Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (28 page)

There were two visible mementos of the King's rapprochement with Athénaïs. As one observer summed it up in fairly crude terms: ‘And along came the second Mademoiselle de Blois and the Comte de Toulouse’.
¹⁵
It was true. Athénaïs was very soon pregnant again, and her daughter Françoise-Marie, conceived in August, was born on
10
March 1677. She was created Mademoiselle de Blois like Marie-Anne. It was an example of the intimacy of Athénaïs and Françoise, as well as the delicacy of the renewed relationship with the King, that the little girl was actually born at Maintenon (although Françoise was by now too grand to look after these latter children). Athénaïs's sixth child by the King, Louis-Alexandre, created Comte de Toulouse, was born on 6 June 1678. ‘You have had Augustus [Maine] and you have had Caesar [Vexin],' said Athénaïs to her lover. ‘Now of course you have to have Alexander.’

No more martial heroes were however to be commemorated in the names of Louis's children. There is good reason to believe that the King ceased to have sexual relations with Athénaïs after the birth of Toulouse. Ungallantly, but realistically, the cessation may have had something to do with Athénaïs's increasing weight in her thirty-eighth year, on which the courtiers were beginning to comment. The kindly Madame de Sévigné noted that her ‘angelic’ face was as beautiful as ever, with the delicious blonde ringlets, ‘a thousand of them’, which were made to frame it in a style called
hurluberlu,
so flattering that even the Queen copied it (maybe the blondness now owed something to art but the effect was still stunning). Malicious Primi Visconti on the other hand described one of her legs as being as big as his own thigh, although he added, as though to soften the insult: ‘I have lost weight lately.’
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Athénaïs's physical family inheritance, remembering the notorious girth of her brother Vivonne, had proved a fatal combination when her large appetite and repeated pregnancies were added to it. She was endlessly massaged and perfumed: it made no difference against these more potent factors.

Louis still visited Athénaïs in his orderly way for the regulation two hours daily and she continued to enjoy her sumptuous apartments at Versailles. But his passion had passed on.

The Dutch War was concluded at last in 1678. By the Peace of Nijmegen of 1678–9, Franche-Comte, originally conquered ten years earlier, was formally annexed to France from Spain. Louis XIV now had leisure for two new enthusiasms. In the first place he concentrated once more on Versailles. His new official architect Mansart was given sums to spend which rose sharply over the next few years, reaching 5
¹
₂
million livres in 1680 from a mere three-quarters of a million in 1676 (eighteen million and 2
¹
₂
million pounds respectively in modern money). The aim in all cases of modifications and additions was grandeur, grandeur in the eyes of all Europe, the continent where the Peace of Nijmegen had made him the visibly preeminent monarch. Liselotte as a resident of the palace had another take on the subject: ‘There is nowhere that hasn't been altered ten times,’ she wrote of Versailles. The unpleasant smell of wet plaster was something with which all the grand ladies of Versailles had to contend, to say nothing of the inevitable dirt and noise of perpetual building works.
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The second enthusiasm was of the familiar sort. The King fell in love. Her name was Angélique. But since this was the love of a forty-year-old man for a girl of eighteen there was a new aspect to it: sheer infatuation with her youth, her blonde, ethereal, unsullied looks; wit or intelligence was no longer demanded. There was even an embarrassing aspect to it all, as the courtiers watched the Sun King, who passed his fortieth birthday on 5 September 1678, become a fool for love, devoting himself to a girl who was the same age as his son the Dauphin and twenty years younger than his
maîtresse en titre
Athénaïs.

Perhaps the warrior in him deserved this delightful reward: this was certainly the line taken, albeit satirically, by Bussy-Rabutin. As Louis seduced the virginal Angelique against a background of Le Brun's tapestries depicting his military victories, he could regard her as his latest conquest. Naturally Angelique fell madly in love with the King: in this, wrote Liselotte, she was more like the heroine of a novel. And if she was also stupid – Louis ‘seemed ashamed every time she opened her mouth in the presence of a third party’ – her sweetness was a pleasant contrast with the tartness of Athénaïs, by no means decreasing with age.
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Angelique de Scorailles de Roussille, Demoiselle de Fontanges, came of an ancient family in the Auvergne region where her father, the Comte de Roussille, was the King's Lieutenant. She was indeed very pretty, something of the same type as the young Louise de La Vallière although her features were more classically perfect: she looked ‘like a statue’, said the scornful Athénaïs. Others said more flatteringly that she was the most beautiful woman ever to appear at Versailles. Angélique arrived at court in October 1678 as a maid-of-honour to Liselotte. According to Liselotte later, the girl had had a prescient dream about her own fate which she duly recounted to her mistress: how she had found herself ascending a lofty mountain, but on reaching the peak, she was suddenly enveloped in an enormous cloud and plunged into total obscurity … Angélique awoke from this vision in terror and consulted a local monk. His interpretation was scarcely reassuring: the mountain was the court, where she was destined to achieve great fame, but this fame would be of short duration. In short, said the monk, ‘if you abandon God, H
e
will abandon you, and you will fall into eternal darkness’.
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Although Liselotte's recounting of the dream surely owed something to hindsight, it was true enough that Angelique ascended the ‘mountain’ remarkably quickly: by February Bussy-Rabutin, a gossip but an accurate one, predicted ‘changes of love at court'. Madame de Maintenon was of course horrified. She contributed her own analogy, also taken from dramatic scenery. ‘The King,’ she told Gobelin on 17 March 1679, ‘is on the edge of a great precipice.’

What was happening now to his famous salvation, on which she, Bossuet and Bourdaloue were working so hard in their different ways? Happily indifferent to this important subject, intoxicated with the air at the peak of the mountain, Angélique flaunted her success. Her carriage was drawn by eight horses, two more than Athénaïs had ever commanded. Her servants wore grey livery to match the celebrated grey of her sea-nymph eyes. La Fontaine had paid tribute to her in verse with the permission of Athénaïs (who saw in Angélique less of a threat to her personally than Françoise). She was installed first of all in a pavilion of the château Neuf at Saint-Germain and then in an apartment close to Louis's own. Undoubtedly the exquisite Demoiselle de Fontanges briefly aroused the King's flagging sexual powers in a way that Athénaïs, with all her arts, had failed to do in recent years. The men of letters knew all about that kind of excitement. It was a case of ‘the charm of novelty … the bloom on the fruit’, in the words of La Rochefoucauld. Saint-Évremond discoursed on the difference: ‘In a new Amour you will find delights in every hour of the day,’ whereas in a passion of long standing ‘our time lingers very uneasily’.
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In striking contrast to the King's pampering of his youthful mistress was his cruel imposition of dynastic duty upon another girl of roughly the same age. This was Marie-Louise, Mademoiselle d'Orléans, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the late Henriette-Anne and Monsieur. In the absence of war, Louis XIV turned to that other convenient method of boosting a nation's power, the strategic marriage alliance. In 1679 an impartial observer would not have considered King Carlos of Spain promising bridegroom material. At the age of eighteen Carlos was notorious for his gross, even brutal behaviour to his courtiers. He had a high eunuch's voice and disgusting eating habits, with an over-long tongue which lolled from his mouth and loose lips above a receding chin; his thick fair hair, his best point, was generally left matted and dirty. To marry such a man was a ghastly prospect for any girl – unless one took the line that he was the greatest
parti
in Europe and that could never be a ghastly prospect for any girl who was a princess.

The obvious bride in dynastic terms would have been Louis's daughter, the Petite Madame, but after her death in 1672, Louis turned his attention to the senior Princess at the French Bourbon court, his niece Marie-Louise. He was especially anxious, as ever, to win the race against any Habsburg candidate. Frankly, all the doubts about Carlos's physical ability to beget an heir remained unresolved; however, in the autumn of 1678 the Spanish court announced that he was in fact eager to be married.

In his capricious way, Carlos took a violent fancy to his pretty cousin's portrait. (Both were descended from Philip III.) And Marie-Louise
was
pretty. With her large sloe-black eyes and black hair, she had inherited the Médicis looks of her grandmother Henrietta Maria; in other ways she resembled her famously charming mother, if a darker version. Her bearing was superb: ‘She deserves a throne,’ whispered the French courtiers. A formal proposal came in January, followed by a proxy marriage and the planned departure of Marie-Louise for her new kingdom.

Marie-Louise was devastated. She too had envisaged a royal destiny to which as a Granddaughter of France she considered herself entitled. But her preferred bridegroom, the one she had believed since infancy would be hers, was her first cousin, the Dauphin Louis. A robust fellow, whose fair looks favoured his mother, the Dauphin was more interested in hunting than anything else except possibly his food. He was capable of much ingenuity in pursuit of his passion, only failing when he tried to hunt a weasel in a granary with basset hounds. He had however no intellectual tastes, and a brutal governor in childhood had left him terrified of authority in the shape of his father. But the Dauphin was essentially good-natured and popular with the people as well as the court.

In the royal lottery any princess could do a lot worse than drawing him for her mate, quite apart from the prospect of being Queen of France in the future. Like any French princess, Marie-Louise considered this the highest possible destiny. Her mother Henriette-Anne, although fobbed off with Monsieur, had certainly believed it; it was the same view that the French-born Queen of Spain had inculcated in Marie-Thérèse. Unfortunately, in his ruthless way where such matters were concerned, Louis XIV intended his son for a German princess to secure his position in the east still further.
*
To the weeping Princess, Louis remarked that he could not have done more for his own daughter. ‘Yes, Sire,’ replied Marie-Louise, in sad reference to her dashed hopes of marrying the Dauphin. ‘But you could have done more for your niece.’
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Marie-Louise paid a series of farewell state visits, including to the convent of Val-de-Grâce where the heart of her mother was interred; she was perpetually in tears. She even flung herself at the feet of the King, who was on his way to Mass, crying: ‘Don't make me go!’

‘Madame,’ joked Louis, ‘it would be a fine thing if the Most Catholic Queen [of Spain] prevented the Most Christian King from going to Mass.’ His true indifference to her suffering in the interests of ‘glory’ was made clear when Marie-Louise said her last goodbyes. It was the case of the Grande Mademoiselle and Lauzun all over again: the dynasty must come first, whatever its demands. ‘Farewell,’ said the King, firmly. ‘For ever. It would be your greatest misfortune to see France again.’ He referred to the tradition by which a princess married to a foreign sovereign never returned to her native country except in circumstances of disgrace or failure. Yet Louis was extremely fond of this unhappy young woman, originally for her mother's sake and now for her own. He simply put duty as he saw it – her duty to uphold the interests of France in Spain – above human feelings. And expected others to do so.

So Marie-Louise departed to a life quite as miserable as she had anticipated. By the rules of the repressive Spanish court she was so confined that she could not even look out of the window. She was obliged to spend at least four hours a day in private prayer, quite apart from the prolonged rituals of the services. As for the local entertainment of watching heretics being burned by the Inquisition, that, as the French Ambassador in Madrid drily observed, ‘gives horror to those not accustomed to it’. At first Carlos himself was obsessed with his young wife and highly jealous of her; then he started to dislike her for her (unsurprising) inability to conceive. He took to kicking the pets with which she tried to console herself: ‘Get out, get out, French dogs.’ By coincidence, another victim of Louis XIV's sense of duty had fetched up in Spain in a convent in Madrid: Marie Mancini, still warring with her husband. Queen Marie-Louise took her for rides in her carriage: two women, one of forty, one of seventeen, who pined for France.
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The fate of that other young woman, Angelique, whose duty was no more than to divert the King of France, was in the end not much better, if less protracted than that of Marie-Louise. In this case Louis XIV cannot be blamed entirely, since Angelique was essentially a willing victim who had used her charms to aim at a high position. She duly became pregnant, like all the other mistresses, but not for her the triumphant fertility of Athénaïs. On the contrary, her baby boy died at birth, and in the process of the confinement Angelique herself received injuries which made her, as the cruel courtiers said, ‘wounded in the King's service’. As sex faded, so did the King's love, and the imprudence of the whole episode became apparent. Religion was playing an increasingly prominent part in the scenario of the court. The celebration of the Mass would find both women with a claim on the King, Athénaïs and Angelique, praying hard on their knees and jangling their rosaries. Athénaïs and her children would be on the right, Angélique on the left. ‘Truly,’ wrote Primi Visconti, ‘court life provides the funniest scenes imaginable.’
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