Athenais (43 page)

Gleeful descriptions of the affair soon sped in dispatch bags around all the courts of Europe. Madame, aware that she had made an embarrassing public spectacle, resolved to put the best face she could manage on the wedding. After all, as she wrote to her aunt, “I will have no trouble getting used to [my daughter-in-law], for we will not see each other often enough to annoy each other ...Saying
bonjour
and
bonsoir
each morning and night won’t take long.”

The bride’s sister, Mme. la Duchesse, was nearly as furious as Madame, and even less restrained. In marrying Philippe de Chartres, Mlle. de Blois would become a granddaughter of France through her husband’s rank, and would therefore take precedence over her elder sister, a mere princess of the blood. Mlle. de Blois would have a longer train and be permitted to sit in an armchair in the presence of the King, while Mme. la Duchesse would have to writhe with envy on a straight-backed, armless chair. Even worse, Mme. la Duchesse de Bourbon would have to address the new Mme. la Duchesse de Chartres as “Madame.” Neither of these great ladies was yet out of her teens. Mme. la Duchesse was so peeved that she could not bear to attend the ceremonies which, as Saint-Simon records with gloomy satisfaction, had more splendor than pleasure about them.

The betrothal took place on the evening of 17 February 1692 and the marriage the following day. At the engagement Mlle. de Blois wore a dress of gold, embroidered all over with tiny black flowers, trimmed with gold Spanish lace and decorations of diamonds and rubies, with more diamonds in her fair hair. Her fiancé was magnifi-cent in gold brocade with pink and gold ribbons. The bride’s dowry was an astonishing 2 million livres (more fuel for the rage of Mme. la Duchesse, who had received only 1 million), a pension of 150,000 livres a year and jewelry worth 600,000 livres.

For the wedding, Mlle. de Blois wore silver, while the Duc de Chartres appeared in black velvet — perhaps his mother’s choice — and marvelous shoes encrusted with pearls and diamonds. At the “bedding” ceremony, the Duc was given his nightshirt by King James II of England, who had been exiled to the French court since 1688, and Madame, with gritted teeth, presented the new Duchess with hers. The next day, the fourteen-year-old girl received the congratulations of the court as she lay in bed. “Sodomy and double adultery had triumphed,” wrote Saint-Simon disgustedly.

The new Duchesse de Chartres took a pragmatic view of her marriage. “I don’t care if he loves me, so long as he marries me,” she said of Philippe. The marriage was not really a happy one, although the couple eventually had seven children. Françoise-Marie felt isolated in her husband’s family, and looked to her Mortemart cousins for support, which infuriated her hostile mother-in-law. From the beginning, Philippe’s infidelities were legion, and after the birth of his first legitimate son, Athénaïs’s grandson, he installed his mistress, Marie-Louise de Séry, in a house right under his wife’s nose at the Palais Royal. He insulted his wife further by having Marie-Louise act as hostess during the state visit of the Elector of Bavaria. Philippe was not really a wicked man; he was just young, frustrated and unhappy, largely thanks to the unfair treatment meted out to him by his jealous uncle Louis.

The “
esprit Mortemart
” was discernible in Françoise-Marie, but it was combined with a laziness and a lack of interest in court life unknown to Athénaïs. Madame complained that her daughter-in-law spent all her time reclining in her salon, too idle even to dine with her family, as this would have meant sitting on a stool rather than lolling on a sofa. The Mortemart tendency to plumpness manifested itself early in Françoise-Marie, for she was really a glutton, and drank to excess as well. Her pride was notorious, and she incensed Madame by suggesting that it had really been rather kind of her to agree to become Duchesse de Chartres, as her husband was only the King’s nephew, while she was his own daughter.

The marriage held, and a show of loyalty was maintained, at least in public. Eventually, Madame and her daughter-in-law were reconciled, united in their hatred of the scandalous Marie-Louise. After Philippe’s mistress died, the couple grew closer, and Françoise-Marie reigned supreme at the Palais Royal until her death in 1749.

But where, during all the scheming and plotting that surrounded her daughter’s marriage, was Athénaïs? She was not even invited to attend. Athénaïs had to read about her daughter’s marriage, and that of Du Maine a month later, in the
Mercure Galant,
like any bourgeois housewife hungry for a bit of upper-class gossip. Sadly, this was largely the work of her disloyal son the Duc du Maine. Early in 1691, Louis had announced that he intended to leave for the siege of Mons and to take the Comte de Toulouse with him. Athénaïs was particularly upset, since she had just learned that Mlle. de Blois was to be taken from her charge and placed in the care of the wife of the Duc du Maine’s tutor, Mme. de Montchevreuil. To deprive her of her children was to deprive her of her only reason for remaining at court, and Athénaïs was deeply offended and hurt. In desperation, she asked Bossuet to inform the King that since he obviously had no further use for her, she required his permission to retire from court to the convent of Les Filles de St. Joseph, in which she had been charitably interested for some time. Perhaps she was dusting off Louise de La Vallière’s old tactic to revive some flame of Louis’s love. Whatever her reasons, she immediately regretted her impetuousness, for Louis received the news with perfect equanimity, and announced that this was most convenient, since he had intended to give her apartment to the Duc du Maine and to pass on the Duc’s to Mlle. de Blois. Mortified, Athénaïs gathered up her baggage and her dignity and retreated to Clagny, from where she coolly announced that in fact she had not really intended to leave the court for good, and that she thought it rather hasty of him to have had her furniture removed.

It was the Duc du Maine who, far from begging his mother, the “
belle madame
” of his childish letters, to remain at his side, had gleefully sent on her things with all speed. He had also been seen throwing Athénaïs’s delicate furniture out of the windows of her apartment. Du Maine had long since realized that he had more to gain from his beloved governess, the King’s secret wife, than from his troublesome, embarrassing mother, and had plotted with her old enemy Bossuet to take advantage of her careless remark. What better way of ingratiating himself with La Maintenon than by sacrificing his mother? La Maintenon loved Du Maine as her own son, and they were both greedy for power and keen that the Duc should position himself as the leader of the factions that were forming among the younger generation of courtiers. Athénaïs’s presence was too much of a reminder to Du Maine of his compromising birth, and in his ambition, La Maintenon found the ally she needed to achieve what she had been hoping for for twenty years.

Du Maine really was a revolting little individual. He felt no loyalty to his mother for her work in securing him the great fortune on which he founded his fantasies of power, or for the tenacity with which she had insisted on remaining at court to safeguard his future and that of his siblings. When he realized she could be no more use to him, he packed her off like a sacked chambermaid. Saint-Simon is not the most reliable judge of the characters of Athénaïs’s children, but in the case of Du Maine his description seems accurate. He compares the Duc to the Devil

in malice, in perversity, in unkindness to all and good to none, in sinister plotting, in sublime vaingloriousness, in conceits without number and endless dissembling; yet with much seeming amiability, especially in the arts of pleasing and entertainment, for when he wished he could charm. Being the most arrant coward in heart and mind, he was also most dangerous, for provided he could manage it unseen, he was ready to go to dreadful lengths to escape what he feared, and would lend himself to the meanest and most despicable actions, by which the Devil lost nothing.

Du Maine’s cowardice was a devastating blow to his father, who revered martial prowess, and who hoped that as his own years of campaigning drew to a close he could live his battles vicariously through his son. Louis created a special precedent to allow Du Maine to lead an army by promoting the Duc de Vendôme, the dashing, illegitimate grandson of Henri IV, to a general’s command, in which, unlike Du Maine, he proved most able.

Du Maine took up his post at the head of the left flank of the Maréchal de Villeroy’s army in 1695. On 14 July (not a happy date for the French monarchy), the Maréchal sent orders to Du Maine to attack the enemy, who were greatly disadvantaged, being outnumbered, out-armed, exhausted, and trapped in an open position on a plain, their only hope of escape the cover of a wood three leagues away. It would be a sure and simple victory for the French troops. Du Maine procrastinated. He had to go to confession, to reorganize his camp, to reconnoiter the position again. Six times the orders were sent, and all the while the enemy were sneaking closer to freedom. Du Maine’s dithering lost the day for the French. No one at court dared to tell the King of this shocking display of cowardice, particularly as the dispatches were usually full of sycophantic exaggerations of Du Maine’s heroic exploits. Louis finally learned the truth from his valet, Vienne, and “his distress was more than he could bear.”
¹³
That night at Marly he lost control of himself in public, venting his fury on a waiter at table whom he had spotted filching a petit four. Louis leaped to his feet and rushed at the man, beating him with his cane, which was, luckily, made only of bamboo. The company, horrified, were quick to shout out their anger at this “rascal” to prevent the King from even more undignified rage. Later, the Marquis d’Elbeuf slyly asked Du Maine in public where he was planning to serve next, explaining that he meant to accompany him, since anyone who stayed close to the Duc would be sure of preserving his life.

Notwithstanding the efforts of Mme. de Maintenon, Louis had never been able to bring himself to order Athénaïs from court, but between them her own son and Bishop Bossuet managed it. “Mme. de Montespan left the court in a storm of tears and never forgave M. du Maine, who, by this monstrous service, won for himself the love and perpetual devotion of Mme. de Maintenon.” Du Maine’s deceitful treatment of his mother should perhaps have alerted Louis to the nasty side of his son’s character, but with the King’s secret wife as his champion, Du Maine knew he would remain safe from censure. He was even to deprive Athénaïs of her refuge at Clagny, despite the fact that it had been promised to her mother until her death. Du Maine demanded Athénaïs’s lovely house as a wedding “gift,” suggesting to La Maintenon that now his mother was banished, it would be embarrassing, and too tempting for the King, to have her so close to Versailles.

In her last days at Clagny, Athénaïs must have been surprised that she had gone on living. Suddenly, and by what seemed a banal accident, she had lost the life which she had so loved for twenty years. As long as she remained at Versailles, visited by the King, respected by the court, she could believe that in some measure she was significant. Now she was little more than the ghost of herself, “one of those unhappy souls who return to expedite their faults in the places they used to inhabit.”
¹⁴
The morning of her final departure, 15 March 1691, she had wryly announced to Bossuet that he could, at last, pronounce her funeral oration. “Yes, Madame la Marquise. The King no longer loves you.” The King no longer loves you, you are as good as dead.

As she wandered in the gallery at Clagny, Athénaïs may have smiled at the fresco she had chosen in the days when her whim was Louis’s command. Dido, the beautiful Queen of Carthage, who is loved and then abandoned by Aeneas, mourned from her walls. In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas begs Dido to save his fleet, then leaves her desolate when he sails away to found Rome, and Dido commits suicide. “Why should I palter?” she storms at Aeneas. “Why still hold back for more indignity? / Sigh, did he, while I wept? Or look at me? / Or yield a tear, or pity her who loved him?”
¹⁵
Athénaïs had held on for as long as she could, but was she, like Dido, granted at least the chance to confront her lover? Was there some final parting scene between the King and his mistress? It appears not. That Athénaïs left Versailles in tears is all that is known.

Embodied at Versailles in the intrigues of the
dévot
party, the strictures of Bossuet and the triumphant hypocrisies of Mme. de Maintenon, the Catholic Church would perhaps seem an unlikely source of refuge for Athénaïs in her exile from court. However, that strong faith encouraged by her mother Diane in her childhood had remained a constant throughout her life, and in the years after 1691 she came more than ever to rely on it, though typically, it was in the form of action rather than the cloistered contemplations of Louise de La Vallière, that it manifested itself. Athénaïs had, as she famously remarked, never taken the liberty of committing all sins simply because she was guilty of one, and in fact had often left the King to pray privately. She had never missed a fast day or doubted the certainty of her beliefs. Now middle-aged, and deprived of much of her celebrated troubling beauty, she had nevertheless retained all her energy, and she threw herself into good works with all the zeal she had formerly spent on arranging entertainments for Louis. She was determined, it seems, to prove to the world that although she had left Versailles, her life was not over.

Athénaïs had become involved with the Filles de St. Joseph during the difficult period of the King’s religious crisis in 1676, quite possibly, given Bossuet’s attempts to persuade the King to break with her, in the hope of providing herself with a refuge in the event that the bishop’s mission had succeeded. The order was made up of nuns who devoted themselves to the education of poor or orphaned girls, and so generous were Athénaïs’s donations that by 1681, the order passed an act recognizing her as their “superior” and giving her the power to organize the rule of the order, to choose its nuns and boarders and to supervise “the well-being and utility as much spiritual as temporal of the said Maison de St. Joseph.” Even if this is viewed as a shrewd acknowledgment of the “temporal” benefits Athénaïs’s wealth might bring to the order, it was also a recognition of the strength of her faith, despite her status as France’s most public, and in 1681, as yet unrepentant sinner.