Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (26 page)

Françoise certainly had no good words to say about marriage itself; when in August 1674 she was offered a convenient marriage to an unsavoury old duke she replied: ‘I have already got a singular position, envied by the whole world, without seeking out one which makes three-quarters of the human race unhappy.’ Twenty years later she was still preaching the same gloomy if realistic doctrine: ‘Don't hope for perfect happiness from marriage.’ The female sex would always be exposed to suffering because it was dependent: marriage was ‘the state where one experiences the most tribulations, even in the best'. And she had after all had early contacts with the high-born Parisian ladies who from their privileged positions sighed and complained of marriage as ‘slavery’.
²⁶

The death of Scarron, on 6 October 1660 (shortly after that triumphal entry to Paris of Louis and his Queen which Françoise witnessed), left his widow once again plunged into poverty, and with debts in addition. But Françoise had preserved her precious reputation. It would have been easy for the pretty young wife of a cripple to enjoy romances; on the contrary, Françoise made a point of avoiding such encounters, going to her room after dinner when the company got too raucous. The story that she took part in ‘gallantries' with the rakish Marquis de Villarceaux has no contemporary backing and a great deal of evidence to the contrary, starting with Françoise's obsession with her virtue.
*

The woman who told it thirty years later, claiming to have lent her own accommodation for the affair, was the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. Once so beautiful that she could seduce any man of any age, fathers and sons a speciality, and perhaps grandfathers too, such was the longevity of her reign, Ninon in old age became jealous of the august position of her erstwhile modest friend. And in her report, Ninon managed to have it both ways. Françoise had indeed had an affair, but she had been ‘clumsy' in her love-making (unlike Ninon was the implication).
*
La Rochefoucauld had a maxim on the subject of ladies and their gallantries which seems relevant to the case of Françoise. Plenty of women, he wrote, had no affairs at all, but there was seldom a woman who had only one.
²⁹
Since Villarceaux was the sole named candidate (and that so many years later), Françoise was surely in the former category.

Laminated by her virtue, Françoise was able to enjoy the patronage and friendship of other women, one of these being Athénaïs. Queen Anne was persuaded to grant her a pension. Aristocrats such as the Duchesse de Richelieu and the Marquise de Montchevreuil had her to stay for periods in their country houses unofficially acting as something between a secretary and a housekeeper. One of the Montchevreuil children was lame in the leg: a foretaste of the problems of the Duc du Maine.

Françoise was pliant but she was by no means weak and she had a strong practical streak. Above all, she loved being with children, teaching them to read and seeing to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare, by teaching the catechism. This addiction might sound an obvious feminine trait, but in fact there was no sentimentalisation of children at this date; such a profound liking for and interest in children was yet another characteristic which made Françoise unusual for her time.

In the course of her work with and for children, Françoise also encountered several of the illegitimate ones of whom there were many examples in society, not only in royal circles. Scarron's sister, also called Françoise Scarron, was the mistress of the Duc de Tresmes-Gescres, having been seduced by him at fifteen; she had five illegitimate children. At one point Françoise d'Aubigné spent a year in the same house as her sister-in-law and family.
*
In 1667 she included her brother Charles's bastards Toscan and Chariot in a little nursery.

In so many ways therefore Françoise seemed the ideal person to take on the prestigious – but tricky – post of governess to the royal bastards. Where her religious nature was concerned, the fact that in 1666 she took on a confessor in the shape of the Abbé Gobelin made her even more suitable. Gobelin, whose correspondence with Françoise would become a vital source for her true feelings, was not only profoundly spiritual himself, but also intellectually brilliant. He demanded – and got – Françoise's obedience over many years, for that was part of the bargain. As Françoise confided to the Marquise de Montchevreuil, she knew that once she had chosen Gobelin, she must obey him in everything.

It was thus to Gobelin that Françoise put the proposition of her new post. The Abbe's reply was to tell her to make sure that they really were the King's children, not the byblows of a great court lady's love affair with an unknown noble: there was a rumour that the Duc de Lauzun was involved, Duc to the secrecy in which the household was cloaked. If they were the King's offspring, then tending to them could be seen as some kind of duty … even a holy destiny (Gobelin was very interested in the individual's search for his or her holy destiny). Thus the connection in Françoise's mind between religious duty and her role as semi-royal governess was there from the first. Above all, said Gobelin, Françoise must distinguish between Madame de Montespan and her lover: ‘She is neither here nor there but he is the King’.
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So Françoise did accept: another rather unusual decision in an unusual life. By the time she was welcomed with her ennobled and legitimised charges to the court in the summer of 1674, she had spent four years running an unorthodox but comfortable and welcoming household, mainly at 25 rue de Vaugirard, near the Palais du Luxembourg in the parish of Saint-Sulpice.
*
Madame de Sévigné, who visited the house, described it as having large rooms and a necessarily large garden in which the children (still officially hidden from the world) could play in safety. Unfortunately this need for secrecy meant a lack of domestic help and even builders: Françoise would later describe how she had rushed about, painting, scrubbing, decorating … all unaided for fear of inviting dangerous speculation. Nevertheless she created, as she was able to do, a happy domesticated atmosphere.

It was here, at this out-of-the-way house, ‘in the shadows', as Saint-Simon put it, that Louis XIV, who had seduced so many women, was himself in quite a different way seduced: although the process was not intentional. He would pay unannounced visits on his way from hunting. He found a charming, tender mother figure, with one child on her lap, another at her shoulder, a third in a cradle, reading a book aloud. ‘How good it would be to be loved by a woman like that,' he mused. In the modern sense of the word, Françoise was cool – something expressed in the nickname given to her in the Sévigné circle: ‘The Thaw’, where Louise had been ‘The Dew' and Athénaïs ‘The Torrent' among other names.

To her genuine maternal instinct, Françoise added another very different quality, that of conversation, and its concomitant, the art of being a good listener. It was Madame de Sévigné, no mean judge of the subject, who attested to Françoise's abilities in this respect. Louis, who in principle disliked blue-stocking women and had thus been prejudiced against Françoise at the start, was quite won over by the gentle social arts she had learned among her
Précieuses
friends. Françoise understood perfectly well the force of that observation by Madeleine de Scudéry that a woman should never sound like a book talking.

Of course Françoise in her thirties was still an attractive woman. Did the King, according to his wont, make a pass at her at this early stage? A letter of March 1673 in which she complained of ‘the master' and his advances, how he went away ‘disappointed but not discouraged', is certainly forged, with the benefit of hindsight.
*
The importance of the bond between them by the time she reached court and stayed there in 1674 was its basis in his admiration for her virtue, her respectability, her femininity, exactly those qualities which Françoise prided herself on possessing. It was a happy match of temperaments.

Unfortunately there was a loser in this, and that loser was Athénaïs, the mother of the children. It was not a question of sexual jealousy: the issue was the perennial jealousy of the (mainly absent) parent for the (ever-present) nurse or governess. Athénaïs surely loved her children as much as grand ladies did and could, especially one whose role in life – richly rewarded – was to amuse the King. Equally Françoise gave vent to correct sentiments: ‘Nothing is more foolish than to love to excess a child who is not mine' (although her love for her darling, Maine, was certainly to excess). This common sense did not prevent her experiencing her own jealousy for the beautiful, dominating mother whose behaviour towards her children was, in Françoise's opinion at least, disruptive. Françoise considered that Athénaïs spoiled the children with sweets and other treats; Athénaïs believed that Françoise was trying to divide her children from her. It was the classic struggle.

And no one had ever suggested that Athénaïs, fascinating as she might be, was easy to get on with. By September 1674, Françoise was complaining regularly to the Abbé Gobelin of the royal mistress's rages and caprices: surely it was not the will of God that she should continue to suffer in this way? Françoise began to talk wistfully of retirement. She even threatened to become a nun, although she quickly retracted the threat: ‘I am too old to change my condition’.
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When the King rewarded Fracoise for all her faithful care with a large sum of money towards the end of 1674, she was able to begin the purchase of a property at Maintenon. This lovely water-girt château, twenty-five miles from Versailles, thirty-five miles from Paris, reminded her vividly of the lost paradise of her childhood, Mursay.
*
Medieval in origin, it had been embellished and added to over the years, principally in the sixteenth century. Françoise described it to her brother Charles in January 1675 as ‘rather a beautiful house, a little too big for the household I intend to have, in an agreeable situation'. Here she dreamed of retirement, Françoise told Gobelin, leaving ‘the sinful court' behind. She loved everything about this country retreat,
her
butter,
her
apples,
her
linen (which had to be stored with lavender as fragrance, not rose petals). And she could swim in the river Eure, whose waters lapped the ancient stone tower.
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But she would retire under the name of Madame de Maintenon. The King had given her permission to use the designation taken from ‘my land' as she proudly called it (the title of Marquise came later). That name of Scarron, with its faintly disreputable tinge, was left behind. Even if the dream of retirement was to remain just that, something to which the new Madame de Maintenon would refer sorrowfully when things at court were not going according to her plan, she had already, as she said herself, achieved ‘a singular position', she who had been first a poor relation, then a poverty-stricken widow.

What neither Françoise, Athénaïs nor Louis XIV could foresee was that the Easter of 1675 would bring an extraordinary threat to the
maîtresse en titre,
affecting all their destinies. Athénaïs's true adversary turned out to be not the upwardly mobile governess she had chosen but the Catholic Church itself.

* Saint-Sulpice, much simpler then than it is today, was built in 1646 on the site of a previous structure and enlarged from 1670 onwards. The present imposing classical front dates from the eighteenth century; many further embellishments and additions were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

* At Versailles the smell of tuberoses on a summer's night was sometimes so strong that the court was driven indoors; as has been noted, it was sometimes a convenient cover-up perfume indoors.

* Still to be seen at Versailles today, although moved to the Orangery: a remarkable souvenir of bygone amours.

* A plaque marks her suggested birthplace, at the Hôtel du Chaumont, 5 rue du Pont, Niort.
¹³

* A classic combination of intimacy and inequality best captured by Jane Austen describing the position of Fanny Price at Mansfield Park in the eponymous novel.

* Next to the Maine of Prêcheur, one of the most ancient villages in Martinique, a little plaque on the side of the church commemorates the presence there of Françoise d'Aubigné during her childhood.
¹⁶

* The writer the Chevalier de Méré, who lived in Poitou and knew Françoise when she was young, may have helped with advice over these letters, although he subsequently much exaggerated his importance in Françoise's life.

† They lived in a house in the rue de Turenne, near the Place des Vosges in the Marais; it is now a sports shop.

* The drunken ramblings of Françoise's jealous brother Charles – ‘a madman who should have been shut up', in the opinion of Saint-Simon – on the subject of her debaucheries in the Scarron days should certainly be ignored: this was Charles's payback for his lifelong dependence on her.
²⁷

* A painting of a naked woman, optimistically described as Françoise, which belonged to Villarceaux, is sometimes put forward as proof of the affair; it actually looks rather more like Ninon (who definitely had an affair with Villarceaux); even if it does depict Françoise there is no proof that she posed for it.
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