Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

by Antonia Fraser

  A few weeks after Louise's departure, and shortly after the formal registration of Athénaïs's separation, the next batch of natural children was presented at court. It must have been obvious to that observant world that Athénaïs would fairly soon be adding to their number: her fifth child by the King, Louise-Marie, created Mademoiselle de Tours and nicknamed ‘Tou-Tou’, was born in November. (Tou-Tou was fortunate to be born after the official separation and was therefore, unlike her brothers and sister, not the fruit of that tricky Double Adultery.) Louise-Françoise, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Vexin were in the charge of their governess Françoise Scarron. The baby girl had to be carried and so did Maine, who with his lame leg could not yet walk at the age of four and a half. It was an anxious moment for Françoise, this thirty-eight-year-old woman of modest birth, with a marriage to a mere playwright behind her. But apart from the friendship with Athénaïs which had secured her position, Françoise already had another ally at the court. That was the King.

  Françoise d'Aubigné was born on 27 November 1635: she was thus three years older than the King, five years older than Athénaïs and nearly ten years older than Louise de La Vallière. From the first the circumstances of her life were unusual; indeed, one might go further and say that, by the standards of the time, they were adverse. Although she was not exactly born in a prison, as her enemies would later suggest, her father Constant was in prison at the time at Niort near Poitiers. Françoise was probably born close by his place of confinement.* Constant's crime was conspiracy against Richelieu, but this was not in fact his first spell in prison; earlier he had been accused of abduction and rape.

  Françoise's ancestry was not undistinguished: her grandfather Agrippa d'Aubigné, who died before she was born, had been a celebrated poet – but a Huguenot (Protestant) poet. Although Huguenots were still legally tolerated in the France of the 1630s following the Edict of Nantes forty years earlier, Richelieu had already annulled some of the political clauses to their advantage; Huguenot descent once again, like her father's disgrace, made Françoise an outsider. There was certainly a contrast with the conventionally Catholic upbringing of Louise, daughter of soldiers who served the King bravely, or the grandeur of Athénaïs's birth, a duke's daughter with her much-vaunted Mortemart blood.

  Françoise's mother, Jeanne de Cardhillac, a girl of sixteen when she got married, was the daughter of Constant's jailer. She was a Catholic, and Françoise had a Catholic baptism a few days after her birth at which her godmother was Suzanne de Baudean, daughter of the governor of the town, the Baron de Neuillant.14 The event itself and the connection were to stand Françoise in good stead. Although raised in the first instance as a Protestant, the essential Catholic baptism meant that she could always recover the official religion of the state without a ceremony of abjuration; while Suzanne, only nine at the time, would grow up to honour her commitment as godmother in proper style.

  Jeanne had already given birth to two sons, Constant and Charles, when the little girl who would be known in childhood as Bignette arrived; Constant died under mysterious circumstances at the age of eighteen but Charles d'Aubigné, only a year older than his sister, would grow up to constitute the kind of affliction no family needs and many families have. In any case, Bignette's true family life was not lived in the insalubrious atmosphere in and around the prison (although she visited her father on Sundays, watching him in silence as he played cards with his jailers). The magic place she loved, not only then but in recollection all her life, was the château of Mursay, where rivers met in a forested valley at Parthenay, not far from Niort.

  Beloved Mursay was the home of Constant's sister, the Marquise de Villette, who, in view of Constant's distressing circumstances and Jeanne's poverty, took Bignette in. Apart from her aunt and kindly uncle – ‘you acted as my Father in my childhood', as she wrote to the Marquis de Villette later – there were the three pretty fair-haired daughters, all older than herself, and the only son Philippe de Villette, born in 1632, who became an important brother figure.

  To the Marquise de Villette, little Bignette was in effect a fifth child. But she was a fifth child who was also a poor relation.* It was a state of affairs hardly likely to lessen Bignette's natural feelings of insecurity. Brought up in touch with luxury, she knew that it would not necessarily last into adulthood given that she was unlikely to have the dowry which even life in a convent necessitated. To accustom her to this, Bignette had no fire in her room, cast-off bonnets which had belonged to her glamorous cousins, and wooden shoes which began by being too big, so that she could grow into them – till then she must stuff them with straw. Nevertheless Bignette loved the Villettes, felt grateful to them and in general remembered these days at Mursay as the happiest times of her childhood.

  In time Constant was released. Relaxation and domesticity did not follow: rather, adventure and hazardous travel. When Bignette was eight and a half, in the spring of 1644, she rejoined her family in order to travel to the French West Indies.15 The two months of sea crossing were ghastly for all parties. Much later the former Bignette would tell the Bishop of Metz of how a fever on board apparently left her for dead; her corpse was about to be thrown overboard when her mother, giving her a last kiss, saw signs of life. ‘Ah, Madame,' commented the Bishop portentously, ‘one does not come back from such a distance for nothing.'

  They landed first at Guadeloupe. There however life did not radically improve. Jeanne was a strict mother. Bignette was given little liberty to taste the delights of a wild island and a different culture. Her education was conventional, pious (still Protestant) and took place indoors. Meanwhile the post of governor of the Isle of Marie-Galante turned out to be vacant. But after a brief sojourn there, the family settled in Martinique.* The unsatisfactory Constant returned to France, leaving Jeanne to be ‘both father and mother' to her children, as she put it herself. Forever combating poverty, Jeanne was a strong role model of female endurance under difficult circumstances for her daughter. Nor would it be surprising if Bignette, both from observation of her father and in conversation with her mother, derived a less than perfect image of the male sex.

  Another frightful journey followed when Jeanne took the family back to Europe in 1647 to join their father. But Constant was dead by the end of August. For Bignette at least it was back to the delights of Mursay and the mingled intimacy and hard work: for it was at this period that she was set to work in the farmyard and elsewhere, herding turkeys, going barefoot on occasion, although taking care to preserve her precious lady's complexion with a nose-mask.17

  It was what happened next which created, even if briefly, a real trauma in her life. It will be remembered that Bignette had been baptised a Catholic, although educated according to the Protestant mode with instruction on the Psalms and the Bible. Nevertheless Madame de Feuillant, mother of her godmother Suzanne, seized the opportunity to petition Anne of Austria about the fate of this little lost soul, and succeeded in taking her into a Catholic convent with a view to restoring her to the true faith. Bignette did not like the convent and there was a considerable struggle for her soul until, significantly, her true affection for one of the nuns there, Sister Celeste, persuaded her to (re)join the Catholic Church.

  Bignette made her Catholic First Communion for the sake of Sister Céleste, she said, not out of any religious principle. ‘I loved her more than I could possibly say. I wanted to sacrifice myself for her service,’ she wrote later.18 Once again it was a different trajectory from the innate piety of Louise and the devout family background of Athénaïs, at any rate where her mother was concerned.

  It was Madame de Feuillant who now brought Françoise, as Bignette had become, on a visit to Paris at the age of sixteen. There she was introduced to the intelligent, sophisticated ladies and gentlemen of the Marais whose patronage and friendship were to have a significant effect on her fortunes. It was not difficult to be friendly towards Françoise because she was by any standards an attractive young woman. The society of the Hotel Ra
mbouillet, and elsewhere at the homes of the Précieuses, liked what it saw: a serious, modest young person whose best feature was a pair of large, wide-set dark eyes. Madeleine de Scudéry waxed eloquent about them in a character sketch of Françoise under the name of Lyriane: ‘the most beautiful eyes in the world', she called them, ‘brilliant, soft, passionate and full of intelligence'. Furthermore ‘a soft melancholy’ pervaded the charms of Lyriane: her gaze was gentle and it was slightly sad.19

  Françoise's complexion – ‘pleasing if a little dark', Madeleine de Scudéry called it – must somehow have become in a measure tanned, despite all her precautions, for she was awarded the sobriquet of ‘ la belle Indienne'. Her mass of lustrous dark hair was however unqualifiedly admired. Françoise's face was a delightful heart-shape and if her nose was a little long, her mouth a little small and her chin a little plump, yet the general effect, as contemporaries agreed, was most appealing.

  It helped that Françoise when young was discreetly feminine in her tastes. Perfume, for example, played an important part in her life, and so did clothes, when she could afford them: a skirt of pink satin, black velvet corselets worn over white blouses, handkerchiefs of Genoese lace. Her confessor once pointed to her taste for fine petticoats (invisible but not inaudible): ‘You say you only wear very ordinary stuffs but when you fall to your knees at my feet [in the confessional] I hear the rustle of something rather out of the ordinary.20

  Her docile and apparently pliant character also made Françoise agreeable to the society in which she found herself. The years of dependency had filled her with a profound desire to please. Late in her life Françoise told Madame de Glapion: ‘I was what you call a good little girl,' always obedient and in particular loved by the servants because she tried to please them as well as their masters and mistresses. While her difficult upbringing might have made a subversive of some women, Françoise had on the contrary a strong sense of the hierarchy of society according to the divine will. A characteristic instruction to girls in her care was to avoid murmuring against the rich: ‘God has wanted to make them rich as He has wanted to make you poor’.21 (It was of course a philosophy which could also cover an upward trajectory in society: that too could be seen as according to the divine will.)

  Furthermore, she was desperate to secure the good opinion of respectable people: ‘That was my weakness,' as she put it. But it was of course a weakness which made her excellent company for these same respectable people she was so anxious to please. Equally her fervent concern for her own reputation – ‘it was my good name that I cared about' – meant she constituted no danger or challenge to other women.22 Or so it seemed then.

  It was during her expedition to Paris that Françoise first met the playwright Paul Scarron, who already by 1648 had described himself as ‘a Condénsation of human misery' thanks to the acute rheumatoid arthritis which twisted him unbearably. Later Scarron was amused and impressed by her letters, written from the country to a Mademoiselle de Saint-Herment, one of those useful female friends Françoise had acquired.* These letters were not what one expected from a girl ‘brought up in Niort' or, worse still, ‘the isles of America', as the West Indies were generally termed. So, in a sense, Scarron's relationship with Françoise began as the epistolary romance beloved of novelists in which letters to one party actually cause another party to fall in love.23

  Perhaps the playwright, twenty-five years older than Françoise and physically tormented, did not exactly fall in love. It was too late for that. What he did do in 1652, with the cheerful, worldly kindness which was one of his characteristics, was offer the poverty-stricken Françoise, whose mother had died two years earlier, a solution to her life. He would either provide the dowry necessary for a convent or he would marry her. And Françoise, for all her piety, was no fan of convents. Her first surviving letter of 1648 or 1649, imploring her aunt Madame de Villette to rescue her, had run: ‘You can't imagine what hell it is for me, this so-called House of God’.24 So she chose marriage.‡

  It is unlikely that Scarron was able to consummate the marriage fully if at all by this time. It was a question raised by the priest at their wedding, to Scarron's annoyance. ‘That is between Madame and me,' he retorted. That was true enough, and finally the details of what happened between Monsieur and Madame Scarron must remain a mystery. The fact that Françoise emerged from the experience of marriage at Scarron's death eight years later with a lifelong indifference if not aversion to sex, as being something rather unpleasant that men expected of women, might indicate that activity of some limited sort took place. Much later Françoise would write of herself to her scapegrace brother Charles, when giving marital advice, ‘as a woman who has never been married’.25 If she was being honest, that makes full consummation unlikely. Nevertheless it is only fair to point out that Françoise's attitude to sex within marriage, though weary at best, was a great deal more common among women of her generation than the free-wheeling enthusiasm of Athénaïs.

  Françoise certainly had no good words to say about marriage itself; when in August 1674 she was offered a convenient marriage to an unsavoury old duke she replied: ‘I have already got a singular position, envied by the whole world, without seeking out one which makes three-quarters of the human race unhappy.’ Twenty years later she was still preaching the same gloomy if realistic doctrine: ‘Don't hope for perfect happiness from marriage.’ The female sex would always be exposed to suffering because it was dependent: marriage was ‘the state where one experiences the most tribulations, even in the best'. And she had after all had early contacts with the high-born Parisian ladies who from their privileged positions sighed and complained of marriage as ‘slavery’.26

  The death of Scarron, on 6 October 1660 (shortly after that triumphal entry to Paris of Louis and his Queen which Françoise witnessed), left his widow once again plunged into poverty, and with debts in addition. But Françoise had preserved her precious reputation. It would have been easy for the pretty young wife of a cripple to enjoy romances; on the contrary, Françoise made a point of avoiding such encounters, going to her room after dinner when the company got too raucous. The story that she took part in ‘gallantries' with the rakish Marquis de Villarceaux has no contemporary backing and a great deal of evidence to the contrary, starting with Françoise's obsession with her virtue.*

  The woman who told it thirty years later, claiming to have lent her own accommodation for the affair, was the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. Once so beautiful that she could seduce any man of any age, fathers and sons a speciality, and perhaps grandfathers too, such was the longevity of her reign, Ninon in old age became jealous of the august position of her erstwhile modest friend. And in her report, Ninon managed to have it both ways. Françoise had indeed had an affair, but she had been ‘clumsy' in her love-making (unlike Ninon was the implication).* La Rochefoucauld had a maxim on the subject of ladies and their gallantries which seems relevant to the case of Françoise. Plenty of women, he wrote, had no affairs at all, but there was seldom a woman who had only one.29 Since Villarceaux was the sole named candidate (and that so many years later), Françoise was surely in the former category.

  Laminated by her virtue, Françoise was able to enjoy the patronage and friendship of other women, one of these being Athénaïs. Queen Anne was persuaded to grant her a pension. Aristocrats such as the Duchesse de Richelieu and the Marquise de Montchevreuil had her to stay for periods in their country houses unofficially acting as something between a secretary and a housekeeper. One of the Montchevreuil children was lame in the leg: a foretaste of the problems of the Duc du Maine.

  Françoise was pliant but she was by no means weak and she had a strong practical streak. Above all, she loved being with children, teaching them to read and seeing to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare, by teaching the catechism. This addiction might sound an obvious feminine trait, but in fact there was no sentimentalisation of children at this date; such a profound liking for and interest in children was yet another
characteristic which made Françoise unusual for her time.

  In the course of her work with and for children, Françoise also encountered several of the illegitimate ones of whom there were many examples in society, not only in royal circles. Scarron's sister, also called Françoise Scarron, was the mistress of the Duc de Tresmes-Gescres, having been seduced by him at fifteen; she had five illegitimate children. At one point Françoise d'Aubigné spent a year in the same house as her sister-in-law and family.* In 1667 she included her brother Charles's bastards Toscan and Chariot in a little nursery.

  In so many ways therefore Françoise seemed the ideal person to take on the prestigious – but tricky – post of governess to the royal bastards. Where her religious nature was concerned, the fact that in 1666 she took on a confessor in the shape of the Abbé Gobelin made her even more suitable. Gobelin, whose correspondence with Françoise would become a vital source for her true feelings, was not only profoundly spiritual himself, but also intellectually brilliant. He demanded – and got – Françoise's obedience over many years, for that was part of the bargain. As Françoise confided to the Marquise de Montchevreuil, she knew that once she had chosen Gobelin, she must obey him in everything.