Athenais (20 page)

Appearances, then, were all, and Athénaïs was determined that her personal
gloire
should match that of the King. From 1674 onwards, she pursued material ambition assiduously. Mme. de Sévigné now gives her another private nickname — “Quanto,” from the Italian card game Quantova — meaning “how much?” If Athénaïs’s desires seemed insatiable, so, too, was the King’s eagerness to gratify them, and he encouraged her extravagance, giving her access to his treasury for her needs, for her spending was yet another indication of his power. But Athénaïs was always too clever to show any sign of covetousness or to turn a hint into a demand. Knowing, for example, that Louis disliked being asked for jewelry — so generous with everything else, he was niggardly when it came to jewels — she never accepted it as a gift from him, preferring to borrow what she wished to wear. This demonstrates a perceptiveness about Louis’s psychology, for he had a peculiarly uneasy relationship with jewelry, probably rooted in the humiliating sale of so many of the crown jewels during the Fronde, and at the time of his marriage he had been mortified by the discrepancy between the dazzling diamonds of his wife’s retinue and the relatively poor adornments of his own. The King was enchanted by Athénaïs’s reticence, and it prompted him to be more generous to her than he had ever been to Louise. In 1674, he wrote to Colbert from the front near Dole, instructing him to have a beautiful casket made for the jewels that Athénaïs might “borrow.”

The casket must contain a pearl necklace, and I wish it to be of fine quality; two pairs of earrings; one of diamonds, which must be fine ones, and one of other stones; a case with diamond fastenings; a case with fastenings of different kinds of stones, which must be removable two at a time. I require stones of different colors, so as to allow of them being changed. I shall also want a pair of pearl earrings. You must also procure four dozen studs, in which the central stones must be removable, while the outer circle must consist of small diamonds . . . It will be necessary to go to some expense over this; but I am quite prepared for it, and it is my wish that the work should not be done hurriedly.
⁶

The pearls in question turned out to be larger than the Queen’s.

Athénaïs extended her influence far beyond personal ornament. She was anxious that her Mortemart relations should share in her good fortune. Despite the unkind jokes speculating that the Duc de Mortemart had greeted his daughter’s disgrace with avaricious delight, the family had not initially reacted well to her scandalous ascent to the position of royal mistress. Any paternal misgivings may have been eased by the Duc de Mortemart’s appointment as governor of Paris and Ile de France in 1669. In accepting this prestigious post, the impecunious Duc was also released from his ceremonial duties for which, at sixty-nine, he considered himself too old. In 1668, however, her brother Vivonne had gone so far as to renounce his right to succeed his father as first gentleman of the chamber as a gesture of protest.

Yet Vivonne, who was, after all, a great friend of the King’s, ended up doing extremely well out of his sister’s disgrace, though perhaps he may have found the charges of nepotism hard to take since, like all the Mortemarts, he was extremely able and talented in his own right. Louis certainly loved him, and never tired of telling hilarious stories about Vivonne’s adventures. Like his father, Vivonne fancied himself as a gallant, but he did not have his father’s way with the ladies; indeed Bussy-Rabutin claimed that Vivonne failed even “with women who until that moment had refused nobody.” Following another family tradition, the tendency of the Mortemarts to ruin themselves and then save the day with a fortuitous marriage, Vivonne had repaired his father’s squandered fortune by marrying a tremendous heiress, Antoinette-Louise de Roisy, who brought with her a dowry of 800,000 livres. Further resources were provided by the King, who paid off 300,000 livres of debts (sadly, less than a fifth of the astronomical family total) and provided another half a million to release the ancient family title of Maréchal de Créqui. By way of further compensation to his friend for the theft of his sister’s virtue, Louis named Vivonne captain-general of the galleys, with charge over the French Mediterranean fleet; vice-admiral of the Levant; viceroy of Sicily and governor of Brie and Champagne — the latter no doubt prompting many jokes at the gourmand governor’s expense.

Yet of all these honors, the only one that is known to have been bestowed as a direct result of Athénaïs’s influence was the
maréchal
’s baton. She had searched through the King’s pockets for the list of newly appointed
maréchals,
and treated him to a violent tantrum when she discovered that Vivonne’s name was absent. Louis, who was never able to refuse Athénaïs to her face, explained the omission as an error by Louvois. “Send for him at once,” Athénaïs demanded, and gave Louis a good scolding until the minister appeared. Louvois quickly grasped the situation, apologized and added Vivonne’s name to the list. Nepotism may have been a way of life at court, but for Athénaïs to proclaim her rights so stridently was evidence of either tremendous courage or tremendous arrogance when a few offensive words might have been enough to have a lesser woman whisked off to a convent. Luckily for her, the King enjoyed being berated by the woman he loved, and luckily for the fleet, Vivonne was a brave admiral who distinguished himself throughout the 1670s.

Athénaïs enjoyed a close relationship with both of the sisters who still maintained some contact with the world, the Marquise de Thianges and Marie-Madeleine, who became Abbesse de Fontrevault. Mme. de Thianges, bored by her husband’s country tastes, spent most of her time at court, cultivating her interests in music, theater and opera. She had been a prominent member of the salon established privately by Mademoiselle at the Palais du Luxembourg during the years of her disgrace after the Fronde. It was here that the vogue for pen portraits was introduced, with Mademoiselle extemporizing those of the King and Monsieur for the amusement of her guests. The genre was later mastered by La Bruyère in his
Caractères
of 1688. Louis would often accompany Mme. de Thianges to hear lectures by the writers Racine and Boileau, and as has been stated, she occasionally substituted for Athénaïs in other respects, though, surprisingly, without arousing her sister’s jealousy. Athénaïs looked after Mme. de Thianges’s family well. She shared with her sister the percentage on all sales of meat and tobacco in Paris that she had been granted, and was also, of course, responsible for arranging her niece’s lucrative marriage. The Marquis de Thianges benefited, too: he was appointed a lieutenant in the Duc d’Anjou’s household cavalry.

The Abbesse de Fontrevault was perhaps the most beautiful of the three sisters described by Voltaire as “the three most beautiful women of their age,” and also the cleverest scholar. She had taken up her vocation, rather sadly, under pressure from her father, but resigned herself most successfully to a religious and academic life. She knew Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew and was a prolific translator of the classics and writer of verses, religious tracts and moral treatises, one of which, on manners, remained in print well into the eighteenth century, and she was as successful in her religious life as she was in her worldly studies. Marie-Madeleine, a true
femme savante
in the intellectual tradition of the salons, was greatly admired by serious thinkers, including Athénaïs’s enemy Bishop Bossuet. Her elevation in 1670 to abbesse of Fontrevault, a great twelfth-century Benedictine convent, was a somewhat controversial measure of Louis’s respect for his mistress’s family, since the post, which carried the responsibility for sixty convents, had traditionally been reserved for women of the blood royal.

When the Abbesse visited Paris in 1675 to tend the Duc de Morte-mart, who had suffered a stroke, the Queen invited her to dinner and presented her with a diamond worth 3,000 louis. Marie-Madeleine had the Mortemart gift for conversation, with a sharper intellectual edge: “Mme. de Thianges talks like a woman who reads,” it was said, “Mme. de Montespan like a woman who dreams, and Mme. de Fontrevault like a woman who talks.”
⁷
Although she did not appear at large court functions, Louis was so captivated by her conversation that he tried to persuade her to stay at court. It was to no avail — she was committed to her abbey — but she did continue to make brief excursions to Versailles to visit her sisters. It is typical of the rather flexible religious sensibility of the early decades of Louis’s reign that the nuns apparently made no objection to their abbesse paying calls to a woman considered by the
dévots
to be the disgrace of the nation. The Abbesse was certainly no prig. When she was in Paris, for instance, she would accompany Athénaïs to hear the sermons of a plump Jesuit priest who was the double of Vivonne. The ladies were greatly diverted by hearing worthy sentiments and religious homilies delivered by what appeared to be their roué of a brother got up in a surplice.

Athénaïs’s main family priority was the welfare of her children by the King. Now that, to her delight, they were established with Mme. Scarron at court, and she herself was officially recognized as the
maîtresse en titre,
she wanted a proper residence of her own. She already had a little pleasure house, the exquisite porcelain palace of Trianon, which Louis had had built for her in 1670 in the grounds of Versailles, and in the evenings, she and Louis would sail down the Versailles canal, perhaps in one of the two magnificent gondolas presented to the King by the Doge of Venice, to enjoy its superb flower gardens.

Trianon, an ensemble of four pavilions enclosing a central salon, had been inspired by the discovery of the Tour de Porcelaine at the Imperial Palace of Nanking in 1664 and constructed by Le Vau in the chinoiserie (more properly
lachinage
) style first popularized by Mazarin. Blue and white Delft tiles covered the walls, while the interior was of polished white stucco ornamented with azure (in a neat dramatic irony, this décor was created by a duo of Carmelite monks). Externally, the miniature palace presented a charming mélange of classical and approximately oriental styles. Aside from the salon, which was designed for more formal entertainments, the main feature of Trianon was the bedroom, named, of course, “
La Chambre des Amours,
” which was decorated in white, silver and blue and boasted a huge, mirrored bed trimmed with gold and silver lace, tasseled fringes and gold and silver braid. Here, if anywhere, snug inside the gilded canopy and flounced curtains, the King and his love could make a secret world.

The pavilions were largely given over to the preparation of food, evincing the lovers’ shared delight in gastronomic pleasures, but the great joy of Trianon was the gardens. The little house was surrounded by anemones, Spanish jasmine, tuberoses and orange trees, emitting the heady perfumes both Louis and Athénaïs loved. Here, too, Louis’s
gloire
appeared to triumph over nature: even in the depths of winter, guests could promenade in a spring garden, thanks to the millions of hothouse flowers that were planted out every day. Like the fountains, fresh flowers seemed to spring up wherever Louis walked — though Le Bouteux, the head florist, had to keep a staggering 2 million flowerpots in constant circulation in order to achieve this effect.

Trianon, then, was a delightful place for moonlit meetings and private games, but Athénaïs wanted a real château that would display her taste and status. Together, the lovers decided to engage the young architect Jules-Hardouin Mansart, who had taken over the construction of Versailles after Le Vau’s death in 1670, to design a house at Clagny, an estate that Louis had purchased in 1665 to enlarge the parkland of Versailles. The King had originally decided on another little pleasure house, but Athénaïs was tired of trinkets, and when she saw the plans she remarked with audacious contempt that it was the sort of thing one gave to chorus girls. Chastened, Louis gave her one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe.

Of all the spectacular gifts Athénaïs received, Clagny was the most impressive. It took 1,200 men to build the house which cost 2,074,592 livres (more than $11 million in today’s values). Until the house was completed, Athénaïs lodged in the old manor house on the estate, which was pulled down in 1677, and was involved at every stage — in 1674 Louis wrote to Colbert from the front: “[As to] the plan for the house at Clagny, I have no answer to send to you at present, as I wish to ascertain what Mme. de Montespan thinks about it.”
⁸
Mansart constructed the house on similar lines to Versailles: east to west, with two wings perpendicular to the main façade, which had nineteen windows facing west. At either end of the wings were an orangery and a painted chapel, and in between stretched the gallery, 210 feet long by 25 feet wide, and ornamented with bas-relief sculptures and huge paintings from the
Aeneid.
Above the entablement hovered allegorical divinities of the seasons, the elements and the four corners of the earth. The dome in the center of the house formed the roof of Athénaïs’s salon, which was reached by five marble steps and surrounded by huge corinthian columns, and had an anteroom in black and white marble on each side. The court was fascinated by Athénaïs’s new palace — even Queen Marie-Thérèse could not resist paying a visit to the works.

Since both Louis and Athénaïs were passionate about gardens, the garden at Clagny became a wonder. Louis writes again to Colbert: “Mme. de Montespan is most anxious that the garden should be planted this autumn. Do everything that will be necessary to oblige her in this matter.”
⁹
After a second estate had been bought to give the gardeners the scope they needed, Clagny’s park extended to 429 acres. André le Notre, the most celebrated gardener in France, who had created the “miracle” of the Versailles gardens as well as those of Sceaux, St. Cloud, Fontainebleau, Chantilly and the Tuileries, was employed to design the grounds, and remarkably, Athénaïs’s gardens were finished by 1675. Mme. de Sévigné, that ardent gossip, was prompt in paying them a visit. She was delighted by them, and commented on how triumphant Athénaïs appeared amid her workmen. “You know Le Notre,” she gushed. “He has left a little, dark wood which makes a perfect effect; there’s a forest of orange trees in large tubs, on both sides of them are palisades covered with tuberoses, roses,