City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Though Françoise was “beautiful . . . sweet, grateful, secretive, faithful, modest [and] intelligent,” her religious upbringing kept her from being easily swayed by potential suitors. Athénaïs took special note of this rare quality—a necessity for the mistress to a king who strayed easily—and offered her the position of governess. In a turn that would later come to characterize the relationship between the two women, Françoise refused. She insisted that she would accept only if the king, not Montespan, made the request personally, which he did. Only much later would Athénaïs understand that she had put, once again, a formidable rival in the path of her beloved king.

  Cradling the newborn in her arms, d’Aubigné signaled to the driver to set off for the remote home where she would raise the child as her own. The scene repeated itself a year later, in 1670, when Athénaïs gave birth to a second child, the future duke of Maine, and again in 1672 and 1673. As one court observer noted, “The lady is extremely fertile and her powder lights very quickly.”

  Six years after Louis and Athénaïs first consummated their relationship, the king legitimized their three children. In what should have been a dry legal statement, Louis used the announcement to document publicly his love for Montespan, explaining that at the heart of his actions lay a “tenderness that nature has given His Majesty for his children and for other reasons that augment considerably his sentiments.”

  While Françoise kept herself off limits to the king, Louis hardly remained celibate during his mistress’s frequent “indispositions.” He continued performing his husbandly duties for the queen on a weekly basis. He also surveyed the court for other potential partners. The dark-haired Claude de Vin des Oeillets caught his eye. Claude Oeillets possessed a dramatic flair, having grown up in the theater. Her parents had lived a nomadic life as actors, roaming from theater to theater, city to city, with their children in tow. By the early 1660s her parents had settled into the Théâtre de Bourgogne in Paris, where Molière’s troupe also performed. Within a few years Oeillets’s mother, Alix Faviot, had established herself as one of the most praised actresses in the capital, earning accolades for her roles in plays by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. Members of the Théâtre de Bourgogne frequently entertained the king at Saint-Germain and Versailles, giving Oeillets’s mother the opportunity to make the connections necessary to ensure a place for her daughter in Montespan’s household.

  Although successful actors often circulated among members of the court, their home lives could not have been more different from those of the nobility. Considered to have questionable moral values and denied Christian burial, actors lived at the fringes of society, in poverty or at least very close to it. Despite her renown, Faviot lived on the rue Saint-Denis in the destitute Montorgeuil neighborhood. Her daughter Claude lived nearby on the rue du Regard, also in the same neighborhood, but once employed by Montespan, she was rarely seen by her neighbors. Busy attending to the king’s mistress, she was a rare success story of a local woman having found her fortune at court.

  The details of Louis’s intimate encounters with the thirty-three year-old Oeillets are not well documented. But it is likely that the two became lovers as early as 1670 and most certainly no later than 1672. In the months before the birth of Montespan’s second child in 1670, the king transferred a substantial sum of money from the royal coffers to Oeillets. Two years later, around the time of Athénaïs’s third child, he deeded property to Oeillets near Clagny, northeast of Versailles, with the intent that she would eventually build a home there. A royal maid later confided to a court insider that she and the king spent time together when Madame de Montespan was either “busy” or sick. She also suggested that Oeillets also gave birth to one of the king’s illegitimate children, though documents do not confirm this.

  To Athénaïs’s relief, the king always came back to her when she was no longer indisposed. In 1671 the king instructed the architect Louis Le Vau to design an elaborate villa for the couple on the outskirts of the Versailles estate. The Trianon of Porcelain, as it was called, was true to its name. Thousands of blue-and-white Delft porcelain tiles preotected the facade and roof of the building. Inside, porcelain covered every inch of the floor, and delicate vases and figurines imported at great expense from China decorated the interior. From the windows or while strolling outdoors, the king and his lover could admire gardens bursting with rare plants and flowers—Spanish jasmines, tuberoses, hyacinths, and narcissuses imported from Constantinople. And in each room, bouquets arranged in enormous porcelain vases filled the villa with their heady fragrance. But the most exquisite place in the Trianon of Porcelain was the Chambre des Amours (lovers’ room), which housed the sumptuous bed to which the king and his mistress retreated, spending endless hours in intimate escape.

  As Louis and Athénaïs frolicked, Françoise d’Aubigné raised their children. Having ordered them away from court from the moment of the birth, the king himself had never met his children. On Christmas Eve 1672, Louis sent for the three children to be brought to the Palace of Saint-Germain. Smiling at the first glimpse of the trio with their governess, he asked her who their father was. Françoise responded playfully, “I have no idea. I imagine it’s some duke or big lawyer at parlement.” Both Athénaïs and Louis doubled over in laughter at Françoise’s feigned ignorance. In a demonstration of the king’s newfound interest in his children, Louis legitimized them in 1673, and Françoise moved with them to court, where she became a regular and privileged fixture in the royal family.

  As Athénaïs’s star continued to rise, Louise de La Vallière continued to suffer. In an ultimate act of cruelty, Louis made La Vallière godmother to his third child with Athénaïs. The couple named the baby girl Louise-Françoise in a sly reference to her mother, Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan, and Louise de La Vallière, the woman whom Montespan had replaced. By the end of June 1674, Louise could not take any more humiliation at court. After attending a mass with the king in the company of Marie-Thérèse and the ever-present Athénaïs, she dropped to her knees and begged him to let her leave the court forever. Louis waited a full year to approve her request. In the spring of 1675 Louise ate her last dinner at the palace in the company of the king and Madame de Montespan. The next day she entered the Carmelite convent on the rue Saint-Jacques, where she remained until her death thirty-six years later.

  The departure of her main competitor solidified Athénaïs’s hold over the king. Committed to pleasing his demanding mistress, the king instructed Colbert to arrange for “a pearl necklace, which I want to be beautiful, two pairs of earrings, one in diamonds, which I [also] want to be beautiful, and all of the other [earrings] in [precious] stones.” To this list, the king added four dozen buttons, each with a jewel in the middle surrounded by diamonds, and a third pair of earrings made of pearls. He also wanted the jewelry to be presented in a box covered in diamonds and precious stones of all colors.

  In 1674 the king had a country home built for his mistress in nearby Clagny. When Athénaïs complained it was “fit for a chorus girl,” Louis had the house razed and instructed the Versailles architect, Jules Mansard, and chief gardener, André Le Nôtre, to design something much bigger and more elaborate. From the battlefields of the Low Countries, Louis kept careful watch over the construction of his mistress’s new palace, making sure that her every wish was fulfilled. “Madame de Montespan mandated me to order you to buy orange trees [for Clagny],” he wrote on June 5 to Colbert. In response to Colbert’s grousings, the king conceded three days later that the cost was “excessive,” but insisted “to please me, nothing is impossible.” One year later, in August 1675, Madame de Sévigné exclaimed to her daughter, “The eye sees [the palace] rising in the distance. [The gardens] are assuredly the most beautiful, the most surprising, and the most enchanted novelty one can ever imagine.”

  As triumphant as Montespan—whom the court now called “Quanto” (How much?) and “Quantova” (How far will she go?)—felt, the victory proved fleeting. Montespan soon fac
ed another, more formidable competitor.

  To acknowledge her dutiful service, Louis had gifted Françoise d’Aubigné a large fortune, a château, and a new title, Madame de Maintenon, after the village where the château was located. Montespan did not make a secret of her disliking for her new rival. Athénaïs bristled with jealousy at Maintenon’s close relationship with her children, fearing as well the governess’s deepening relationship with Louis.

  As for Maintenon, she remained committed to raising Montespan’s young family, but refused to support the woman’s loathsome behavior. She complained loudly, avoiding her nemesis’s name, that “one only consults me after a decision has been made, wanting me to approve and not wanting me to give my opinion. One is only using me to better her reign.” For her part, Montespan lamented to her priest that she would “never understand why God would make me suffer Madame de Maintenon.”

  A year after Maintenon moved to court, Montespan attempted without success to remove Maintenon from her path by marrying the widow off to the duke of Villars. Maintenon refused, clearly feeling very secure in her relationship with the king, who interacted with her as if they were “good friends.” In return, the governess held unusual influence over the monarch.

  One day the king witnessed Montespan yelling at Maintenon. When he asked what the trouble was, Madame de Maintenon stepped forward calmly and said, “If Your Majesty would go into the other room, I will have the honor of telling him.” The king obliged, and Maintenon described Montespan’s insufferable actions, worrying aloud about the king’s future if he continued to be allied with a woman of such questionable morals.

  Maintenon was not alone in her concerns for the king’s soul. Montespan’s hedonism stood in stark contrast to Louise de La Vallière, whose pathos-filled exile to the convent gained the praise of religious leaders. While the Church could overlook the king’s infidelities with the unmarried La Vallière, his “double adultère” (double adultery) with Montespan constituted an unspeakable sin.

  During Holy Week in 1675, the priest listening to Montespan’s confession at Versailles refused her absolution. “Is this the Madame de Montespan who scandalizes all of France?” he asked, “Go! Go Madame, cease your scandals and afterward you should throw yourself at the feet of the ministers of Jesus Christ.”

  A stunned Montespan described her humiliation to Louis. The king consulted Bishop Bossuet, who surprised the couple by asserting correctness of the priest’s actions and that it was not Louis’s place to interfere. Bossuet counseled Louis to make an “entire [and] absolute separation” from his lover or risk being refused communion. Though torn between love and religious duty, Louis knew what he had to do. His eyes red “like a man who had been crying,” he sent Montespan to Clagny and instructed her to repent of her sins.

  “The king and Madame de Montespan have parted ways purely for religious reasons,” wrote a court observer. “People are saying they still love each other more than life itself. They also say that she will return to court but not be lodged at the Château and will not see the king unless she is with the Queen in her quarters.” The noblewoman concluded skeptically: “I have my doubts . . . for there is always the danger that love will have the upper hand.”

  Louis made frequent visits to Athénaïs’s château at Clagny, but the couple remained under the watchful eyes of a group of chaperones composed of the court’s most religious noblewomen. In her absence, Louis turned again to Mademoiselle des Oeillets, Athénaïs’s trusted chambermaid, for physical companionship. After their encounters, Oeillets noted that the king often spent hours in front of the fire, “pensive and sighing.”

  Four months into the forced estrangement, the king returned to Clagny, determined to reunite with Athénaïs. He pulled her away from her chaperones into a window nook, where the couple whispered and wept with each other. With shared determination they then took leave of their matronly observers and made their way to a nearby bedroom. Shortly afterward the king reestablished Montespan’s favor in the court by assigning her twenty rooms on the first floor of Versailles, which eclipsed the queen’s eleven on the second. Confirming her physical as well as emotional hold on Louis, Montespan bore the king two more children whom, on the king’s insistence, she once again entrusted to the care of Maintenon.

  Athénaïs had always been curvaceous, but as Maintenon announced with no small amount of pleasure, “Her girth had grown to formidable proportions.” Once a stunning beauty, time and nine pregnancies—two with her husband, seven with the king—took a toll on Montespan’s body. The Italian ambassador, Primi Visconti, chimed in as well, exclaiming that just one of her legs was as big as his entire body. Athénaïs knew better than anyone about the king’s roving attention when it came to women. In a desperate attempt to keep him from looking elsewhere, she stockpiled corsets to appear slimmer than she actually was. It did not work. The Torrent’s days were numbered; Athénaïs was desperate.

  16

  Offering

  Voisin never told her family what she was doing, nor did she share the names of the visitors who streamed through their front door. The young Marie-Marguerite couldn’t resist making up her own names. Of all the many visitors to her mother’s house, the one who made Marie-Marguerite the most uncomfortable was the Prayer Man (Le Prieur). No one knew what the Prayer Man—elderly and missing an eye—did to make ends meet. Marie-Marguerite’s father suspected he was a counterfeiter. All his daughter knew was that the man frightened her.

  One day the ever-curious Marie-Marguerite followed her mother into one of the ramshackle houses nearby. Soon the girl found herself in a dark and empty room. Feeling a presence behind her, she turned and saw the Prayer Man leaning toward her. Marie-Marguerite spun around and ran.

  In the months and years that followed, Marie-Marguerite slowly got used to seeing the Prayer Man not only around the neighborhood, but also in her house. One day he appeared at her doorstep, dressed in a long robe. He greeted her mother briskly, and then the two went straight to her mother’s bedroom and began barking orders at Marie-Marguerite.

  On her mother’s command, Marie-Marguerite helped move the furniture, adjust it, and readjust it. She lifted the narrow mattress into the air and placed two footstools underneath it. She then lit the candelabras and shut the windows and door tightly.

  Shadows flickered against the walls in the candlelight as the Prayer Man stood expressionless behind the mattress. At her mother’s command, Marie-Marguerite ushered a woman into the room. She had a dramatic flair about her. As she strode into the room, the two trains of her dress—one in front, one in back—swayed back and forth. Marie-Marguerite nicknamed her the Woman with Two Tails. The girl watched in fascination as her mother quickly unlaced the woman’s corset, marveling at the layers of undergarments once hidden under the silk dress: the puffy petticoats, the whalebone frame, the knee-length bloomers.

  The woman who strode confidently into the room was now nude and stood in front of her mother and the Prayer Man. Surrendering herself to them, she stepped toward the elevated mattress and lay across the bed with her head and feet hanging over the edges. Marie-Marguerite’s mother placed a cloth on the woman’s abdomen, and onto the cloth laid a cross. Next to the cross, a chalice balanced precariously on the woman’s stomach. Then the mysterious chanting began.

  As Marie-Marguerite got older and earned her mother’s trust, the girl’s errands expanded beyond Montorgeuil and Les Halles. She once accompanied her mother and several of her mother’s friends to a beautiful new château in a small village not far from Versailles. Marie-Marguerite stayed in the coach while her mother conducted her business. The girl did not know whom her mother met, but the trip had obviously been profitable, as she treated the group to a lovely picnic in the Bois de Boulogne with some of the money she earned.

  By the time she was in her late teens, errands to châteaux and palaces became Marie-Marguerite’s responsibility. On a regular basis the elder Voisin opened a cabinet in the family home to which she alo
ne had the key. Inside, many small bottles containing powders of all colors lined the shelves: white, gray, black, and a shimmering blue-green. After mixing several of the powders together, Marie-Marguerite’s mother packaged the mixture in a small envelope on which she wrote careful instructions. Voisin then gave her daughter equally detailed instructions on which palace to go to, how to gain entry, and to whom the mysterious packages should be delivered.

  Marie-Marguerite took a shared coach to the palaces, which always made the girl nervous. She’d heard many stories circulated about young women being assaulted in the public carriages by opportunistic drivers or fellow passengers. After the seventh trip on her own, Marie-Marguerite refused to journey to Versailles or anywhere else, for that matter. Something had happened in the carriage. Something so terrible that she preferred to risk her mother’s anger than to make the journey again. And in the months that followed, she turned to Madame Lepère—Voisin’s business partner, fellow midwife, and abortionist—for help. Rather than visit her mother’s shack, she chose to give birth at Lepère’s home. Whatever loyalty she once felt toward her mother was now gone.

  17

  “The Sneakiest and Meanest Woman in the World”

  Unaware of the dark activities afoot in the Montorgeuil neighborhood, La Reynie worried about Brinvilliers’s menacing last words: “Half of the nobility have done the same things, if I felt like talking, I’d ruin them all!” Yet as much as the police chief would have liked to oversee every detail of his urban empire, there was no way one man could know everything that happened in a city the size of Paris. Every day a swarm of Parisians came to his castle-like Châtelet compound to demand retribution for actions that ranged from modest insult to murder. Thousands of criminals sat in his prisons awaiting trial. Any one of them could know something about ominous activities of the sort that Brinvilliers had hinted at.