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

by Veronica Buckley

  On July 3, 1702, Louis formally declared war on England, the Emperor, the United Provinces and all their allies—effectively, half of Europe, presenting it as a defensive war to preserve his grandson on his legitimately held Spanish throne. Most of his subjects appeared convinced, encouraged by an early victory at Luzarra over General Annibal Visconti—known to Liselotte as “Animal” Visconti.

  But if it was a defensive war to the French, and no doubt also to the new King of Spain, to everyone else it looked like a continuation of Louis’s long-evident will to European hegemony. The fighting spread through Dutch and German and Spanish territories, bringing Denmark and Savoy and several Italian states to the already mighty armies arrayed against Louis and his grandson. It spread into the English Channel, into the Atlantic, to Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, South Carolina and Florida, to the Caribbean colonies, to Rio de Janeiro and across to Chile and Peru, to the west coast of Africa, and into the poorly defended Spanish islands of the Pacific. The War of the Spanish Succession had become, in a sense, “the very first world war.”

  Françoise, like Louis and other “well informed people,” had believed that accepting the Spanish throne would be the best way to avoid a “long and ruinous” war, but after the first years of fighting, with dozens of towns destroyed, scores of thousands dead, and young noblemen returning, maimed and blinded, to Versailles, she was more than convinced that it had been a terrible misjudgement. “At court, perhaps without even realizing it, Madame de Maintenon was encouraging defeatism, talking of prayer at a time which called for stiffened resolve and calling up every last reserve of strength. But the King didn’t listen to her…” Beyond her distress at the human costs of the war, Françoise had begun to feel that France and Spain were destined, in any case, to lose it. “Our two Kings are fighting for religion and for justice, and they’re failing. Our enemies are attacking both causes, and they’re triumphant.” It seemed to her useless and even wrong to remain defiant in the face of providence. “God is the master. We must submit to His will in everything,” she concluded, while God-fearing generals on all fronts battled on.

  Despite his impressive exploits in the Dutch wars of the 1670s, the King’s brother had not been called to military service this time. Indeed, at sixty years of age, he was no longer well. On June 8, 1701, he was driven from his château at Saint-Cloud to dine with the King at Marly, looking so ill that Louis threatened to have him bled by force if he would not submit to the procedure of his own will. Monsieur refused, but later in the evening relented, calling in a physician to bleed him, in fact three times, and to administer as well an emetic purge—“eleven ounces,” recorded Liselotte, indignant, plus “two bottles of English drops.” His condition worsened almost at once; within twelve hours, he was dead.

  Liselotte panicked, fearing the classic banishment of the unwanted royal widow, and went sweeping through the halls of Versailles with cries of No convent! No convent! “The monastic life is not my thing at all,” she insisted. “…If Monsieur had lived, I could have led a perfectly settled life…The poor man had begun to turn dévot; he was making amends; he wasn’t misbehaving anymore…” But she was not pressed to leave the court, and in fact found her situation much improved, since Saint-Cloud and all the various residences of the late Monsieur passed on to her, and in addition, his generous personal pension was now to be paid to her directly. Liselotte, placated, dealt kindly with her late husband’s memory: “If those in the other world know what’s happening here, he will be very pleased with me,” she wrote, “because I’ve been through all his things and found all the letters that his mignons wrote to him, and I burned them all, without reading them, to stop them falling into other hands…”

  She might have done well to apply the same remedy to a different set of troublesome letters—a selection, in fact, of the indiscreet letters she herself had been sending with every ordinary post to her much-missed relatives in Germany. These had met the very fate from which she had saved Monsieur’s billets-doux; they had been read by eyes never meant to see them and, far from being burned, had actually been copied and sent to the King, and the King had not been pleased to receive them. Politically incautious and personally offensive, the letters had roused his anger towards his unhappy sister-in-law. Because of this, she had been for many months almost persona non grata at Versailles, and though she had been laid low for some weeks now by a malarial fever, Louis had not sent to enquire after her, a deliberate discourtesy which caused her more distress than the fever itself. Still far from well, and now feeling the vulnerability of widowhood in a foreign land, she decided to take the opportunity afforded by Monsieur’s death to attempt a reconciliation between herself and Louis.

  According to Liselotte, writing to her Aunt Sophie, it was actually Françoise who set things in motion. “She sent a message through my son that this might be a good time to make things up with the King. So I sent a message back to her…asking her to come to me, since I was not well enough to go out. And she came at six o’clock…I admitted…that I’d always been against her because I thought she hated me and made the King think ill of me…but I said I was prepared to put all that behind me, if she would just agree to be my friend. She said lots of fine and eloquent things on that subject, and promised me her friendship, and then we embraced. Then I said she also had to help me get back into the King’s good graces…and she advised me to speak to the King myself, quite openly…”

  Liselotte had not in fact told her aunt the whole story of her interview with Françoise, but her lady-in-waiting, Madame de Ventadour, who had been present throughout, filled in the gaps for posterity by relaying every detail to the duc de Saint-Simon. According to the duc’s rather different version, it was Liselotte herself who requested the interview by sending Madame de Ventadour to Françoise. The latter arrived, and Liselotte invited her to sit down, “which just shows how badly she needed to sit down herself,” as the duc remarked. Liselotte began to complain of the King’s treatment of her, “and Madame de Maintenon let her say all she wanted to say, and then replied that the King had instructed her to say that their recent mutual loss had effaced all anger in his heart, and that all would be forgiven, provided that Madame gave no further cause for offence…There were certain things, which he had not wished to mention, that were the real cause of his indifference during her recent illness.” Liselotte, “thinking herself quite safe,” responded with protestations of innocence, saying that she had “never done or said a thing” that could have displeased anyone. Riveted by his own retelling of the scandal, Saint-Simon continued:

  And since she went on protesting, Madame de Maintenon took a letter from her pocket, and asked Madame whether she recognized the handwriting. It was a letter from Madame to her aunt in Hanover, and it was all about the King’s relationship with Madame de Maintenon, whether they were married or simply living in concubinage, and then it went on all about the poverty in the kingdom that couldn’t be alleviated…Madame looked as if she would drop dead on the spot. She began to cry, and Madame de Ventadour started wittering on all sorts of nonsense just to give her time to recover herself…

  And then, thinking she was on safe ground this time, Madame began complaining that Madame de Maintenon had changed towards her, had dropped her all of a sudden, abandoned her, after she had been trying for so long to live amicably with her…And Madame de Maintenon let her carry on again…and in the end repeated to her a thousand things, every one more offensive than the last, that Madame had said to the dauphine about her, which the dauphine herself had relayed more than ten years before…At this second blow, Madame just stood there like a statue, and there was silence for a bit, until Madame de Ventadour started wittering on again to give Madame time to recover herself for the second time…She began to cry again, and admitted it was all true, and begged for pardon, clasping Madame de Maintenon’s hands. Madame de Maintenon stood there coldly for quite a while, saying nothing, just letting her go on. It was a terrible humiliation for a haughty Ger
man…In the end, they embraced, and promised to forget the past, and be friends in future…

  Three days after the interview, Liselotte met privately with Louis and, knowing she had nothing to hide from him now, spoke frankly, as Françoise had advised her. “I told him,” her letter continued, “that, however badly he had treated me, I had always respected and loved him, and I said that it would have been a great joy for me if he had just allowed me to be near him. He embraced me and told me to forget what was past…and then I said to him, quite naturally, If I hadn’t loved you, I wouldn’t have hated Madame de Maintenon so much…And he laughed…”

  Liselotte’s admission, “quite natural” perhaps, but also touching and rather sad, was enough to bring her back into the fold. Louis had always been fond of her, and he had some sympathy for her injured sense of rank where Françoise was concerned. “I visited la Maintenon,” she had written, “and found her…sitting in a big armchair behind a table, with all the other ladies on stools. She offered to have another stool brought in for me, but I assured her I was not too tired to stand. I had to bite my tongue—I nearly laughed out loud. How things have changed since the time when the King came to ask me whether I would allow Madame Scarron to eat with me just once so that she could cut the little duc du Maine’s meat for him…Nowadays, when they take their promenades in the garden, she sits in a sedan chair with four fellows carrying her, and the King walks alongside like a lackey…The world is upside-down here…”

  The court spent six black-clad, socially bereft months in mourning for Monsieur, and during that time and for a little while afterwards Françoise escaped further insult in Madame’s letters. But in the end, Liselotte proved incorrigible. Four years later, the marquis de Torcy, grandson of the great Colbert and himself now Secretary of State, was still conveying her letters to the King, not copies now, but originals which Liselotte had imagined she had sent to Germany. “It’s appalling, the way they deal with my letters,” she had written, unwittingly or provocatively. “In Louvois’ day, they would read them and then give them back to you. But since that little toad de Torcy’s had control of the postal services, he’s been really annoying me.” “I’m sure his German pronunciation must be hilarious. Out of a hundred Frenchmen speaking German, there’s hardly one you can understand, and they all think they know the language perfectly…” “This isn’t actually a new joke…but I wanted to give M. de Torcy the pleasure of seeing I’d sent it. If he doesn’t find it amusing, at least he can’t complain this time on the pretext that it contravenes the interests of the State.”

  In March 1701, the new King Felipe V of Spain had married the princesse Marie-Louise of Savoy, twelve-year-old sister to the duc de Bourgogne’s exquisite Marie-Adélaïde. If Louis had expected this second marriage to ensure Savoy’s loyalty to French interests in the forthcoming battle for the Spanish crown, he was mistaken, though little Marie-Louise herself proved a remarkably staunch defender of her husband’s claim.

  She had been chosen as Felipe’s consort by a friend of Françoise’s from the days of her young widowhood, the politically minded Anne-Marie de La Trémoïlle-Noirmoutier, now known as the princesse des Ursins. Since her days in the salons of the Marais forty years before, Madame des Ursins had spent most of her time in Madrid and Rome, widowed, remarried, and widowed again. For years, her own sparkling salon in the Eternal City had served as an unofficial second embassy of France, where diplomats and cardinals inveighed and intrigued for the rival continental powers. Here, together with her close friend Portocarrero, Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo and Spain’s ambassador to Rome, Madame des Ursins had promoted France’s interests with skill and charm, and the keen delight of a born politico.

  With young Marie-Louise’s marriage to the new King of Spain arranged, Françoise had proposed her old friend for the influential position of camarera mayor: governess, tutor, lady-in-waiting, head of the Queen’s household, political advisor, and, not least, dueña of the three hundred court ladies and their own one hundred chaperones. In April 1701, Françoise wrote to the duc d’Harcourt, son of her old Marais admirer and now, through her own auspices, ambassador extraordinary at the court of Spain: “As I am generally readier to give my opinion concerning the ladies rather than other affairs, I suggest Madame des Ursins…She’s intelligent, amenable, courteous, she’s used to foreigners, and she’s very well liked; she’s a Grandee of Spain, she has no husband or children, and no awkward ambitions…She would be better than any of our ladies here.” Never slow to promote herself, Madame des Ursins had in fact written much the same on her own behalf. “If I may say so,” she had concluded, “I would be more suitable for the position than anyone else, since I have a great many friends in Spain…and I speak Spanish, too. I’m sure my appointment would please the whole nation.” The duc d’Harcourt agreed, seeing in Madame des Ursins an excellent opportunity to rid the Alcázar palace once and for all of the “dwarves, clowns, parrots and monkeys, inquisitors, sorcerors, and priests disguised as physicians” plaguing the macabre Spanish court.

  The precocious Marie-Louise, every bit as charming and astute—in Liselotte’s word, every bit as “Italian”—as her sister at Versailles, accepted her sixty-year-old guide and companion with an easy grace. Her husband, inexperienced, naturally cautious, immature for his seventeen years, followed her direction. Madame des Ursins proved a perfect pillar for them both to lean on, and indeed, in the slow-moving gloom of the Spanish court, they had scarcely any other. On his arrival, young Felipe had been warned by the French ambassador of the local penchant for poisoning unwanted royals: His Majesty must never sniff a flower, nor indeed even touch one, nor use any perfume, nor open any letter with his own hands. As for Her Majesty, there were “a hundred ladies” complaining that her gowns, admittedly in heavy black fabrics, with bodices of lead, in the Spanish style, to flatten her pert adolescent breasts, were still scandalously short: her feet had once been seen while she was in the process of sitting down—certain local ladies had been stabbed by their husbands for this same fault. The trains of Her Majesty’s gowns were evidently too short as well, allowing her to walk more quickly than the conventionally funereal Alcázar pace. The matter was referred to Louis for arbitration, with Madame des Ursins mounting a spirited defence: “The rooms in this palace are never cleaned,” she wrote. “When the ladies turn around with these massive trains, they raise clouds of dust. They’re dangerous for Her Majesty’s chest, and they sound like rattlesnakes.” Louis, seated one evening in Françoise’s apartment, turning over the Spanish-dressed doll which the indignant camarera mayor had submitted as evidence, returned a verdict of compromise: Marie-Louise should wear the long trains occasionally, though she need not do so as a matter of course. The Spanish must be won over gradually to the idea of change. Their new Bourbon King and his wife should do nothing to alarm their ossified sub-Pyrenean sensitivities.

  One Grandee, at least, had felt prompted towards a humble gesture on the side of innovation, as Felipe’s French attendant, the marquis de Louville, relayed to the head-shaking courtiers at Versailles. “It was in the middle of a five-hour-long ceremony,” he said. “The King was enclosed in a kind of elaborate cupboard, and the Grandee realized that after such a length of time, the King might wish to address a particular corporeal need, so he passed in his beaver hat—it was brand new—with a respectful note inviting His Majesty not to restrain himself.”

  With the priests and dust clouds and five-hour ceremonies, there might have been enough to do at the court in Madrid, but the new King and Queen, together with their éminence française, had weightier matters pressing in on them. By the time they had even arrived in Spain, Marie-Louise’s own relative, the generalissimo Prince Eugene of Savoy, imperial commander-in-chief, was raising a force against them in Italy. In the spring of 1702, seeking to boost morale by his own royal presence, Felipe set off in person for Naples, to join the French army led by the brilliant Maréchal Vendôme. Marie-Louise remained behind in Madrid, missing her young
husband, but eager to further his cause and her own political education: at thirteen years of age, she had found herself, quite suddenly, Regent of the Spanish Empire.

  The King of Spain had ridden off to the wars in the south, and to east and west were his father, the dauphin of France, his brothers, Bourgogne and Berry, and his half-brothers, du Maine and Toulouse. And in the summer of 1706, the duc d’Orléans set off for Italy, “to command as generalissimo. I can’t describe my son’s joy,” wrote Liselotte to her aunt. “He’s standing up straighter and he seems to have grown three thumbs higher.” Conspicuous in his absence from the lists, however, was the twenty-seven-year-old duc de Saint-Simon, a titular colonel, who had requested permission to leave the service, supposedly because of his poor health. “As I had had various health troubles, and had been advised to take the waters,” he wrote, “I spent three years with no troops and nothing to do. The King didn’t seem to be bothered,” he added petulantly, or perhaps with relief. “M. le duc de Saint-Simon, peer of France, governor of Blaye, bailiff and governor…captain…colonel of cavalry…” began Spanheim, adding the duc’s name in a mere four-line appendix to his memoirs: “No one pays any attention to him,” he concluded.