Athenais (30 page)

Whatever the attraction, Mme. de Maintenon seemed to be steadily displacing the
maîtresse en titre.
“We are talking of changes in love at court,” wrote one of Bussy-Rabutin’s correspondents. “Time will make things clear.”
¹³

Clarification came in the form of Marie-Angélique de Scorailles de Roussille, Demoiselle de Fontanges. “
Belle comme une ange
” was the obvious, and apposite, pun on her name, since she was the most beautiful creature the court had ever seen. The stand-off between Athénaïs and La Maintenon was suddenly eclipsed by a new passion which appeared to threaten them equally.

Angélique, like most of Louis’s women, was a gorgeous blond, eighteen years old, slender and delicate with huge grey eyes and a beautiful set of teeth (in itself a sufficient qualification for beauty at the time). “One could see nothing more marvelous,” conceded Madame, who had no patience for pretty women. Like Louise de La Vallière, Angélique came from the
petite noblesse.
Her family, who lived in Auvergne, realizing that their beautiful daughter was a great asset, had raised enough money to send her to court with the unspoken yet precise aim of replenishing the family coffers from the royal bed. Angélique made her ambition quite clear in recounting a dream to her new mistress, Madame. She dreamed that she climbed a high mountain, and when she reached the summit, she was dazzled by a brilliant cloud, then she found herself in such profound darkness that she awoke in fear. The dream was interpreted by a monk, who warned Angélique that the mountain represented the court, where she would arrive in great but short-lived state. “If you abandon God,” he told her, “He will abandon you, and you will live in shadow forever.” This monk was not the only religious soul to be alarmed by Angélique’s dazzling vision. On 17 March 1679, Mme. de Maintenon wrote to her confessor, the Abbé Gobelin, using remarkably similar imagery: “I beg you to pray for the King, who is on the brink of a great precipice.” It was Athénaïs who, in a terrible error of judgment, pushed him over the edge.

Desperate to distract Louis from his increasing interest in Mme. de Maintenon, Athénaïs drew his attention towards the beautiful young Fontanges girl. She believed that this foolish little provincial would be another Mme. de Ludres, a passing fancy easily controlled and easily disposed of. One evening she pointed the girl out to Louis at Appartement, remarking casually, “Look, Sire, here is a beautiful statue; seeing her I asked myself lately if she came from the chisel of Girardon, and I was surprised when I was told that she is living!”

“A statue, perhaps,” replied Louis, “but Good God, what a beautiful creature!”

At first, the King seemed almost shy of expressing his admiration for La Fontanges, joking that here was a wolf who would not eat him, but before long he had given the Duc de la Rochefoucauld a pearl necklace and earrings to present to her, a clear indication that he planned to make her his mistress. Athénaïs had calculated badly. Louis was no longer the handsome, shy young man she had drawn out and encouraged, but a mature monarch of forty-six who, like many middle-aged men, was all too ready to fall head over heels for an exquisite young girl. The very security of Athénaïs’s position, and the splendid domesticity she had established with her children at Clagny, diluted some of her erotic appeal, and as Louis moved into middle age, he was anxious to test his virility on younger, more quiescent flesh. One autumn evening, while Athénaïs was safely occupied at the
bassette
table, he retired discreetly to his carriage, accompanied only by his bodyguards, and drove to the Palais Royal, Monsieur’s Paris residence, where an accomplice named Mlle. des Adrets showed him to Angélique’s room. For all her apparent innocence, it appears that Angélique was not without a few erotic wiles of her own. She knew to resist just enough to make the conquest more delicious, how to abandon herself with a reluctance at once charmingly modest and thrilling. Indeed, the Paris pamphleteers were not slow to detail the King’s latest conquest in terms of a military surrender: “This important place, having been reconnoitered, was attacked in all its curvaceousness. The way was cleared, the outskirts were seized, and with much sweat and fatigue, and spilt blood, the King entered in victorious. We can say that no conquest gave him greater difficulty. There were many cries and tears spilt on one side, and never did a dying virginity release such gentle sighs.”
¹⁴

At first, Louis installed his new love in a little villa at Château Neuf de St. Germain, but before long she was given her own apartment at court. Angélique probably became Louis’s mistress only two months after her arrival in late 1678; in any event, the secret was clearly out early in the new year. Athénaïs was initially complacent, unaware that Louis had any serious interest in the girl, and it was not for several months that she knew herself abandoned. In March, La Maintenon described Athénaïs’s state in a letter. “Mme. de Montespan complains of her last
accouchement,
she says that this girl has caused her to lose the King’s heart; she blames me, as if I hadn’t told her often to have no more children ...I pity Mme. de Montespan at the same time as I blame her: what would she be if she knew all her misfortunes? She is far from believing the King unfaithful, she accuses him only of coldness. We don’t dare to tell her of this new passion.”

In May, the governess witnessed a violent quarrel between Louis and Athénaïs, who had finally learned the secret the whole court had been whispering behind her back for months. Louis was unmoved by his lover’s fury. “I have already told you, Madame, that I do not wish to be bothered,” he said coldly. Athénaïs whipped herself into a fury of denunciation, slandering La Fontanges with all the vitriol she could muster, and then departed to Clagny for a few days to recover herself.

Suddenly, there was a whirlwind of change, and all the regard of the court, all the entertainments it held, were for the aspiring mistress. Athénaïs was still
maîtresse en titre
(and indeed La Fontanges was never completely declared so), but from the King’s actions, it was clear that, informal though her position was as yet, Angélique was well on the way to becoming favorite. Louis abandoned the plain, sober style of dress he had affected in recent years and bedecked himself rather pathetically in the silks and ribbons of his youth. Athénaïs was hoist with her own petard. The King was deliriously in love. La Fontanges gave herself tremendous airs, and the malleable loyalties of the court were only too ready to do homage to the King’s new passion at the expense of the old. Athénaïs found herself shunned, ignored, eclipsed, as once she had herself eclipsed Louise de La Vallière. “The violence of the King’s passion for Mme. de Montespan is no more,” wrote Mme. de Montmorency, “and it is said that there are times when she weeps bitterly after the conversations she has with the King.”

“Really,” complained Athénaïs. “A stupid girl without education, a beautiful painting and that’s all. The King is hardly delicate to love such a person, who had affairs back in her province.”

Although Athénaïs was spared the final indignity of seeing her rival declared
maîtresse en titre,
she had to tolerate the affair until 1680. For some time, it appeared that La Fontanges was to become a permanent favorite. She flaunted herself before the Queen, appearing at Mass in a coat made from the same azure cloth as Louis’s; her carriage was drawn by eight fine white horses; she demanded a position as abbesse of Chelles for her sister Catherine; just like Mme. de Montespan, she spent 25,000 ecus a week on trinkets. The new favorite’s portrait was taken by Mignard, and La Fontaine, who had benefited so much from Athénaïs’s patronage, treacherously dedicated a flattering poem to La Fontanges, with the inscription:

Charmant objet, digne present des cieux

(Et n’est ce point image du Parnasse)

Votre beauté vient de la main des dieux

Vous l’allez voir au recit que je trace.

Puisse mes vers presenter tant de grâce

Que d’être offerts au dompteur des humains,

Accompagnés d’un mot de votre bouche

Et presentés par vos divins mains.
¹⁵

That La Fontaine, with whom Athénaïs had enjoyed a stimulating relationship of mutual admiration, should prove so fickle, so ready to prostitute his genius in the service of a mere doll, was intolerable. To defer to this uneducated provincial was more than Athénaïs’s pride could bear, and she railed at the King’s confessor, Père la Chaise, who seemed perfectly complacent at this new romantic peccadillo, since it did not involve double adultery. “
Ce Père la Chaise,
” she punned, “is a real
chaise de commodité.
”
¹⁶
She had clearly chosen to forget that she herself had made use of La Chaise’s complacency during the religious crisis of 1675. Louis was besotted, and ignored both the rants of his discarded mistress and the querulous mutterings of the
dévots.
One bishop who dared to try to remonstrate with the King about this too-public display of his affection was given the tart reply, “You will do me the pleasure, Monsieur, of conserving your zeal for your diocese!”

Initially, Athénaïs allowed her anger to draw her into open rivalry with Angélique. Comically, the two appeared side by side at the King’s Mass, both trying to outdo one another in their demonstrations of piety, clutching their chaplets in two plump white hands and rolling four great blue eyes to heaven like beautiful saints. “It’s the greatest comedy in the world,” scoffed Primi Visconti. One story has it that the two pet bears Athénaïs kept for her amusement in a little menagerie Louis had given her in the grounds of the palace “accidentally” escaped and destroyed Mlle. de Fontanges’s apartment. It is likely to be apocryphal, but it would not have been beyond Athénaïs’s enormous capacity for fury to release the ravening beasts into her rival’s rooms. If the story is true, it was the last service the bears performed for Athénaïs, for in 1681 she sold them to the Duc du Maine’s valet.

In February 1680, the whole court set off to meet the future Dauphine, Anne-Marie of Bavaria, betrothed to Louis’s only living legitimate son. At a ball at Villers-Cotterets, Athénaïs showed that she could still outshine her conceited little rival in grace and style. Angélique danced badly, and disgraced herself in the minuet, Mme. de Sévigné commenting that her legs seemed unable to arrive where they ought, and that she managed barely more than a bow. Athénaïs, on the other hand, knew that she danced superbly, and obliged Angélique to retire blushing from the floor. It was this very awkwardness, however, that seemed to enchant the King. In contrast with the tempestuous Athénaïs, La Fontanges seemed all simplicity and admiration, flattering Louis’s huge ego with her naïveté and ignorance. Just as Athénaïs had done ten years before, she introduced a new hairstyle, this one created on the hunting field rather than in the boudoir. One day, as the hunt galloped in pursuit of the stag, a branch whipped Angélique’s hat from her head so that she appeared before the King with her hair loosely tied in a ribbon, tumbling in curls to her shoulders. Louis found this “rustic” style delightful, and the coiffure
à la Fontanges
became the latest craze.

Realizing at last that anger was useless, Athénaïs tried the tactic of friendship she had employed so successfully with La Vallière, feigning a great affection for the girl, who was so intoxicated with conceit at her own success that she was flattered to have the former favorite attend upon her. Athénaïs dressed La Fontanges for court entertainments, styling her hair with her own hands, as once La Vallière had wound ribbons through her own golden locks, and presented her with a New Year gift of a jeweled almanac containing predictions for the four seasons by La Fontaine. Now believing herself to be secure, Angélique allowed her passion for the king to become ever more obvious, boasting of the advancements she would achieve for her family and flaunting her jewels like a goddess. She showed off her new wealth by giving 20,000 ecus to her former companions in Madame’s train. As Athénaïs had guessed it would, this presumption began to irk Louis, especially when La Fontanges had the audacity to order him about in public. Athénaïs maintained a calm façade, writing to the Duc de Noailles about some green velvet to line her coach and remarking casually that the King visited her only twice a day, but that this was better than more frequent and quarrelsome meetings.

If Athénaïs derived any amusement from the situation, it was from the distress of Mme. de Maintenon, who was obviously furious to have her good work on the King’s soul undone all over again. Athénaïs teased the governess by suggesting that the King now had three mistresses: herself in name, La Fontanges in bed and La Maintenon in his heart. La Maintenon attempted to persuade the
maîtresse de corps
to give up the king for the good of her soul, but Angélique laughed in her face and asked if she should rid herself of a grand passion as easily as a used chemise. Nonetheless, the governess continued to enjoy the King’s high favor, which further wounded Athénaïs’s pride. Louis seemed to feel no embarrassment at continuing to spend much of his time with a lady who had remonstrated so openly with him on the subject of his amours. Indeed, caught between the tantrums of the old mistress and the vacuous chatter of the new, he took increasing pleasure in the engaging and easy conversation of the Marquise de Maintenon. For the first time in his life, he was experiencing the comfort of a woman’s friendship.

At the end of 1679, La Fontanges gave birth to a baby boy who, despite or perhaps because of the efforts of the surgeons, failed to survive. The difficult birth coupled with the distress of losing her child began to diminish Angélique’s ravishing beauty. She suffered from the loss of blood and fits of fever, and her fine features were blurred with swelling. Since she had little else to recommend her, intelligence never having been her strongest asset (she may have been as beautiful as an angel, but she was also, in the court parlance, “as stupid as a basket”), Louis began to tire of her. The vivacious, invigorating young girl had been replaced by a whining, clingy woman whose pretensions irritated him and whose vapidity bored him. In April 1680, he granted her her Duchess’s
tabouret
and a pension of 80,000 livres, and though she received the congratulations of the court from her bed, everyone knew that the elevation was a valedic-tory gesture.