Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (29 page)

In the end Angélique was made a duchess: the traditional farewell gift of the sovereign. She also received a visit from Madame de Maintenon, who argued with her for two hours about the need to give up the guilty relationship. At one point the wretched Angélique exclaimed: ‘You speak of throwing off a passion as if it was as easy as changing a chemise!’
²⁴
A romantic if foolish character herself, who loved to dress in colours which matched the King's clothes, she could not understand the pious practicality of someone like Françoise. Angélique's ill health increased, and she began to show signs of lung disease. She retired to the convent of Port-Royal and endured a protracted death, probably caused in the end by a pulmonary abscess.

Louis's general policy was to ignore those mistresses who left the court: he never, for example, visited Sister Louise de La Miséricorde in her convent. (That was left to Athénaïs, who on one famous occasion made the sauce for the convent meal, food, as has been noted, being one of her interests in life.) But Louis, either out of tenderness or a bad conscience, did pay a visit to Angélique
in extremis
on his way from hunting. She saw the tears in his eyes – how could anyone, let alone Louis, fail to cry at the sight of a girl of twenty about to die? – and according to one story, reconciled herself to death as a result: ‘I die happy since I have seen my King weep.’ It was guilt, perhaps, that made Louis give money for an annual service in Angélique's memory, something once again he would do for no other mistress.
Sic transit gloria mundi,
commented Madame de Sévigné: it was the same allusion to the transitory nature of worldly glory which Louise had had inscribed on the pillar of her farewell picture by Mignard.
²⁵

The withdrawal of Angelique, and the effective ousting of Athénaïs from the King's intimate affections, paved the way for the more public ascendancy of Françoise. Athénaïs received the rank and rights of a duchess (she could not receive the actual title because her separated husband refused to be elevated from his Marquisate). She was also given the post of Superintendent of the Queen's Household, the most prestigious female office at court, something Louis had always declined to accord her. But the public role which pointed to the future was that given to Madame de Maintenon.

January 1680 saw the arrival in France of the Dauphin's bride, the Bavarian princess who had taken the place so much coveted by Marie-Louise. A new royal meant a new household: it was Madame de Maintenon who was made the Dauphine's Second Dame d'Atour (Mistress of the Robes). She now had in public estimation that respectability and status which by her own admission meant so much to her. This appointment was a tribute to those conversations, perhaps two hours a day, which the King was beginning to have with her. This man who had experienced most forms of heterosexual relationship was, wrote Madame de Sévigné, tasting for the first time the delights of friendship. In consequence of her appointment Françoise had to adopt the grave costume which went with the post: ‘Now I belong to a princess I shall always wear black,’ she told Gobelin.
²⁶
*

Marianne-Victoire, Princess of Bavaria and now Dauphine of France, was a year older than her bridegroom. She had little to commend her by the standards of the French court except French blood: her grandmother had been Christine de France, Duchess of Savoy. She was on her way to being an intellectual, speaking German, French and Italian with some knowledge of Latin. Marianne-Victoire was uninterested in the hunting which was her new husband's passion (she disliked exercise of any sort), nor in the gambling which the court loved; she preferred poetry and music. The trouble was that she was distinctly plain: Liselotte called her ‘horribly ugly’, an exaggeration perhaps, but then Liselotte was now displaced from being the Second Lady at Versailles to being the Third. Madame de Sévigné wrote more detachedly that it was odd how Marianne-Victoire's various features did not combine to make an attractive whole, her forehead being too high, her nose a little bulbous, even if she did have lively and penetrating dark eyes. But the fact that Marianne-Victoire was interested in the new art of conversation endeared her to the King, who not only respected her rank (the Second Lady would always have been sacred to him), but positively enjoyed her staid but intelligent company.
²⁸
And she was devout too, something that was becoming more and more important to him, as in his conversations with Françoise.

There is a comparison to be made at this date with another gallant King who was at last settling down – with his mistress. Charles II was eight years older than his first cousin, and thus celebrated his fiftieth birthday in May 1680. He too had led a life of extreme profligacy, in which one
maîtresse en titre
was surrounded by a changing cast of lesser mistresses. For many years the resplendent foremost position had been occupied by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, whose sensual beauty in youth, ‘the sleepy eye that spoke the melting soul’, made her one of Lely's favourite subjects. She had much in common with Athénaïs, including high fertility, an awkward husband and a tempestuous nature which alternated torrents of jealousy and high-spirited laughter.

But Charles, with the growing indolence of age, had settled for a quieter life. His current
maîtresse en titre,
Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was a highly domesticated little French-woman, nicknamed ‘Fubbs’ (Chubby) by the King for her plump figure and childish face; he even named one of his ships the
Fubbs
in her honour. Charles's unhappily barren Portuguese Queen, Catherine of Braganza, found Fubbs a great deal more congenial than the insolent Barbara: she even protected her when Fubbs was attacked publicly for her Catholicism. There was therefore something like a contented domestic triangle in what proved to be the last years of Charles II's life. In France a contented domestic triangle was also in the making.

Louise Portsmouth's relationship with King Charles had been sexual in origin, however cosy it had become. To return to Louis XIV in 1680 and his demure conversationalist Françoise (who was incidentally fifteen years older than the French mistress across the Channel): was he by this time sleeping with her? In short, was the role of Mistress of the Robes to the Dauphine, accorded to her at this date, a reward or a recognition of a new role? Or was it perhaps neither of these things, but an inducement to adopt a new role in the future? There is considerable difference of opinion among biographers over the date on which the pair first became lovers, and a ten-year range of suggested timings, starting as early as 1673.
²⁹
*
In the absence of any absolute certainty, two things become crucial: Françoise's known character, developed over the forty-five years of an often troubled life, and her correspondence with her confessor.

Taking her character first, Françoise was certainly capable of feminine jealousy as we have seen, including rivalry for the attentions of the King with her erstwhile employer Athénaïs. But she was no female Tartuffe, a scheming hypocrite who outwardly preached one thing and lived another. Her piety was sincere and her concern for the King's salvation was genuine. So was the friendship she offered him. At the same time life had made of her a realist. If occasionally priggish, she was not a prude, as her down-to-earth advice to girls in her care would show. She mocked one who was horrified when her father used the word ‘culotte’: as if a mere ‘arrangement of letters’ made something immodest. And she laughed at those who could only bring themselves to discuss pregnancy in whispers – despite it being mentioned in the Bible.
³⁰
In any case, six years at court, if nothing else, had surely convinced her that the King would be with difficulty weaned away from the pleasures of illicit sex altogether.

In a significant step the new Mistress of the Robes actually persuaded the King to ‘return’ to his wife in the summer of 1680 and sleep with her again from time to time: something which made Marie-Thérèse intensely happy.
†
This good deed was all part of Françoise's picture to herself (and her confessor) of the work-for-salvation policy she was committed to at court. Gradually it became evident that there might be some kind of price to pay for all this good work. Angélique might fade and lose her charms but it was by no means out of the question that the King's eye would fall upon another pretty moppet at court. There might be further bastards (how providential that Angélique's son had died!): after all, as the cheerful Gascon proverb had it, ‘A man can beget as long as he can lift a sheaf of straw.’
³¹
Perhaps friendship – that hitherto unknown territory to the King, was not quite enough to keep the King safe.

The evidence of Françoise's correspondence with Gobelin points delicately to the possibility of compromise some time in the future. In a letter of 27 September 1679 for example she wrote that she was determined to profit from the instructions he had sent to her ‘and make up by charities for the bad things I am doing’.
³²
This is of course the conventional language of a penitent to her confessor, but it also points to the bargain Françoise was beginning to make with herself (and hopefully God, via her confessor). Good deeds could atone for other deeds which were not quite so good; in short the motto of the Jesuits might be discreetly applied, that the end justified the means.

All this was not immediate. It is surely inconceivable that Françoise was sleeping with the King at the time when she was lecturing Angelique on the need to throw away her passion in March 1680. The appointment to be the Second Mistresss of the Robes was therefore a reward for her services and a recognition of her value to the King – that value not yet, if it ever would be in the true sense of the word, sexual. Significantly, Louis made a public communion at Pentecost 1680, which coupled with the decline of Angélique's charms and his staged return to the Queen's bed, seems to indicate at least a partial repentance for past misdeeds.

At the same time Madame de Sévigné reported in early June that Madame de Maintenon's long interviews with the King were ‘making everyone wonder’; her favour was growing all the time, and that of Madame de Montespan was diminishing.
³³
It was true. At the start of 1680, that inviolable position Athénaïs had attained for herself, with her apartments, her children, her regulation hours of talk with the King every evening, was apparently under threat. But the danger in this case did not come from the Catholic Church. It came from the heart of seventeenth-century evil: allegations of poison.

* Madame de Sévigné, attending for rheumatism, described a regime of thermal baths interspersed with painful jets of boiling hot or icy water, which was much like that of modern hydros. The little underground ‘theatre’ where this took place made her think of Purgatory.

* The librettist Quinault was briefly sacked for the satire, giving the Mortemarts an opportunity to push forward their favourite La Fontaine, but Lully did not suffer, Louis acting as godfather to his son shortly afterwards.
¹⁴

* Louis XIV had once considered Mary, elder daughter of James Duke of York, for his son, although (like Liselotte) she was a Protestant; it is an interesting speculation what the consequences of this union would have been. Mary's actual marriage to William of Orange led to the Protestant takeover and the rule of King William and Queen Mary.

* From this regulation court dress, which she had to wear for ten years, sprang the many slurs on Madame de Maintenon as a crone forever clothed in black. Françoise in fact preferred brightness to black, and when young loved blue above all other colours.
²⁷

* The main theories and their supporters are listed in the Notes.

† Marie-Thérèse, at nearly forty-two, had last given birth eight years previously; one supposes that the King had ceased his marital attentions when the fact that she was past childbearing became evident.

CHAPTER 10
Madame Now

Madame de Maintenon is now Madame de
Maintenant.

– Madame de Sévigné, September 1681

T
he Marquise de Brinvilliers, a notorious poisoner, was tortured and executed in July 1676; her tiny body was then burnt in a colossal fire, and her ashes scattered to the winds. It says something for the customs of the time that Madame de Sévigné, the most civilised woman of her age, took great pains to watch the process and was disappointed that the packed crowds meant that ‘I only saw a mob-cap'. Madame de Sévigné went on to fantasise about the effect of the dispersal of the murderess's ashes: ‘so we shall inhale her, and by absorbing the little vital spirits we shall become subject to some poisoning humour, which will surprise us all.’
¹

Whatever the mythical potency of the guilty Marquise's remains, it was certainly true that during 1679 a first-class crisis brewed on the subject of poisonings and poisoners, in which some celebrated names were mentioned by notorious criminals already under threat of death. And for one moment the ashes blew close to the King with the invocation of the name of the Marquise de Montespan. So began the temporary implication of Athénaïs, banished from royal favour but not the royal presence, in that brutal labyrinth of an episode known as the Affair of the Poisons.
*

The arrest of Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, on suspicion of witchcraft (a capital offence) in March 1679 was the effective start of it all. La Voisin was a supplier of potions of many different sorts to the great ladies of the court, and has as a result been felicitously described as ‘a duchess among witches’.
³
La Fontaine airily summed up her various talents: whether you wanted to keep your lover or lose your husband, straightaway you went off to La Voisin for assistance. The solution to both these annoying problems might be powders, aphrodisiac or the reverse, and certainly La Voisin supplied a great many powders in her time. There was also the question of horoscopes, spells, black magic and even that blasphemous use of inverted ceremonial known as a Black Mass. The contemporary view of black magic in any aspect was expressed by Furetière in his
Dictionnaire Universel
as follows: ‘A detestable art which employs the invocation of devils and uses them to accomplish things beyond the force of nature.’
⁴

Here a distinction must be drawn between the various functions La Voisin was supposed to perform. Supplying aphrodisiacs, which might or might not work, was a very different matter from providing poisons. Similarly, a visit to La Voisin to enquire about the future – of a love affair, for example – was a harmless activity; consultation about a horoscope might have something naïve about it but it was hardly evil (otherwise a great many people down the ages to the present day would have to be Condémned). To take part in a Black Mass on the other hand, with its use of the human body as an altar, with a murdered child's body and blood as sacraments, was something so blasphemous by the standards of the seventeenth century (to say nothing of its horror by any standards) that no Catholic could have done it without the deliberate intention of rejecting conventional religion.

La Voisin described herself as ‘a practitioner of chiromancy, a student of physiognomy', arts she said she had learned at the knee of her mother, also a sorceress. She named an enormous number of suspects on her arrest and was finally executed a year later. As a result of her revelations a tribunal unofficially but graphically known as the Chambre Ardente (Burning Chamber) was set up under La Reynie, the Chief of Police. It sat until July 1682. Over four hundred cases were heard, over three hundred arrests were ordered, thirty-four people were executed, nearly thirty more sent to the galleys or banished. Crimes varied, like the penalties, from poisonings to the use of horoscopes: it was, quite literally, a witch-hunt.

The court began to feel the heat when the name of Marie Mancini's elder sister Olympe, Comtesse de Soissons, was mentioned as having poisoned her husband, who died in 1673. Although the latest research on the subject suggests that Olympe was not guilty, she fled to Flanders in January 1680 and later on to Spain, leaving her large family of children behind. She had long lost the favour of the King – memories of the amorous past they had shared had faded, while her mischief-making caused Louis intense irritation. Olympe had lost her position as Superintendent of the Household and Louis was surely relieved to see her go. Another Mancini sister, Marianne, the ‘spontaneous and bold' Duchesse de Bouillon, was ‘unperturbed' by similar charges of planning to harm her husband: she appeared in front of the tribunal accompanied by the aforesaid husband as well as the lover who was supposed to benefit. It was a gesture of high style which succeeded. The Duchesse did not flee.
⁵

The name of Athénaïs was not introduced until comparatively late in the proceedings, by which time La Voisin was dead. Crucially, La Voisin had never mentioned the favourite under torture, although she implicated twenty other people. Another conspirator named Falastre, who did name Athénaïs (under torture), withdrew the allegation on the eve of his death. La Voisin's evidence on the subject of the favourite came second-hand via her daughter Marie-Marguerite. This was not a very convincing route, since Marie-Marguerite was desperate to do something, anything, which would spare her torture and execution.

The suggestion that Athénaïs had taken part in a Black Mass, her voluptuous naked body stretched out as an altar, with a rogue priest performing the ‘ceremony', was frankly preposterous. Athénaïs's piety was genuine, as much part of her character as the radiant sexuality which had charmed the King for so long. She once gave a memorable dismissal to the Duchesse d'Uzès, who queried her sedulous church-going in view of her immoral life: ‘Because I commit one sin [i.e. adultery] it does not mean that I commit them all.'
⁶
This declaration should always be borne in mind where Athénaïs is concerned. In the years to come she would show herself almost as devout as Louise de La Vallière, although her expression of her piety was less extreme. If employing black magic – ‘the invocation of devils' – put a seventeenth-century Catholic in danger of hell, participation in the murderous blasphemy of the Black Mass would have Condémned anyone beyond a doubt – not only in the eyes of the Church but in the fearful imagination of Athénaïs, the Catholic in question.
*

Equally preposterous were the allegations that the
maîtresse en titre
had also procured poisons ‘to accomplish things beyond the force of nature', in Furetiere's phrase – that is, with the intention of killing the King. How on earth would the death of Louis have benefited his long-term mistress? Her entire position in material terms depended on his favour, her lavish lifestyle, including her splendid apartments, her gems, her money, her house at Clagny; furthermore, status was equally important to her self-esteem, and the King was showing every sign of respecting that, even if the sexual bond had been broken. There was no question that the accession of the Dauphin to the throne (with her abiding adversary Marie-Thérèse as Queen Mother) would have led to disgrace and probably banishment from court.

As to allegations of other poisonings – did Angélique receive a bowl of poisoned milk? – these were so endemic to the French court, and indeed the society of that time, that any hostility expressed, followed by some kind of illness or death, was all too easily transformed into an accusation of poisoning.
⁷
(Remember how the Chevalier de Lorraine had been falsely accused of poisoning Henriette-Anne simply because they were on bad terms at the time of her death.) Liselotte for example, who had a vindictive streak in her apparently jolly, extrovert nature, accused Madame de Maintenon of poisoning both the minister Colbert and the architect Mansart. Athénaïs was of a far higher rank than the wretched old women who got into quarrels with their neighbours and were duly burned as witches when the same neighbours collapsed from some common malady of the time. But her situation was essentially the same. Her unsurprising jealousy of Angélique, her role as furious Juno to Angelique's innocently lovely Io in the opera
Isis,
was all too easily transformed into an accusation of poisoning when the lethal ashes of the Marquise de Brinvilliers were blowing in the wind.

Where Athénaïs, like many of her friends, was probably guilty, if that is the right word, was in seeking aphrodisiacs from La Voisin: ‘powders for love’.
⁸
The mention of her waiting-women in this connection, the saucy Demoiselle des Oeillets, who had probably had a child by the King in 1676, and another known as Catau, is perfectly plausible. No doubt they visited La Voisin on behalf of their mistress (and perhaps Oeillets on her own account too), especially since one date cited was 1678, when Athénaïs was losing her sexual hold over the King. Catau was said to have had her palm read: another fairly innocent pursuit despite the Church's prohibition. The name of Athénaïs's sister-in-law the Marquise de Vivonne was also cited. This behaviour might be louche but it was hardly heinous.

Aphrodisiacs were a subject of prodigious interest in the seventeenth century, as indeed they have been in every century down to the present one: like contraception, the need brought the solution, or hopefully the solution. (The same is true about recourse to horoscopes in time of personal anguish.) Cantharides – taken from the wing covers of the ‘Spanish fly' beetle – and other ground-up substances were advocated, including extract of toad and snake. When Margaret Lucas, one of Queen Henrietta Maria's maids-of-honour, was married off to the future Duke of Newcastle, thirty years her senior, she found him in the unfortunate position of being both impotent and in need of an heir. Since the popular remedy of ‘heating [i.e. spicy] foods' failed to do the trick, the Newcastles turned to Europe. From Rome Sir Kenelm Digby reported a cure by an apothecary who regularly killed three thousand adders to make his medicine: ‘By long use of such flesh of vipers,' he wrote, men who had turned eunuchs through age ‘become Priapus again'. (It did not work with the Duke; there was no male heir; the Duchess of Newcastle turned to writing.)
⁹

There was an underworld market for such things in Paris. Nor was it only the great ladies or their maids who ventured there. All his life the King had plenty of discreet access to it. One of the most important men in the intimate life of Louis XIV was his chief valet, Alexandre Bontemps, whose reticence was so famous that keeping silent on a subject was proverbially known as ‘doing a Bontemps'. A huge fat man, nearly twenty years the King's senior, Bontemps was adored by Louis for his total loyalty, also his adept way of carrying out private missions for which he used a special royal coach without armorial bearings. Bontemps was without malice. After his death, it was said of him that he had never spoken an ill word of anyone and, even more remarkably at Versailles, had never let a day pass without speaking well ‘of someone to his master'.
¹⁰
But for all his good nature, Bontemps was not without his contacts in the underworld.

Another of the King's devoted valets, François Quintin de La Vienne, had been a celebrated swimmer and became a
baigneur,
something between a bath attendant and a barber. He conducted an
étuve
or bath-house where the King had been in the past to be bathed and perfumed. (Being rubbed down with eau de toilette was the most fashionable form of hygiene in an age when water was widely distrusted, with good reason.)

These
etuves
had many of the same assets as a modern health club with their facilities for bathing and massage. But under the alibi of being bath-houses, they also performed – discreetly – some of the same functions as a brothel. Everyone knew what was meant by the discreet phrase
coucher cheZ le baigneur
(sleeping at the bathhouse). The women in attendance might be available for further services. Young men used them as places of rendezvous, especially with married women whose husbands had to be kept in ignorance. There was also a medicinal aspect to such establishments: people went to be cured of the problems brought about by ‘great pleasures', that is, venereal diseases. They were certainly places where aphrodisiacs might be obtained. It was La Vienne who was credited with supplying the King with ‘fortifiers' when Louis found he could no longer achieve ‘all he wished' in his love affair with Angélique. The genial La Vienne, always elegantly turned out, was a popular member of Louis's inner household.
¹¹

All this is to say that the King, a man of terrific sexual energy in youth, encouraged to further heights in his thirties by the inspirational Athénaïs, was beginning to fall back just a little from the high standards he had come to expect as he approached forty. He therefore had recourse to stimulants. Athénaïs may have provided some of these ‘powders of love' from La Voisin via her maids or in her own right. (The point has been made that former
maîtresse en titre
Athénaïs had bodyguards installed by the King who would certainly have monitored such discreditable visits and reported them.) But Louis also had his own network of discreet servants when such things were required.

There is certainly no evidence to link the King's periodic fits of
‘vapeurs'
with the potions supplied, let alone with poisons. The English word ‘vapours', with its hysterical female connotation, does not cover these royal attacks: they were more like mini-collapses. For example, Louis had an attack when his mother first fell really ill in the summer of 1664 (he cured it by going swimming). And he would have an attack in April 1684, long after Athénaïs had either opportunity or motive to administer a drug. These fits were perhaps nervous in origin, a periodic short-lived weakness Duc principally to his extraordinary daily schedule, which certainly included love-making (latterly with stimulants), but also hours in Council planning policy at home and military strategy abroad. As we shall see in the next chapter, other illnesses were on their way, including the dreaded gout to which both his father and grandfather had been subject. In the meantime the doctors' frequent purges and
lavements
(enemas), recounted in fearful detail in their industrious journals, were enough to weaken the strongest man and cause him collapses.