Athenais (37 page)

Mme. de Sévigné’s letters are now full of the growing influence of the King’s new favorite. On 5 June 1680, she notes: “The credit of Mme. de Maintenon still continues . . . She goes to visit him [Louis] every day, and their conversations are of a length which give rise to numberless conjectures.” On 9 June: “Mme. de Maintenon’s favor is constantly increasing, while that of Mme. de Montespan is visibly declining.” A court joke had the two marquises meeting on the Queen’s staircase at Versailles. Says La Maintenon to La Montespan, “What! Are you going down, Madame? I am going up.”

At court, people recalled the Grand Divertissement of 1668, at which Louise de La Vallière, Athénaïs de Montespan and Françoise Scarron had all been present together. Had they but known, ran the joke, that here were the past, the present and the future seated at the same table. Mme. de Sévigné reported of “Mme. de Maintenant”: “Nothing now but perpetual conversations between her and the King, who gives all the time he used to bestow on Mme. de Montespan to Mme. la Dauphine” (and, by implication, with La Maintenon, her
dame d’atour
). If Athénaïs had cherished the hope that Louis would return to her after he tired of Fontanges, she knew she could no longer sustain it after the stresses of the Chambre Ardente or in the face of such obvious neglect. She refused, however, to take the traditional route to the convent. Her only chance of remaining at the court which had been her life for twenty years was to displace La Maintenon by any means available. Mourning the loss of her looks with the melancholy peculiar to the beautiful, she “was ready to die with mortification at the influence obtained by wit and conversation”
¹
and, embonpoint or no, was determined to trump La Main-tenon’s wit with her own. But what Athénaïs had not realized was that times had changed. She had always been more concerned with amusement than with truthfulness and, having once bested Louise de La Vallière’s dull earnestness with her own fantastic humor, she found herself as bewildered as her old rival now that La Maintenon had been clever enough to make sincerity a fashion. Appearance had been everything to Athénaïs in her desire to impose her
gloire
on the world, but she had allowed appearance and artifice to become conflated. So, though she remained Louis’s mistress in name, she was horrified to discover the frailty of her true position.

One small reassurance was that Athénaïs’s erstwhile employee was unpopular with much of the court. La Maintenon’s secretiveness and ostentatious piety, as well as the long hours she was spending closeted with Louis, gave rise to fear and distrust. And amid the obsession with etiquette and precedence which was becoming the main occupation of many of the aristocrats enclosed in this city of the rich, the governess’s humble birth and rather dubious history counted against her. It was on this front that Athénaïs launched her first attack. Madame Scarron’s bohemian marriage of convenience, her early poverty and her pretensions to an aristocratic lineage had already disgusted the Dauphine and her cousin Madame. Both German ladies were intractable on the subject of breeding, and one of their pleasures was making life a misery for those courtiers with flimsy quarterings. Gratifyingly for Athénaïs, they both hated La Maintenon for her upstart influence over the King, and in this they were joined by the Duc de Saint-Simon who, while he came to resent Athénaïs for the precedence her bastard sons were given over the dukes of France, did respect her for the purity of her own lineage. For good measure, Athénaïs made sure that the governess’s sexual history was also called to account. “Could she suppose that people would always remain in ignorance of the first volume of her life?” mused Mme. de Sévigné, and while it appears unlikely that La Maintenon had indeed led the life of a merry widow, there are certain ambiguities in her history which lent credence to Athénaïs’s malicious insinuations. It was rumored, for instance, that she had had a lesbian relationship with the great courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. The basis for this gossip was a pornographic novel,
L’Ecole des Filles,
published in 1655, in which the experienced Suzanne initiates the timid Fanchon, said to represent the young Mme. Scarron, into the delights of sapphism (the English diarist Samuel Pepys bought a copy in secret and pronounced it “a mighty lewd book”
²
). Ninon’s own recollections do not confirm this, but Voltaire notes that the two were intimate friends, and slept together for several months, this being “a fashion in friendship.”

An unexpected ally in Athénaïs’s campaign against the governess was Charles, Comte d’Aubigné, La Maintenon’s brother. Although he was to benefit from his sister’s position in acquiring the governor-ship of Aigues-Mortes, this poor and cowardly soldier was constantly carping that he had not been made a duke, or even a
maréchal.
Although the Comte was a boastful, pompous spendthrift, he shared his sister’s intelligence, and the court delighted in his witty remarks, particularly when they concerned the history of the widow Scarron in her days at the Hôtel d’Albret. Saint-Simon recalls that he “used no restraint when he described her amorous adventures, and contrasted them with her present piety and majesty.” He was to refer insolently to Louis as “my brother-in-law,” which caused La Maintenon enormous embarrassment. Altogether, he was a thorn in her side, “forever chasing after whores in the Tuileries and spending a vast deal of money on them.”

If Aubigné was a burden, his wife was even worse. The marriage had been arranged as a favor by Mme. de Montespan in 1678, when La Maintenon was still officially governess to Athénaïs’s older children, but it may have been something of a backhanded gift, for Mme. d’Aubigné, the daughter of a Parisian doctor, was, in Saint-Simon’s snobbish words, “if possible, even more plebeian than her birth . . . marvelously stupid, of commonplace appearance, and so totally devoid of any social sense that Mme. de Maintenon found it equally embarrassing to receive her in company or refuse her admittance.” Mme. d’Aubigné retreated into the company of her vulgar Parisian friends, but constantly disgraced La Maintenon with her public complaints about her husband’s extravagance and ill-treatment. La Maintenon, ever ready to manipulate religion for her own convenience, complained to the priests at St. Sulpice, who managed to talk d’Aubigné into entering a “gentlemen’s retreat” where he could live quietly on his pocket money in lodgings. Poor Mme. d’Aubigné was persuaded into a convent, which, according to La Palatine, she thought “very hard lines after all that had happened, and that they might well have spared her that.” Much to Athénaïs’s glee, the Comte d’Aubigné, an unwilling captive, told everyone what a liar his sister was for boasting of his conversion. He escaped to his Tuileries whores as often as he could, but was always recaptured by the priests, and eventually put under the surveillance of a “companion,” an extraordinarily dull priest named Madot, who quite literally bored him to extinction. La Maintenon’s only use for Christian charity, it seemed, was control.

With Angélique de Fontanges now weeping and fussing because she was no longer loved, and Louis spending ever more time in the governess’s room, it was apparent that he cared nothing for such calumnies, and Athénaïs changed tack. Perhaps the ruse of distraction, though it had admittedly misfired with La Fontanges, would now serve to rid her of both of her rivals at once. Mme. de Caylus reports that Athénaïs attempted to draw Louis’s wandering eye to her own young niece, Mme. de Thianges’s daughter the Duchesse de Nevers, “in order to preserve the royal favor in her own family.” Mme. de Sévigné confirms that on one visit to Versailles with her mother, her aunt and Louis, the Duchesse was so bedecked with flowers that she rivaled Flora herself. De Sévigné, who perceived Athénaïs’s game very well, adds archly: “How dangerous such a jaunt would be to a man who had anything of the libertine in his composition!” The plan was not a success — perhaps Flora’s charms were too demure, too springlike, to ignite the aging royal imagination — and Athénaïs next attempted to push one of her own household, a voluptuous creature named Mlle. d’Ore, upon Louis’s affections. Mme. de Maintenon was by now alarmed, noting in her correspondence: “I have been suffering terribly from melancholy vapors ...I believe you already know Mlle. d’Ore. On Saturday she partook of
medianoche
with the King. They say she has a sister even more beautiful than herself, but that is no concern of ours.” Whether or not “
medianoche
” is used here as a polite euphemism, Mlle. d’Ore was no more of a hit with Louis than the Duchesse de Nevers. Maybe the ailments of La Fontanges and the carping of La Montespan were more than even the King’s celebrated libido could withstand.

Yet in spite of the plotting and the rivalry between them, the two Marquises hated one another with the greatest cordiality. Athénaïs was fundamentally too good-tempered to allow a feud to interrupt a good conversation, and on one famous occasion when the two ladies were obliged to take a carriage journey together, Athénaïs suggested as they set off: “Let us not become the dupes of this affair, but converse as if we had no cause to quarrel. Of course, that will not necessitate our loving each other any the more, and on our return we can resume our former relations.”
³
Perhaps, since there were now younger courtiers, such as the Dauphine, who had not known her in her days of triumph, and who saw her merely as the disgruntled mother of the King’s bastards, Athénaïs needed La Maintenon as a link with her past, someone who would respect her for what she had been. Although she was consumed with jealousy and distress at her rival’s role in Louis’s life, her feelings were of the type which ignite passionately and dissipate quickly, and she was not inclined to remain in a state of constant anger. La Maintenon describes one occasion when they took a walk together in the gardens of Versailles “arm in arm and laughing heartily, but we are on none the better terms for all that.” Athénaïs continued to mock La Maintenon’s
dévot
circle. She went, along with other court ladies, to one meeting in La Main-tenon’s rooms where each contributed a monthly purse of alms for the poor. Seeing the long-faced nuns and priests waiting outside, Athénaïs remarked: “You could not hope for a better attendance in your antechamber, Madame, were it the day of your funeral.”
⁴

The most exciting event at court that year, 1680, was the birth, in a sweltering August, of the Dauphine’s first child, the Duc de Bourgogne, the heir to the throne in the third generation. As the Dauphine went into labor, messengers gathered outside the palace, ready to gallop the news all over France, and when the child was born the cries of delight could be heard at the other end of Versailles. The Abbé de Choisy recorded the universal joy at the event in his memoirs: “We became almost crazy ...everyone took the liberty of embracing the monarch, who gave his hand and kissed everybody. The common people seemed out of their senses.” The courtiers ripped up the parquet in the Galérie des Glaces and piled it with whatever else they could find — furniture, sedan chairs, old clothes — on to a huge bonfire to celebrate. Perhaps the only people who were not beside themselves were the poor Dauphine who, after a thirty-hour labor in a room crowded with ambassadors — who by custom were permitted to witness royal births — lay stifling in a freshly flayed sheepskin, and Athénaïs. “She evaporates our joy, she dies with jealousy,” crowed La Maintenon, as though she herself were a member of the royal family, suggesting that Athénaïs was annoyed because this birth was not as shameful as those of her own children. Once again, Athénaïs was forced to acknowledge that she was no longer the cynosure of Louis’s eyes.

The following year, 1681, did bring some consolation to Athénaïs in the final removal of La Fontanges and the legitimization of Mlle. de Blois and the Comte de Toulouse. As well as a mark of Louis’s continuing regard, if not of his love, this was a strong indication, if any were needed, that he considered her absolved from any incrimination in the Affair of the Poisons. Yet that same year also delivered a crushing blow in the death of the six-year-old Mlle. de Tours on 15 September, despite (or perhaps, given his subsequent record, because of ) the attentions of the new royal doctor, Fagon. The court was at Fontainebleau, from where Louis instructed the monks of the priory of St. Pierre de Souvigny to bury his “
très chère fille
” in the vault of the Ducs de Bourbon. The funeral took place on the 19th, and the child was carried to the tomb in her little coffin, draped in white satin with a silver cross, by the light of 600 candles. Athénaïs’s grief at her daughter’s death has already been described in her letter to her son the Duc du Maine. Cruelly, she was not able to attend the funeral, as she had to depart for Bourbon on a mission to negotiate on Du Maine’s behalf with the Comte de Lauzun, the former friend she had betrayed, who had finally been released from Pignerol.

Lauzun had Athénaïs to thank for his freedom, though her motives in procuring it do her little credit. Du Maine was undoubtedly Louis’s favorite child, and both his parents felt that he required titles and estates to befit the position he would hold at court as an adult. Since the boy was illegitimate, there was a limit to what Louis could do for him, and the only other member of the royal family with sufficient wealth at her disposal was Louis’s cousin Mademoiselle, whose marriage to Lauzun the King refused to allow at the eleventh hour. The still unmarried granddaughter of Henri IV remained the richest woman in France, with the principalities of Dombes and La-Rochesur-Yon, the duchies of Montpensier, Chatellerault and St. Fargeau, the earldom of Eu, the barony of Thiers and numerous other fiefdoms at her disposal. Marie-Thérèse was hoping that this vast inheritance would be left to her own son, the Dauphin, but since Mademoiselle loathed her after the Queen had sided against her in the Lauzun affair, this was unlikely. Athénaïs, however, had remained on good terms with Mademoiselle. Fortunately for Mme. de Montespan, Mademoiselle had never suspected her involvement in Lauzun’s disgrace, and had continued to treat her as a confidante.