Athenais: The Life of Louis XIV's Mistress, the Real Queen of France Read online

  Copyright © 2002 by Lisa Hilton

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  First United States Edition

  First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company in 2002

  For information address, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017,

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-316-03045-8

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Historical Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  To my father

  Not all Medea’s herbs, not every

  Spell and magical cantrip will suffice

  To keep love alive, else Circe had held Ulysses And Medea her Jason, by their arts alone.

  Ovid, Ars Amatoria

  Cast of Characters

  LOUIS XIV, King of France.

  ANNE of AUSTRIA, widow of LOUIS XIII and mother of LOUIS XIV.

  MARIE-THERESE, Queen of France, wife of LOUIS XIV.

  LOUIS, DAUPHIN of FRANCE, called “Monseigneur,” son of LOUIS XIV.

  MARIE-ANNE-CHRISTINE-VICTOIRE, DAUPHINE of FRANCE, first wife of the DAUPHIN.

  PHILIPPE, DUC D’ORLEANS, called “Monsieur,” brother of LOUIS XIV.

  HENRIETTE D’ANGLETERRE, DUCHESSE D’ORLEANS, called “Madame,” first wife of PHILIPPE D’ORLEANS.

  ELISABETH-CHARLOTTE, LA PRINCESSE PALATINE, called “Madame,” second wife of PHILIPPE D’ORLEANS.

  PHILIPPE, DUC DE CHARTRES, then (1701) DUC D’ORLEANS, son of PHILIPPE D’ORLEANS and LA PRINCESSE PALATINE.

  ANNE-MARIE-LOUISE D’ORLEANS, DUCHESSE DE MONTPENSIER, called “Mademoiselle,” cousin to LOUIS XIV.

  LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE, DUCHESSE DE VAUJOURS, mistress to LOUIS XIV.

  ATHENAIS DE ROCHECHOUART DE MORTEMART, MARQUISE DE MONTESPAN, mistress to LOUIS XIV.

  LOUIS-HENRI DE PARDAILLON DE GONDRIN, MARQUIS DE MONTESPAN, husband of ATHENAIS.

  LOUIS-ANTOINE, DUC D’ANTIN, son of ATHENAIS and MONTESPAN.

  LOUIS-AUGUSTE DE BOURBON, DUC DU MAINE, son of ATHENAIS and LOUIS XIV.

  LOUIS-ALEXANDRE DE BOURBON, COMTE DE TOULOUSE, son of ATHENAIS and LOUIS XIV.

  LOUISE-FRANÇOISE DE BOURBON, called Mlle. de Nantes, daughter of ATHENAIS and LOUIS XIV. Married LOUIS, DUC DE BOURBON-CONDE, afterwards known as MME. LA DUCHESSE.

  FRANÇOISE-MARIE DE BOURBON, called Mlle. de Blois, daughter of ATHENAIS and LOUIS XIV. Married PHILIPPE, DUC DE CHARTRES, afterwards known as DUCHESSE DE CHARTRES, then (1701) DUCHESSE D’ORLEANS.

  FRANÇOISE SCARRON, afterwards MARQUISE DE MAIN-TENON, governess to ATHENAIS’s children.

  GABRIELLE DE ROCHECHOUART DE MORTEMART, MARQUISE DE THIANGES, sister of ATHENAIS.

  LOUIS-VICTOR, DUC DE VIVONNE, brother of ATHENAIS.

  COLBERT, minister to LOUIS XIV.

  LOUVOIS, minister to LOUIS XIV.

  LAUZUN, aspiring husband to MADEMOISELLE.

  LA REYNIE, chief of police in Paris.

  LA VOISIN, fortune-teller in Paris.

  Prologue

  Early in the twentieth century, an antiques dealer living near Nantes heard of two old maids, impeccably aristocratic, but embarrass-ingly impoverished, who might welcome the opportunity to make a profit on a few old trinkets. Elderly ladies traditionally being obtuse about the value of their possessions, the dealer thought it would be easy to part them from a few good pieces for far less than they were worth. So he was surprised when the women, having overcome their mortification at the idea of entering into any kind of trade, proved astute, if not positively indignant bargainers. No, Monsieur could not possibly believe they would relinquish their precious Louis XIV commode, their rare pewter, their pictures, for such a paltry sum! Really, a most indelicate suggestion. Irritated at having wasted his time, the dealer scrabbled about in a drawer for something smaller he could persuade them to part with, and closed his fingers around a tiny portrait. “Ah,” said the ladies, “the Shame of the Family.”

  This intriguing person proved to be a seventeenth-century lady in the dazzling court dress of Louis XIV’s Versailles. Excited, the dealer offered the ladies a much larger sum of money than any he had mentioned so far. What could be the harm in making a little profit from an unknown woman who clearly had some terrible scandal attached to her? Why else would “the Shame of the Family” have remained anonymous for generations, if it were not that even her name were too disgraceful to pronounce? The owners had no idea as to her identity; since their own nineteenth-century childhoods, their ancestress had been known by no other name. The Shame of the Family? It must have been a scandal of distinction all the same, thought the dealer, for its cause to be so exquisitely immortalized. What was the secret of the miniature beauty, that these two respectable country ladies had never been told who she was? The dealer made his bargain, and perhaps the ladies were glad to be rid of a skeleton from the family closet.

  The Marquise de Montespan had many names in her life. Athénaïs first, the goddess’s name she chose for herself. Circe, after the deadly mythological enchantress who ensnared Ulysses; Alcine, after the ravishing magician in Ariosto. Quanto, meaning “How much?,” or “the Torrent” were the famous letter-writer Mme. de Sévigné’s code names for her. Her children called her Belle Madame, her admirers La Grande Sultane or La Maîtresse Regnante. Her lover’s soldiers called her the King’s whore; the poets “Rare Masterpiece of the Gods.” Her descendants wrapped much of Europe in a skein of her lineage, but it is not certain as to how her picture found its way through the complicated legacy of her bloodline to lie hidden in a drawer for 200 years as “the Shame of the Family.” It is not surprising that the denizens of the straitlaced nineteenth century named her thus, as Athénaïs’s disgrace made her the most notorious and celebrated woman of her age. Perhaps the name she liked best was the Real Queen of France.

  Chapter One

  “Great and glorious events which dazzle the

  beholder are represented by politicians as

  the outcome of grand designs, whereas they are

  usually the products of temperaments

  and passions.”

  Versailles today is rather a sad place. The titanic mass of the château is obscured by the crowds of buses which spew fumes and tourists on to the Cour Royale. The famous gardens retain their magnificent views, but without the attentions of their thousand gardeners they can seem as soulless as a scrubby, shrubby municipal park. Inside, the long coil of visitors shuffles over cheap, squeaky parquet, through huge doorways whose marble mantels have been replaced by painted wood. The crush, the crowd and the heat of the massed bodies in the vast rooms are perhaps all that r
emain true to the life of the house.

  On the evening of 14 May 1664, the first of all the huge gatherings Versailles was to witness assembled for Les Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchantée. That night, Louise de La Vallière was the most envied woman in Europe. For four months, a small army of artisans had labored in the park of the simple hunting lodge that was to become the great palace of Versailles to create “the Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle” — seven days of ballets, banquets and balls which astonished the world with their magnificence. Six hundred gorgeously dressed courtiers crowded together in the cool, early-summer evening to watch the finale of the fête, and the scents of ambergris, rosewater and jasmine melded with the acrid fumes of gunpowder as fireworks swooped great arabesques of intertwining “Ls” across the sky for Louise and her lover, King Louis XIV of France. Aged twenty, this blond-haired, blue-eyed country girl was the beloved mistress of Louis the God-Given, the most powerful monarch in the world.

  Louis opened the fête with a procession on the theme of the Italian poet Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso,” riding a bejeweled charger and carrying a silver and diamond sword. Louise was lucky in that her lover, as is not commonly the way with kings, was genuinely good-looking, “the most handsome and well-built man in his kingdom.”1 True, at only five feet four, he had not attained quite the regal stature of his cousin Charles of England, but he had inherited the same exotic dark eyes and thick coffee-colored hair — which he wore long and curling before the periwig unfortunately came into fashion — from their Italian grandmother, Marie de’ Medici, and he had a good physique and well-shaped legs, a prerequisite for handsomeness before the mercies of the trouser. The great Bernini was to make a bust of Louis that has been called the finest work of portraiture of the century, his eloquent marble capturing the sensuous modeling of the young man’s face, simultaneously imperious and slightly louche. Louis appears in his true character, a passionate, proud man, and though his was a dignified beauty, it seems easy, looking at the bust, to imagine him laughing.

  And the Queen? Louis, so famously courteous to women that he even touched his hat to the chambermaids, would not have dreamed of openly dedicating his gala to his mistress. The enchanted isle was officially for the pleasure of his mother, Anne of Austria, whose Spanish niece, Marie-Thérèse, was his wife and Queen of four years. Poor Marie-Thérèse. Her most interesting feature is that she was painted by Velázquez. On the diplomatic mission to Spain that preceded the royal marriage, the Maréchal de Gramont commented tactfully on the Infanta Maria Theresa’s looks by likening her to Anne, but the spiteful eyes of the courtiers observed that Louis turned visibly pale when he saw his bride for the first time. The Hapsburg genes were exhausted by consanguinity, and Marie-Thérèse was so short as to resemble one of her beloved dwarfs (thoughtfully, Louis included a few in the tableaux vivants). She had a lumpy, limping figure and short, stubby legs, black teeth and bulbous eyes, hardly compensated for by her flaxen hair and fine, fair skin. A childish, stupid woman, she would never learn French properly, and was bewildered by the sophisticated banter of the courtiers, which her husband increasingly appreciated. The playwright Molière had produced his risqué anti-clerical comedy Tartuffe for the fête, and if the pious Queen was not scandalized, like her mother-in-law, it’s because she could not understand the jokes.

  Was Louise delighted with the enchantments her lover had procured for her? The orchestra played new compositions by Lully, great basins of fruit and ices were served by waiters dressed as fairy gardeners while the Four Seasons and the Signs of the Zodiac danced a ballet. Nymphs and sea monsters and whales emerged from the lake to recite poems; lions, tigers and elephants were led among the delicate pavilions, draped in rippling colored silks, which had been erected amid the trees. Louise loved the King for himself. She was shy, perhaps even ashamed. Or perhaps she realized that it was France Louis aimed to seduce with plays and masquerades and fireworks, since he was a king who would govern through pleasure, whose tyrannies were calculated as elegantly as the measures of a dance.

  It is high time that history was hard on Louise de La Vallière. Of all the Bourbon mistresses (and if the kings of France had shown the same taste in wives as they did in mistresses, the country might well be a different place today), posterity has granted virtue only to Louise, the Sun King’s first love. Her reign as maîtresse en titre coincided with the blossoming of the Great Century, which developed that spectacular combination of genius in the arts which was to make France, and things French, the arbiter of taste in Europe for centuries to come. Louise’s “innocence” and “simplicity” have proved an irresistibly sentimental metaphor for that renaissance, in contrast with the dismal conclusion of Louis’s reign. In fact, some contemporaries considered her a sorry creature, as this unkind poem demonstrates:

  Soyez boiteuse, ayez quinze ans

  Pas de gorge, fort peu de sens

  Des parents, Dieu le sait. Faits en fille neuve

  Dans l’antichambre vos enfants

  Et sur ma foi, vous aurez le premier d’amants

  Et La Vallière en est la preuve.2

  This skillful riddle is attributed to one of Louise’s fellow ladies-in-waiting, a beautiful, spirited girl named Athénaïs de Montespan. Louise had been Louis’s mistress since 1661, the year the young king had come into his own. He had inherited the throne of France aged four, and had suffered a confusing, peripatetic childhood during the series of civil wars known as the Fronde. This conflict, which continued sporadically from 1648 to 1652, set the crown powers against both Parlement and the great nobles of France, notably the Prince de Condé and the Prince de Conti, distant relations of Louis through his grandfather, Henri IV. Although his widowed mother, Anne of Austria, aided by her minister, Cardinal Mazarin, had eventually restored security to the crown, Louis was determined that his kingdom should never again be threatened. When his beloved mentor Mazarin died in March 1661, Louis summoned his councillors and told them he intended to act as his own prime minister. No treaty could be signed, no money spent, no mission dispatched without his personal approval. In this way, as part of the strategy later consolidated by his organization of the court at Versailles, Louis hoped to keep the potentially rebellious aristocracy under control.

  France, with a population of 18 million, was the largest nation in Europe, and Paris the continent’s greatest city. Released from the influence of the wise but penny-pinching cardinal, Louis was free to address the enormous problems facing the country. The state was practically bankrupt, the army in confusion, agriculture destroyed by years of war. The future looked uncertain, but Louis was passionately determined that France should fulfill her potential as a powerful nation. Despite a cloudy horizon, France was at the dawn of a new age.

  And France was Louis, as in Shakespeare’s plays, in which France can mean either king or country, or both. This symbiotic relationship was reinforced in the coronation ceremony, in which the Bishop of Soissons placed a consecrated diamond ring on the third finger of Louis’s left hand, marrying him to the nation (given the state of the royal finances, Anne had to loan one of her own rings for the occasion). To understand the man, then, is to understand his role.

  To be a king of France meant more than exercising a power bestowed by birth, it meant enacting a system of beliefs which governed the monarch’s entire understanding of the world. To be royal, much more so than nowadays, was to be divided by a vast psychological chasm from ordinary people. When the courtiers teased the newly arrived Marie-Thérèse about her earlier suitors, she replied sincerely, “There was no king in Spain but the King my father.” It was inconceivable to her that she could even look at a man who was not one of God’s anointed. This is the primary, crucial aspect of Louis’s understanding of his kingship: that it was ordained by God. He was the divine representative on earth. In the words of one of his subjects, “Sire, the place where Your Majesty is seated represents for us the throne of the living God.”3 It was largely agreed (though the limits of monarchical power wer
e certainly disputed — witness seventeenth-century England) that the only stay on the king’s divine right was adherence to Christian principle. Accordingly, Louis was also the spiritual governor of his people, and in France, unlike other Catholic countries, the power of the Pope was effectively subordinate to Louis’s own, since as king he could vet any papal edict before it was ratified by the Parlement. In short, the king was answerable only to God.

  Since the French kings claimed their descent from the Roman emperors, Louis was also considered a demigod by many of his people, a belief which supported the idea that he embodied France. The country, still a collection of provinces with indeterminate borders, had not yet fully emerged as a geographical unit, and Louis’s incessant warring on these borders was motivated partly by the need to establish precise national territories.

  So the king was not as other men, and this difference was based on something more profound than wealth or political power. Louis well understood how to emphasize his “kingliness” by cultivating an awe-inspiring persona. Petitioners were advised to try to catch a glimpse of the King before approaching him, lest his appearance should strike them dumb, and at his magnificent public exhibitions he would adopt the role of Apollo or Jupiter, the classical gods whose imagery was still a part of the vocabulary of the educated of the time. Versailles itself is as much a testament to Louis’s power as a cathedral, a feat of architecture which appears to have been created by a superhuman ego. A French peasant from the medieval squalor of the countryside might easily have believed that this was where God held court. It is characteristic of Catholic culture at the time that faith, in gods or kings, should manifest itself externally, in baroque display, and Louis manipulated this so successfully that the monarchy was not laicized until the mid eighteenth century.

  In the early part of his reign, the contrast between Louis the man and Louis the King was distinct. Although graceful, athletic and good-mannered, he was a diffident, if not rather shy young man, uneasy in the company of women, awkward at social chitchat. He was self-conscious about the shortcomings of an education which had been interrupted by the wars of the Fronde, and later tried to compensate by giving his son, the Dauphin, a rigorous classical schooling, although thanks to the assiduous thrashings of his tutors, the poor young man ended up far more foolish than his father. Louis was passionately fond of music, and danced beautifully in the court ballets. He adored hunting, riding out nearly every day when he was not on campaign until the end of his life. But he was shy of intellectuals and had little confidence in his own attractiveness. It was his second mistress who taught him to feel as a king.