Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

  Soon thereafter, Henri received the news that the prince had fled with Charlotte to the safety of the Netherlands. Henri’s adviser the duc de Sully reported, “When I came to the Louvre I found the King in the Queen’s chamber, walking back and forth, with his head reclined and his hands folded behind his back.” The king said, “Well, our man is gone and has carried all with him.” He added, “I am lost.”20 Henri kept to his rooms for several days after this, locked in deep depression, seeing no one.

  Meanwhile, Spain’s Philip III, continuing his kingdom’s tradition of stirring up trouble with France, assured the prince de Condé of Spain’s support in his just struggle against the lascivious king. Philip offered Condé a home in Spain or, if he wished, in the sections of Italy under Spanish domination. Meanwhile, the pope—appealed to by Henri, Philip of Spain, and the prince de Condé, and unwilling to anger either Spain or France—attempted to play the peacemaker. For several months, European politics were roiled by Henri’s infatuation with a fifteen-year-old girl and the stubborn refusal of her husband to deliver her up to his king.

  As the weeks grew into months Henri’s eagerness to reclaim Charlotte became an obsession. He wrote to his agent in Brussels, “I am so tortured by my anguish that I am only skin and bone. Everything bothers me; I avoid company, and if, in order to do justice to other people, I do let myself be drawn into some gathering, instead of cheering me, it only succeeds in deadening me.”21

  The envoy from the court of Spain wrote to his master, “I have been told that the King of France would give the Dauphin and all his other sons for the Princess de Condé which leads me to believe that he will risk everything for his love. His health is altered; he has lost sleep and some people are beginning to believe that he is starting to go mad. He who has so much loved society now remains alone for hours at a time, walking up and down in his melancholy.”22

  In March came an about-face. Charlotte’s father sued the prince de Condé for a divorce from his daughter. Her husband agreed to the divorce, and Charlotte decided to return to France and become the king’s mistress. Condé had grown weary of fighting the king of France, and perhaps Charlotte preferred a glittering life at court to a dull exile. But Henri’s enemies were unwilling to permit such a prize as Charlotte to return to France. They refused her permission to travel. Henri declared war on them and raised an army.

  But Henri was destined never to see his Charlotte again. On May 14, 1610, while sitting in his carriage with his counselors, Henri was stabbed in the chest by the madman Ravaillac and died moments later. Charlotte quickly returned to her husband with her tail between her legs and through abject self-abasement made amends with Henri’s widow, Queen Marie, the new queen regent and now the most powerful person in France.

  Some sixty years later, Henri’s grandson, Louis XIV, also suffered the recriminations of a defiant husband. Athénaïs de Mortemart, who had been angling in vain for the position of Louis XIV’s mistress, gave up the chase and married the marquis de Montespan in 1663. It was not an advantageous match for the bride, who was already the daughter of a marquis far wealthier than her husband. Dark and dashing, the marquis de Montespan’s finer qualities were unaccompanied by good breeding or common sense. Soon after the wedding he spent his small fortune—and his wife’s dowry—and ran headlong into debt.

  The marquis was a soldier, enjoying to the full a seventeenth-century soldier’s perquisites—looting, raping, and burning. He was on campaign months at a time, rarely going long periods without getting himself into scrapes. On one occasion he seduced a girl, dressed her in a man’s uniform, and assigned her a position in the cavalry—until her family showed up with the local bailiff. Despite his long absences, his wife gave him two children in rapid succession, a girl in 1664 and a boy the following year. She quickly dumped both children on her husband’s relatives so she could devote herself fully to the pleasures of court.

  In 1666 her swashbuckler husband departed on a long campaign in the south of France. By this time, the marquis’s garish charms must have worn thin on his polished wife. By 1667 she had succeeded in becoming the king’s maîtresse-en-titre.

  Though the marquis must surely have heard of his wife’s exalted position as king’s mistress, he at first made no noise about it. Perhaps he was eager to see what financial rewards and honors would come his way. When he returned to Versailles in 1668, he found his wife pregnant by the king. Worse, Madame de Montespan had, as one courtier put it, “in acquiring a taste for the King’s caresses, developed a distaste for her husband’s.”23

  The marquis reacted like the madman which he was commonly thought to be. He ranted and raved to anyone who would listen about the immorality of the king’s affair with his wife—though many thought this newfound piety odd in a man known to have stormed convents to deflower girls. Some court ladies were so shocked at his language that they took to their beds with the vapors. He once entered his wife’s apartments, soundly boxed her ears, and disappeared. Rumor had it that the marquis was frequenting the vilest whorehouses to catch a disease and pass it on through his wife to the king. If this was true, there was a major flaw in his logic. Madame de Montespan refused to sleep with her embarrassing husband.

  One day the marquis drove up to the royal château of Saint-Germain in a carriage draped in black—mourning for his wife, he explained—decorated on the corners with four giant pairs of stags’ horns, the traditional symbol of a cuckolded husband. The king had him imprisoned briefly and then exiled to his estates in the south. But the marquis was not finished. He invited all his friends and relatives to his castle for an elaborate mock funeral for Madame de Montespan, mourning her death “from coquetry and ambition.”24 He stood by the main door with his two small children, all clad in black, somberly accepting condolences on their loss.

  Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, noted that the king could have bribed the marquis into complacence. “Monsieur de Montespan is an arrant opportunist,” she wrote. “Had the King been willing to pay off more handsomely, he would have been reconciled.”25

  A year after the mock funeral, the crazed marquis attacked a convent to debauch a young girl who was hiding from him. In the scuffle, the girl, her mother, the father superior, and several peasants were hurt. Louis took this opportunity to send the marquis to prison, from which he escaped south into Spain, as the king had hoped. But at the pious Spanish court, the marquis complained so loudly of his wife’s adultery with the king of France that Louis decided he had better pardon him and let him come back to France, where he could not damage his reputation internationally.

  This brush with the law effectively subdued the marquis. He remained in the exile prescribed for him in the south of France, managing his estates, farms, and vineyards, hunting, gaming, drinking, and carousing. But Louis had his spies keep a careful eye on him. The king heard rumors that he intended to claim Athénaïs’s numerous royal bastards as his own, born within their marriage, and carry all of them off to Spain, where even Louis’s long reach would not be able to dislodge them. In 1670, when the marquis was permitted to visit Paris, Louis wrote to his minister Colbert, “Monsieur de Montespan is a madman. Keep a close watch on him…in order to deprive him of any pretext for lingering on in Paris…. I know that he has threatened to see his wife…. Get him out of Paris as quickly as possible.”26

  That same year, Athénaïs petitioned the courts to grant her a legal separation from her husband so that an abduction, or a claim to her children with the king, would be illegal. The court dragged its feet for four years despite, or perhaps because of, the king’s insistence on a speedy resolution. These moral arbiters were not impressed with the king’s profligate lifestyle. When in 1674 the decree did come through, it read, in part, that Madame de Montespan, “the high and mighty dame…does and shall continue to domicile separately from her husband…. he, furthermore, henceforward…[is] forbidden to frequent or haunt his lady.”27

  History must chuckle over the twists and turns of fate.
By 1680 Madame de Montespan had lost her position as king’s mistress but stubbornly remained at court. In 1691, at age fifty, she was banished from Versailles and languished at her estates in the country.

  Chastened by her long exile, the former royal mistress was persuaded by her confessor to “ask pardon of her husband and submit herself into his hands,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon. “She wrote to him, by her own pen, in terms of total submission, offering to return to his roof if he deigned to receive her; and if not, to betake herself to whatever destination he should prescribe to her.”28

  Madame de Montespan was as fortunate with her request as Madame de Pompadour would be a century later. The duc de Saint-Simon reported, “She got credit for the gesture without having to suffer the consequences. Monsieur de Montespan sent back word that he wanted neither to receive her under his roof nor to make any prescription to her; neither to hear from or of her ever again in his life.”29

  Surely the most bitter pill that Madame de Montespan had to swallow was her husband’s welcome at court in the late 1690s. While she continued to suffer humiliating exile, the marquis de Montespan, his former recklessness tempered with age, moved to Versailles. The marquis’s son with his wife, born in 1665, was favored by the king, and for the son’s sake the father was welcomed. Court gossips clucked over the amusing spectacle of the marquis, who had created such a ruckus about his wife’s affair, calmly playing cards with her two bastard daughters by the king. As Elizabeth Charlotte wrote, “Even he must have seen the humor of the situation because he would occasionally turn around and give a little smirk.”30

  5. Unceasing Vigilance—The Price of Success

  They lay siege to the heart of a Prince as to a citadel.

  —LOUIS XIV

  UNLIKE THE QUEEN, WHOSE POSITION WAS CAST IN STONE, the mistress’s was made of far flimsier stuff. There would be no peace for her, no rest. Having obtained the great prize, the new mistress could not sit back and enjoy her rewards. She could not look around her magnificent rooms with satisfaction, or smile contentedly as she toyed with her glittering jewelry—not if it meant letting her guard down for a moment.

  “Every woman was born with the ambition to become the King’s Favorite,” wrote Primi Visconti, an Italian fortune-teller who lived at Louis XIV’s court.1 There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women hoping to attain the position, which meant toppling the current maîtresse-en-titre, even as she had unseated her predecessor. Retaining the position usually took more effort than winning it. In fact, the position of royal mistress was like a marathon where the finish line kept moving.

  To defend her turf, the maîtresse-en-titre kept an unblinking eye on pretty women attempting to gain the king’s attention. Prostitutes, chambermaids, and the like had no hope of rising to the lofty position of royal mistress and therefore posed no threat. Though these minor infidelities might hurt, the maîtresse-en-titre had to pretend that they were too insignificant for her to notice. Some royal mistresses even procured lower-class women for the king to distract his attention from the real menace of beautiful noblewomen.

  But when a smiling countess insinuated her way into the king’s company, the savvy royal mistress would call in her troops. She had a bevy of friendly courtiers and well-paid servants ready to whisper to the king that the woman in question had a venereal disease, a greedy family, or total lack of discretion. Such whispers usually shrank the size of the king’s interest.

  Most of the mistress’s work to seek and destroy her enemies had to be conducted behind the king’s back. The mistress could not afford to degenerate into a nagging jealous wife. The monarch already had one of those whom he could not get rid of. But a nagging jealous mistress could be banished at a snap of the king’s fingers.

  “There is the scent of fresh meat,” wrote Madame de Sévigné to her daughter with acidic candor.2 When the royal eye wandered, as it did with alarming frequency, there was great speculation as to whether the object of kingly desires would prove a meaningless flirtation or if she would completely replace the existing power structure at court. Whatever the king’s decision, there was always celebration on the winning side. In 1677 Madame de Sévigné wrote of yet another victory of ten-year veteran Madame de Montespan over fleeting rivals for the affections of Louis XIV.

  “Ah, my daughter, what a triumph at Versailles!” Madame de Sévigné gushed. “What pride redoubled! What a solid reestablishment of favor!…There is evidence of added zest in the relation—all the sweeter, now, after lovers’ quarrels and reconciliations. What a reaffirmation of possession! I spent an hour in her—Madame de Montespan’s—chamber…the very air charged with joy and prosperity!”3

  Royal mistresses maneuvered adeptly in an environment rife with intrigue, where the fundamental human matters of life and death and love meant little compared to the crumbs of success or specks of failure at court. To courtiers a little nod from the king in passing spelled exultant victory, the lack of a nod humiliating defeat. The court was a world of twisted values, strange honor, and disgraces incomprehensible to later generations.

  In 1671 François Vatel, the chief butler for the prince de Condé, was instructed to prepare a lavish feast for Louis XIV. Before the royal visit, Vatel hadn’t slept for twelve nights running after he had been two roasts short of a full banquet for hundreds. “I have lost my honor,” he said to a friend who had noticed his disquiet. “This is a disgrace which is more than I can bear.”4 Then the next morning, when his order of fish did not arrive at the expected time to prepare for the king’s feast, Vatel ran himself through with his sword. The cart that took his body to the parish church was passed on the road by the cart delivering the fish.

  Just as exquisite satins and fine lace hid the reeking flea-bitten bodies of courtiers, so did warm smiles and polite words conceal the razor-sharp weapons brandished on the battlefield of the court. Women, encased in the deceiving armor of beauty and charm, were ready to wreak the most ruthless vengeance against rivals, and all who strode smiling down the gilded halls had fear stabbing at their hearts.

  Some courtiers, at least, were authentic about their inauthenticity. One wrote, “It is a country where the joys are visible but false, and the sorrows are hidden but real.”5 And a visitor to Versailles remarked, “A genuine sentiment is so rare, that when I leave Versailles, I sometimes stand still in the street to see a dog gnaw a bone.”6

  Black Magic

  The royal mistress who went to the greatest lengths to obtain and then retain her position against rivals was Athénaïs de Montespan. Ravishingly beautiful, venomously cunning, Madame de Montespan hoped for several years to replace Louis XIV’s maîtresse-en-titre Louise de La Vallière. But the king was unmoved by Madame de Montespan’s flirtation. “She tries hard,” he told his brother, “but I’m not interested.”7 In 1667, hoping to break up the relationship, Madame de Montespan visited a witch for assistance.

  La Voisin, as she was called, looked much older than her thirty-five years. She lived in a dark and crumbling house on the outskirts of Paris, surrounded by a large, unkempt garden. Garbed in flowing robes embroidered with ancient symbols, La Voisin, along with her colleagues, performed magic tricks, read palms and tarot cards, cast horoscopes, babbled in tongues, and held séances for a steep fee.

  Her more innocuous services included offering lotions to beautify the skin and spells to increase breast size or firm up sagging thighs. Her more sinister services included sticking pins in dolls to incapacitate and kill an enemy, performing abortions, providing poison to slip to annoying husbands, and celebrating Black Masses with a dead baby’s blood while preparing her magic potions. For years the carriages of the rich and famous lined up outside her house as her patrons vied with each other for her services, offering her rich rewards. But Madame de Montespan had no need of potions to improve her breasts or thighs. She wanted the king to forsake Louise and fall in love with her.

  Louise de La Vallière was an unlikely object of black magic. Extremely religious, she c
ame from a noble but obscure family and by a stroke of good fortune, found herself at Versailles and soon after in the young king’s arms. The abbé de Choisy reported that Louise “had an exquisite complexion, blond hair, blue eyes, a sweet smile…an expression once tender and modest.”8 Though all agreed she was a lovely girl, tenderness and modesty did not fare well on the bloody battlefield of Versailles, a court where a healthy slathering of etiquette and a splash of perfume barely disguised savage ambition and vicious greed.

  After five years as royal mistress, Louise sensed Louis was growing restless. Heavily pregnant with her fourth child, she invited her good friend Athénaïs de Montespan to join her private meals with the king. Louise knew that her friend was a witty, scintillating conversationalist—all that she, Louise, was not. Ironically, dull Queen Marie-Thérèse was also pregnant and likewise needed help in amusing the king. She considered all the ladies she knew and also selected her dear friend Madame de Montespan to entertain the king during meals. Both queen and mistress committed a naive and deadly mistake.

  Madame de Montespan used these opportunities of dining with the king to slip love potions into his wine and onto his meat—disgusting concoctions of dead baby’s blood, bones, and intestines, along with parts of toads and bats. Suddenly Louis—either because of her sparkling conversation or her potions—fell in love with Madame de Montespan. With no remorse toward the queen or Louise, she triumphantly affixed the seal of betrayal upon the altar of friendship.

  After the birth of Louise’s fourth royal bastard in 1667, she never became pregnant again, while Madame de Montespan remained almost constantly in this interesting condition. In order to protect his new mistress from the legal maneuvers of her insanely jealous husband, Louis arranged for Louise de La Vallière and Madame de Montespan to share a joint apartment in the palace. A court joke became, “His Majesty has gone to join the ladies.”9 No one knew for sure which one he visited. Or did he visit both at once? Malicious tongues wagged.