Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (18 page)

CHAPTER 6
The Rise of Another

In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.

– La Rochefoucauld,
Maxims

T
here is a rumour going round the court that the King is dreaming a little of Madame de Montespan': this was the Duc d'Enghien writing to the French-born Queen of Poland on 2 November 1666 with the gossip about her native country. Nine months later, the Comte de Saint-Maurice, the Ambassador of Savoy, reported that Louis could think of little else except the scintillating Marquise. By September 1667, Saint-Maurice was convinced that wherever the King happened to be, he made three (long) visits to the Marquise every day.
¹
Thus far had Athénaïs, born into the Mortemart family, travelled in the affections of the King, regardless of the fact that she was now very much a married woman, and the mother of two young children by her husband, the Marquis de Montespan.

Louise de La Vallière's third child, Marie-Anne, had been born on 2 October at the royal château of Vincennes (was it tenderness, tactlessness or sheer indifference that gave the baby the same name as the Queen's daughter who had died at Christmas the previous year?). The circumstances of the birth still had to be discreet, so far as was possible in the ritual intimacy of court arrangements. Henriette-Anne happened to be passing through her maid-of-honour's chamber on her way to the chapel just as Louise was experiencing the first pangs of childbirth.

‘Colic, Madame, an attack of colic,' Louise managed to gasp out. Keeping up the required fiction, Louise urged Dr Boucher, the
accoucheur,
to make sure the birth was successfully accomplished before Madame's return. Her room was filled with tuberoses so that their delicious, dominating perfume would cover up anything else in what had now become a delivery room. The doctor, who was by now after all a veteran of these natural–unnatural crises, succeeded. Louise, pale and exhausted, even managed to make that midnight court supper known under the Italian name of
medianoche.
²

Nevertheless, Marie-Anne's life was to be very different from that of the brothers who had been spirited away. Cared for at first by Madame Colbert, she grew up to be petted and adored; gifted with exceptionally pretty looks from childhood, graceful like her mother, she bade fair to be her father's favourite child. The little girl's status as the child of the King by his acknowledged mistress was made possible by the death of Queen Anne. Her mother's fortunes on the other hand were improving only in theory, not in practice. No semi-official rank could atone for the pain Louise felt and continued to feel at the King's ‘infidelities', which mocked the holy love she had believed they enjoyed (and paradoxically kept her in a state of sin). At least fatherhood was a claim that the King honoured: thus Louise rapidly conceived her fourth child after the birth of Marie-Anne. Unfortunately this also meant that Louise spent the vital year during which Athénaïs developed her ascendancy, yet again in a physically burdened state.

Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart was born on 5 October 1640.
*
She was thus about twenty-six when the King's eye first lit upon her in any context except that of an attendant on his wife. This was not the first flush of youth in a society where looks were supposed to decline after twenty. Athénaïs however was made to be different. She was astonishingly beautiful. She had long, thick, corn-coloured hair which curled artlessly about her shoulders when she was in a state of
deshabille.
Her eyes were huge, blue and very slightly exophthalmic; she had a pouting mouth. There was something at once sexy and imperious about her appearance that ravished the eye while her lusciously curved figure appealed to contemporary taste in contrast to that of slender Louise. This voluptuousness makes plausible at least one story by which Louis plotted to spy on her at her bath disguised as a servant; awestruck, he gave away his presence, at which Athénaïs laughingly dropped her towel.
⁴

But Athénaïs was far, far more than a mere beauty, of whom there were, after all, large numbers at Versailles. She was high-spirited and amusing, with a special kind of drollery known as ‘the wit of the Mortemarts' which her family made famous. There were catchwords which baffled the uninitiated:
Bourguignon
for example stood for everything dull and dreary, Duc to one sister's dislike of her husband's Burgundian estates. A judgement would be delivered by a Mortemart with seeming innocence, even naïvety, what Saint-Simon called a ‘witty languishing manner', and yet in its own way it would be quite devastating.
⁵
And certainly where Athénaïs was concerned, this lovely rose had thorns: later courtiers would dread passing under her windows at Versailles for fear of the comments she might make. Madeleine de Scudéry had commended elegant mockery as the consummate social weapon in an essay ‘Of Raillery'. ‘To mock well,' she wrote in 1653, ‘you must have a fiery intelligence, delicate judgement and a memory full of a thousand different things to use on different occasions.' All this was possessed by Athénaïs.
⁶

The Rochechouart-Mortemarts of Lussac in Poitou were of ancient lineage and proud of it, the two grand families having been joined together by marriage in the thirteenth century.
⁷
Gabrielle Marquise de Thianges, Athénaïs's clever elder sister, was known to tease the King on the subject: the Bourbons, with their Médicis merchant blood, were really a great deal less distinguished … In the meantime her love of opera and the theatre made Gabrielle intelligent company for the King, someone with whom he could enjoy readings by Racine and Boileau. Perhaps the cleverest sister of all was the third, Marie-Madeleine, who was obliged to discover she had a religious vocation by their father (he was having a problem paying dowries for so many daughters). She subsequently ran the convent of Fontevrault, where with her strong character and her remarkable learning – Latin, Greek and Hebrew were among her accomplishments – Marie-Madeleine was considered ‘the pearl of abbesses'. Louis liked her company too. A fourth daughter Marie-Christine really did discover her vocation; she spent her life as a nun at Chaillot, in a state of greater contentment no doubt, if less excitement, than her elder sisters.
⁸

Then there was the single brother Louis-Victor Marquis de Vivonne before he inherited his father's title of Duc de Mortemart. Vivonne, two years older than the King, had been one of his Children of Honour, just as the Duc had been a boyhood companion of Louis XIII. Vivonne was so fat so young that he became the butt of the royal sense of humour. ‘Vivonne' – to use his surname alone was an extremely familiar form of address – ‘you get fatter every time I look at you,' said the King. ‘Ah, Sire,' replied Vivonne, ‘what a slander. There's no day when I don't walk four times round my cousin Aumale' (notoriously the fattest man at court). But Vivonne, bulky as he might be, was an intelligent man and a good soldier: one of his annoyances about his sister's rise to favour was that his career advancement might be attributed to it instead of to the talents on which he prided himself.
⁹

The close royal connections of the Rochechouart-Mortemarts concealed the fact that their parents' marriage was not only unhappy – like so many arranged marriages of the time – but also upsettingly scandalous. One can see in the character of the father of Athénaïs all the unashamed sensuality which she would later make her own. The Duc de Mortemart was a hedonist to whom all pleasures were welcome: music and literature, food and drink, hunting – and of course sex. Diane de Grandseigne, the Duchesse de Mortemart, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne; a wise woman who loved music and the arts, she was also renowned for her piety and virtue. Instead of staying yoked in a marriage of convenience (which had bred five children), the Duc lived quite openly with his mistress, Marie Tambonneau, the wife of the head of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, in a way that flouted the conventions, loose as they were. Eventually the Duchesse retired to Poitou.

It is easy to look on Athénaïs as echoing the career of her father as a sensualist. But the profound embedded influence of her mother should not be forgotten, a woman who made an exceptionally holy death in 1664, surrounded by monks and priests. A pious mother was something she had in common with Louis XIV, and in fact the two women, the late Queen and the Duchesse de Mortemart, had been close friends. As a girl Athénaïs showed remarkable religious devotion, and as a young adult was noted for taking Communion once a week – that badge of virtue.

Yet for all her beauty, her intelligence and her vitality, which surely entitled her to a high position, there was something disappointed about Athénaïs at the moment she caught the King's eye – or perhaps, as we shall see, deliberately rolled her own magnetically large blue eyes in his direction. She was already twenty-two when a betrothal was arranged with Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoïlle. For Athénaïs and her sisters were not heiresses whose fortune made them objects of desire, despite their vaunted noble blood, and, as has been noted, the cheaper solution of religion had to be chosen for two of them.

Then the betrothal went wrong in a startling fashion. Her fiancé got involved as the second in a duel in which the Marquis d'Antin was killed, and he had to flee France.
*
The man left to pick up the pieces of this broken romance was Louis-Henri de Gondrin de Pardaillan, Marquis de Montespan, brother of the dead d'Antin, who paid Athénaïs a visit of condolence. As a result of his visit, this rearranged bridal couple were married at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on the eve of Lent 1663. Athénaïs said later in her amusing way that she had forgotten to bring the proper cushions for them to kneel on, and on sending in a hurry to the family home received some dog cushions from the porter …

Certainly the dog cushions brought no luck to a marriage which was clearly difficult from the first for two reasons. The first of these was debt: the young couple did not really have the wherewithal to meet the considerable expenses in terms of dress and entertainment of an aspiring court lady. The second, probably not unconnected to this comparative poverty, was the prickly character of the new husband. Good-looking in a saturnine way, Montespan was a Gascon, a traditionally proud and touchy race, the poorer the prouder.
*
Where religion was concerned, he had Jansenist connections: his uncle Henri de Pardaillan, Archbishop of Sens, was a man of rigid piety with suspected Jansenist sympathies. This explained the fact that there were no royal signatures to the marriage contract, a favour which would normally have been bestowed on the daughter of the Duc and Duchesse de Mortemart.

Under these circumstances, there was not much for Montespan at court: his own character if not Jansenist was certainly unbending. For Athénaïs, from the first, the court had a great deal to offer. And as time would show, she was far from being the kind of woman derided by Madeleine de Scudéry in
Sapho:
someone who believed she was put on earth only to sleep, get pregnant, look beautiful and talk ‘foolishness'. Nor for that matter was she the type described by a Father Garasse in
La Doctrine Curieuse
for whom the choice was the distaff, the mirror or the needle (for men, it was book, sword or plough). Athénaïs had an irrepressible life force.
¹⁰

Her first child Christine was born on 17 November 1663 and a son, Louis-Antoine, Marquis d'Antin (his dead uncle's title), the following September when the marriage was scarcely eighteen months old. Already Athénaïs was showing herself a goddess of fertility, yet child-bearing did not deter her. Two weeks after the birth of Christine, Athénaïs was dancing in a Court Ballet, just as she had danced immediately after her wedding. Then she enjoyed the sophisticated circles of the Hotel d'Albret, where clever women such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette discoursed with clever men at their feet – here was
galanterie
in its purest sense.
¹¹
Athénaïs formed friendships there: one of her friends was a young widow in struggling circumstances, Françoise Scarron, whose propriety, intelligence and moderation made her an agreeable member of any circle, if never the centre of it.

It was debt which caused the Marquis de Montespan to break away from the unsatisfactory court life and, along with his brother-in-law Vivonne, set off for a military career in the south.
¹²
The measure of the Montespan poverty can be seen in the fact that the couple found it very difficult to raise the money for the equipment needed (officers paid for their own uniforms, horses and so forth) and in 1667 Montespan sold his wife's diamond earrings. In the end Montespan was able to depart, leaving Athénaïs the reigning beauty of the court, alone with two small children. It was at this point that she may have looked round at her limited opportunities as the aristocratic wife of a poor man, and seen that there was one magnificent opening: to become the mistress of the King.

Louise de La Vallière was clearly falling from favour, and in any case was once more pregnant. In disappointment at what piety and virtue had brought her, it seems that Athénaïs decided to take her destiny in her own hands. Why not? She was old enough to know her own mind. She was not a royal parcel like Marie-Thérèse or a timid virgin like Louise. It was a brilliant solution to a life that Athénaïs did not feel was quite brilliant enough (she may not have anticipated exactly how brilliant – or how notorious – her new life was going to be).