently bringing it back up again. Stuck in the various gaps inside his mouth, meaty pieces too often simply decayed there, rendering the royal breath foul even by the unwholesome standards of the day. And his famed dancer’s legs were regularly swollen with gout, making walking and even riding near impossible: shortly after his forty-ninth birthday, he was obliged to take to a little wheelchair to do his pheasant shooting.

  All of this Louis endured stoically, never complaining of pain, even during the gruesome operation on his jaw. His courage was matched by an equally reliable vanity: in 1685, Bernini’s equestrian statue of Louis was unveiled at Versailles. The fruit of eight years of work, it was considered Bernini’s masterpiece, but, “far from being able to appreciate it, when Louis saw it, he found it badly done and ordered it to be broken up.” “He couldn’t bear anyone else to be the object of public veneration,” wrote Spanheim of the King.

  “It’s not pleasant to be mistaken, but it’s much worse to be disillusioned,” the chevalier de Méré had written. If Françoise had only too much reason to think now of her first tutor, she was wise enough to keep her disillusionment to herself. “The greatest man in the world” was proving only too human in his once magnificent physical person. Seldom ill herself apart from migraines and rheumatism, she was nonetheless a sympathetic and confident attendant at Louis’s periodic sickbeds. Determined to keep her gaze fixed on the King’s immortal soul, and accepting of suffering, like all her contemporaries, as an inevitable fact of life, she repeatedly proved more than worthy of his favourite epithet for her: Your Steadiness.

  Steadiness was indeed the quality likely to prove more useful than any as the months of 1686 progressed. The King’s “little tumour near the perineum” had been showing dangerous signs of ulceration; by the autumn his physicians had officially declared it “a fistula.” An operation would be required to remove it.

  Early in October the decision was made, in secret from the too-curious court, that the King would submit to “la grande opération.” The tribe of royal physicians lacking the necessary skills, they sought help from outside the court. They found it in Dr. Félix, who had successfully treated Louis’s dislocated elbow following his riding accident three years before. Dr. Félix assured them that he had perfected the required technique, which he had been practising for several months on corpses from the Paris hospitals. Félix was already noted for performing operations himself, in contravention of the usual practice, with the physician simply dictating what was to be done, and the lower-ranking surgeon carrying out the instructions.

  “La grande opération” was performed on November 18. “Félix made two incisions with the scalpel and eight with scissors,” reported the abbé de Choisy. “The King held his breath through the whole thing.” “Félix’s new instrument spared the King several more incisions with the scissors,” recorded the marquis de Dangeau. “As soon as it was finished, the King sent word to the dauphin, who was out hunting…but as soon as he heard the news, he…came riding back at full speed, weeping.” The royal physicians and the King’s confessor, Père de la Chaise, had also been present throughout the ordeal, and Athénaïs, too, “had tried to get in, in her usual imperious way, but the guard at the door prevented her.”

  The news spread at once—“in a quarter of an hour,” said the abbé—through the court and to Paris. “I can’t express the effect of such astonishing news on the Parisians,” he continued. “Everyone felt how precious the life of a good king was, and everyone was imagining himself in the same situation: the fear, the horror, the pity, it was all painted on every face. Every last person left his work to talk about it. The King has just had la grande opération. The very word was frightening. I heard with my own ears a litter-bearer saying—and he was crying—They cut him twenty times with the scalpel, and he didn’t say a word!”

  The King’s wound began to heal, but unevenly, making it likely to open again in the future. On December 6, several further large incisions were made in an attempt to produce more durable scarring. “He was very jolly before and afterwards,” noted Dangeau. Five days later, Françoise wrote to Madame de Brinon: “The King was in great pain for seven hours today. He suffered like a man broken on the wheel, and I’m afraid he’ll be suffering again tomorrow.”

  On the same day, December 11, 1686, at eight o’clock in the morning, another courageous royal personage reached the end of his own mortal suffering. Louis’s cousin, the generalissimo prince de Condé, le Grand Condé, had died, feverish and exhausted, at the age of sixty-five. Liselotte relayed the news to her aunt. “He was in torments, and he asked his physician if it would go on much longer…All his family were weeping around him, and he said to them, For the last time, that’ll do. Let me think about the next world. The poor prince died as bravely as he’d lived.”

  Through his agony, early on that same morning, Condé had written a final letter to the King. Hearing of his death, Louis acknowledged the loss of the greatest of his subjects. With Colbert dead, and Maréchal Turenne, Condé had been the last of Louis’s giants laid to rest. Though a rebel in his youth, for thirty years he had proved an extraordinarily fine servant of his royal cousin. Louis’s praise would have pleased him, but the old warrior would have been prouder yet of the eulogy escaping the lips of one of his toughest enemies in the field, the brilliant Dutch Prince Willem of Orange. “The greatest man in Europe has just died,” declared Willem, and no one was heard to gainsay him.

  “The King’s wound is very much better this morning,” wrote Françoise brightly, later in the month. “We must put our trust in God, since men don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re talking about.” Though one at least of the physicians had in fact done rather well, the King, for his part, had apparently decided in the end to put his trust in Françoise. The year’s long trials had brought him to rely on her more than ever. From this time onwards, “he hardly moved from her apartments. He worked there, held his council meetings there, had plays and music performed there, dined there, and took his supper there.”

  On Christmas Day 1686, Françoise penned a relieved and slightly wicked letter to Madame de Brinon at Saint-Cyr. “Last night, the King attended part of the matins service,” she wrote. “Today he heard three masses…This afternoon he heard a sermon, and then sat through a whole service of sung vespers. From all this you can see he’s quite recovered�
��Madame [Liselotte] is very well indeed. Her delight at the King’s recovery was painted all over her face. I’m sure you can well believe it.”

  Mignon’s military career was also progressing nicely. In 1682, at the age of twelve, he had been appointed governor of the southern region of Languedoc, a post long coveted by Monsieur, the King’s brother and Liselotte’s husband. Now, at sixteen, Mignon was on the point of becoming the King’s General of Galleys, the fleet itself recently expanded by a large number of condemned Huguenots who had bravely resisted conversion.

  Bonne’s daughter Louise, two years older than Mignon, was safely married to the thirty-year-old marquis Jean-Françoise Cordebeuf de Beauverger de Montgon, himself well launched on the usual meteoric career of soldiers of noble birth. The long sought and finally captured Minette de Saint-Hermine, “threadbare demoiselle with all the provincialism of her origins,” as the Versailles-born duc de Saint-Simon remarked snidely, had also been comfortably married off, to the twenty-five-year-old comte Louis de Mailly. “His family weren’t at all happy about that,” said Saint-Simon, “but Madame de Maintenon was all-powerful, so they just had to swallow it.” Charles’s two-year-old daughter, Françoise-Charlotte-Amable, was now living permanently at Versailles, already burbling greetings and compliments in the manner of a true-born courtier: her doting aunt found it “adorable.”

  Françoise could therefore claim a modest success in her clan-building efforts thus far, though one or two of her protégés, in fact one in particular, had recently been going dreadfully awry. Philippe’s elder son, now aged twenty-two and comte de Mursay, was progressing in the army, too, but the light he had been reflecting back on Françoise was not entirely flattering. “He was unappealing, physically and mentally. He was brave, and not a bad officer, but gauche, clumsy in his speech, socially inept to the last degree. Even his valet made fun of him…His wife was ugly and stupid, and amazingly pious…She was constantly at her devotions, and wanted to sleep on her own. Mursay used to complain about it; he told everyone about his wife’s calendar…Madame de Maintenon thought he was marvellous. He told her everything that was going on in the army, and he used to show her letters around, which shows how pathetically trusting he was…People made up to him because of her.” Thus the duc de Saint-Simon, himself neither brave nor a good officer, nor indeed very appealing, physically or mentally.

  But if Philippe de Mursay could at times be something of an embarrassment to Françoise, she was being driven almost to distraction by his sister, Marthe-Marguerite. Converted to Catholicism six years before through a mixture of force and guile, she had just celebrated her marriage to Jean-Anne de Thubières de Grimoard de Pestels de Lévis, comte de Caylus. Unfortunately for Marthe-Marguerite, her husband’s name was by far the most impressive thing about him. He was young, and self-evidently from a very noble line, but his fortune was small, and his interests, far from stretching to his new wife, went no further than the nearest bottle of wine.

  “I was not quite thirteen years old when I married,” said Marthe-Marguerite, mistakenly, since she had in fact already turned fifteen. Six years of life at court had turned Philippe de Villette’s little country girl, singing to herself in her kidnapper’s coach, into a fascinating and delectable beauty. She was fun as well as beautiful, quick-witted, mischievous, and a wicked mimic, notoriously of the long and long-toothed dévote, Madame de Montchevreuil. “I must say I prefer the naughtier ones,” Françoise confessed of her Saint-Cyr girls, and with Marthe-Marguerite, too, “she closed her eyes to the worst of her behaviour.”

  “You’ve never seen such an intelligent, sweet, expressive face, such freshness, such grace and wit, such liveliness and gaiety; there never was a more attractive creature,” exclaimed the duc de Saint-Simon, with precocious appreciation, since he himself was only eleven years old at the time of Marthe-Marguerite’s marriage. But the forty-two-year-old abbé de Choisy, an experienced admirer of the fair sex despite his transvestite habits, observed in her the same spirited grace: “It was constant delight whenever she was about. Her mental gifts were even more attractive than her lovely face. There was no chance of getting bored—you hardly had time to breathe. Her speaking voice was beautiful, far more so than those of the finest actresses…” “Her husband didn’t notice any of it; he was in a daze from years of wine and brandy.”

  “She had everything a girl could need to marry brilliantly,” sighed the abbé, and certainly the comte de Caylus had not been Marthe-Marguerite’s only suitor. Foremost among them had been the illustrious Louis-François de Boufflers, forty-two years old, wealthy and charming, already a marquis and colonel-général of dragoons, with a dukedom and a maréchal’s baton soon expected. His formal offer of marriage had been rejected on Marthe-Marguerite’s behalf by Françoise herself, “in words fit to be engraved in letters of gold: Monsieur, she had told him, my niece would not be a worthy match for you, though I am nonetheless touched by what you have offered for love of me, and in future I shall regard you as my nephew.”

  “Boufflers was devoted to Madame de Maintenon,” wrote Saint-Simon. “Her door was always open to him,” so that it may indeed have been partly “for love of me” that he had offered his hand in marriage to her barely noble niece from the modest château of Mursay. But the girl had had obvious attractions of her own, and after all, Françoise herself had married the King, if only in secret. If Marthe-Marguerite had been less than “a worthy match” for Boufflers, what was to be said of her own match with “the most glorious [king] in the universe”?

  In fact it was probably Louis himself who had acted behind the scenes to prevent the marriage. He was fond of Boufflers and admired him, but, for reasons never clear, he had taken a strong disliking to Marthe-Marguerite. Perhaps, with her extraordinary charm, she outshone his own three daughters, all just a few years younger than she; perhaps, with her mischief and cleverness, he felt she was leading them astray, in particular his “Chubby,” the thirteen-year-old Mademoiselle de Nantes; perhaps he was even a little bit in love with her himself. Or it may simply have been that a marriage with the popular and high-ranking Boufflers would have given Françoise’s family too much prominence at court. The King had no wish to see an alternative court of influence and potential intrigue developing around his wife, such as had once existed around his powerful mother. “I got upset sometimes,” Françoise later admitted, “because the King wouldn’t grant me what I asked for my family and my friends.” If so, her declining of the match, while a puzzle for Boufflers and perhaps a disappointment to her niece, would have been above all a humiliation for her, a reminder of her status as an uncrowned queen, destined to remain effectively offstage.

  Françoise consoled Boufflers, and reassured him of her friendship by swiftly procuring for him the prestigious governorship of the territory of Luxembourg. “So being her adoptive nephew didn’t do him any harm,” as the abbé de Choisy noted. Marthe-Marguerite, by contrast, sought consolation for herself in more serious mischief than the mimicking of dévotes. She became a keen gambler, and soon began an indiscreet affair with the marquis de Villeroy, son of Françoise’s good friend the duc de Villeroy. The marquis, charming and with a touch of devilry about him, was thirty-three years old and himself recently married, in fact to the daughter of the war minister, Louvois.

  Within nine months of her wedding day, Marthe-Marguerite and her husband were sufficiently at odds that Françoise was obliged to offer herself as an intermediary. “I am most impatient, Monsieur,” she wrote to the comte de Caylus in the week before Christmas of 1686, “to make every effort I can to reconcile Madame de Caylus with you.” Reconciliation was equally needed between the comte and his recently widowed mother, with whom he had also fallen out. Françoise does not appear to have succeeded on either account, so that in the summer of 1687, Philippe de Villette himself decided to travel the three hundred miles from Mursay to Paris, to do what he could to help his mismatched daughter. As usual, Françoise was not stinting in her advice:

/>   He has to make things up with his mother, and be on good terms with all his family…You have to make him see…the advantages of this, and also how bad it would be for him to quarrel with me, and what that would mean for him at court…Yesterday he was behaving like a madman, or rather like a drunkard: he wants to take his meals apart from his wife so that he can drink with fewer witnesses. Just between us, he’s no good, but no one knows that yet at court and there’s still time for him to change. Couldn’t you speak on my behalf to this abbé friend of his? You’re a sensible man, and clever. Do something and help me; I really can’t cope with managing both the husband and the wife.

  The problem was too big, too intractable. No straightforward action from above could resolve it. While hoping for results from her “sensible and clever” cousin, Françoise could only address the simpler details of the case. In this same month of August 1687, she sent a pragmatic letter to the marquise de Caylus, Marthe-Marguerite’s mother-in-law:

  Do please send me the account of the comtesse de Caylus’s debts, since we must know what the situation is and make some arrangements for the future: she hasn’t a penny to her name. I’ve asked her husband to send me some money for her, so that I can manage it on her behalf. It distresses me to see her in her present state.

  Marthe-Marguerite’s debts could be taken care of, but her behaviour would be less easy to manage. Françoise, though admitting no responsibility of her own for the catastrophe of her niece’s marriage, and still unreasonably hopeful of a decent outcome to it, decided to remove Marthe-Marguerite altogether from harm’s way. “I’ll send my coach tomorrow—no, on Monday, for you to take her to Sèvres,” she wrote to Philippe. “I’d rather she were there than in Paris, where I’m afraid she’ll do something foolish or let herself be led astray…and then you and I have to speak to the comte de Caylus, and do what we can to change him, but there’s no time to lose. Adieu, my dear cousin. I have a thousand things to do.” But her obiter to Philippe in the same letter reveals her desperation in the affair. The disgraceful situation had to be kept, as far as possible, from everyone at court, and there was little help to be expected from Louis, her own husband, for the wayward sixteenyear-old whom he so disliked. Close friends might sympathize, but in practical terms, she was alone with the problem—alone, that is, apart from Philippe. “It’s really good to have you here and to be able to count on you in all this trouble Madame de Caylus is giving me; you’re so reliable and thorough.”