Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (30 page)

The reaction of Louis XIV to the ‘revelations' of La Voisin's daughter, and her unsavoury accomplices, also under arrest, was immediate. A freeze was put on all the papers relevant to the Marquise de Montespan. At the orders of the Council, all documents relevant to Athénaïs, her sister-in-law Madame de Vivonne and her maid Oeillets were to be taken out of the dossier. The criminals themselves were separated and put into dungeons where their voices could not and would not be heard. The King kept the papers himself for twenty-five years and then burned them. His conduct towards Athénaïs did not alter – the daily visits – and that alone is the most convincing proof that he believed in her innocence.

Louis XIV was a fanatic for order and a good public show, but he was also human. Had these charges of poisoning and the Black Mass been believed, the former
maîtresse en titre
would certainly have been told to retire from court, either to the country or abroad like Olympe Comtesse de Soissons. There is another proof, quite apart from the psychological implausibility of it all already stated. Colbert, the King's chief minister for his whole personal reign so far, the wise and prudent Colbert who had in the past handled the question of the bastards, did not believe in the charges either. He quoted the Latin tag that a single (unsupported) accusation meant no accusation:
Testis unus, testis nullus.
And he had examined all the evidence.
¹²
*

There was also a political dimension to the Affair of the Poisons which Colbert thoroughly understood. He had a long-standing rivalry with Louvois, Louis XIV's Minister of War. Athénaïs had always belonged to the Colbert camp, being connected to him by marriage; she disliked Louvois, who in turn resented her influence with the King. Colbert, absolving Athénaïs for good reason, was also protecting his own interests.

So, where Athénaïs was concerned, ‘all the external signs of friendship and consideration were maintained', wrote Voltaire in his history of the King's reign. He added: ‘although it offered her no consolation'.
¹³
It was true. Athénaïs's long reign was at last well and truly over, not because of the Affair of the Poisons, which was a deeply unpleasant but temporary embarrassment, but because Françoise was now established in her place. The Affair of the Poisons did not help Athénaïs's position but it was a position lost in any case. It could even be argued that the King's resolute defence of his former mistress indicated the continuing depth of his feelings for her – affection if no longer passion.

Athénaïs de Montespan was of course the mother of Louis's children, and the court of France was increasingly dominated by the presence of the younger generation. Or, to put it another way, since this was a King-centred court, the King's role as patriarch was beginning to be glorified. In January 1681 a ballet was danced at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in honour of the Dauphine. If officially dedicated to Marianne-Victoire, it has been described as ‘a sort of celebration of the royal paternity'. Devised by the familiar team of Quinault and Lully, it is seen as the first true Opera-Ballet, and was later, slightly altered, performed in Paris at the Academy Royal. Love was the ostensible theme but the triumph of youth was also proclaimed. Louise-Françoise, the nine-year-old daughter of Louis and Athénaïs, played Youth itself. At the end of the performance she sang sweetly: ‘Reserve your criticisms for old age / All our days are charming / Everyone laughs at our desires.’
¹⁴

Louise-Françoise was already a mischievous little creature: ‘a pretty cat, while you play with it, it lets you feel its claws.' In a few years' time – two months before her twelfth birthday
*
– she would be married off to a Prince of the Blood, the Duc de Bourbon, heir to the Prince de Condé and at court known as Monsieur le Duc. Her official title therefore, by which she was always addressed, was Madame la Duchesse.
†
The Duc de Bourbon was extremely small and his head was very large; he was singularly charmless, and arrogant on the subject of the rank which was his sole claim to distinction. At the time the Marquis de Sourches exclaimed that ‘it was a ridiculous thing to see these two young puppets’ getting married.
¹⁵
The bride did not however long remain a puppet. The wilful Madame la Duchesse, irreverent and rather lazy, would come to exhibit the new values of Versailles, where everyone laughed at the behaviour of the young, or so the young thought.

It was however her half-sister Marie-Anne, daughter of La Vallière, who was the star of this particular ballet. She was newly married to another Prince of the Blood, the Prince de Conti,
‡
a match that excited courtiers had predicted for ‘the little fiancés' when they first danced together. Marie-Anne's ravishing looks fully justified the promise of her childhood: her perfect heart-shaped face and huge wide-set eyes were celebrated at every ball, including the masked balls when Marie-Anne often declined to cover the famous eyes, lest their ‘fire' should be doused. (Like many beauties, Marie-Anne was extremely short-sighted: the kind of beguiling person who ‘lost' her magnifying glasses because she had pushed them on top of her head.) ‘The goddess Conti' was how she was often described, and was she not after all ‘descended from Olympus', ‘the Daughter of Jupiter', as La Fontaine apostrophised her? Her scented chamber was known as ‘the shrine of Venus'. Perhaps her bastard birth was even responsible for her allure. When Marie-Anne unwisely commented on the reclining Dauphine: ‘Look at her, just as ugly asleep as awake,' Marianne-Victoire opened her eyes and said: ‘Were I a love-child I would be as beautiful as you.’
¹⁶

This paragon of grace, with no reason to be tormented by the spiritual anguish of her mother, was rated the best dancer at court; according to one contemporary she eclipsed the dancers of the Paris opera. In this ballet Marie-Anne danced the nymph Ariane in the plumes and luxurious embroidered costume which were considered suitable nymph-wear at the time. The poet Benserade described her as ‘effacing all the other flowers / Even to the lily of her origin'.
¹⁷

The lily in question was her mother Louise, now in her convent, who had duly received a visit from Marie-Anne on the occasion of her marriage, as well as congratulations from the court. (Madame de Sévigné found Sister Louise as lovely as ever, if even thinner; her grace was unimpaired, as well as ‘the way she looked at you'.) Although her daughter was making a prestigious match, Louise's attitude to her ‘children of shame' remained ambivalent. A few years later Bishop Bossuet had to break to Louise the news of the death of her son, Vermandois, at the age of sixteen, under unsavoury circumstances: there had been some kind of homosexual scandal. Louise responded chillingly: ‘I ought to weep for his birth far more than I weep for his death.' Both children were to the nun, in her own words in her book, reminders of her ‘deplorable [former] life, all the more deplorable because it caused me no horror'.
¹⁸

Like Madame la Duchesse, Marie-Anne belonged to a very different generation; after all she could not remember the distressing circumstances of her birth, her mother having to make an appearance in chapel only a few hours later. Marie-Anne set the tone for a new kind of emancipated princess when she complained on her wedding night that her husband ‘lacked force' and she preferred his brother. Courtiers wondered how, exactly, at the age of thirteen, she was able to compare the two; but Marie-Anne had begun as she meant to go on. During a short-lived marriage (the Prince de Conti died in 1685) Marie-Anne troubled him constantly with her wayward behaviour, according to Primi Visconti, who seldom heard a rumour he wouldn't pass on. The Prince de Conti complained to her father. But Marie-Anne would fling her arms around the King's neck and be forgiven for her prettiness, her charm and above all for amusing him with her adorable if naughty ways.
¹⁹
As the King marched steadily, if at times laggardly, in the direction of virtue, there was a lesson here. The hard-working potentate still had to be amused.

After the death of her young husband, the eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne showed no signs of marrying again. Secure in her position, she was prepared to live a life of pleasure at court, enjoying the special friendship and favour of her half-brother the Dauphin. And there was one asset Marie-Anne enjoyed that was denied to Madame la Duchesse (Louise-Françoise). Although both were married to Princes of the Blood, Marie-Anne's mother had not been the wife of another man at the time of her birth; Madame la Duchesse on the other hand, for all her
hauteur,
was for ever stigmatised as the fruit of Double Adultery.

There were other princesses born in the seventies waiting in the wings: none of them showed signs of being docile. The King's younger surviving daughter by Athénaïs, Françoise-Marie, the fruit of their reconciliation, was a little tearaway. Liselotte's daughter Elisabeth-Charlotte, a Granddaughter of France, was described by her mother as ‘so terribly wild' and ‘rough as a boy'. There was something like pride in the way in which Liselotte added: ‘I think it must be the nature of all Liselottes to be so wayward in childhood.’.
²⁰
(Her half-sister Anne-Marie, child o
t
Irlenriette-Anne, a gentler and sweeter character, was married off to the Duke of Savoy in 1684 and left France.) Then there were the Princesses of the Blood, the tiny daughters of the Prince de Condé and a Bavarian princess – nicknamed ‘the Dolls of the Blood' – such as Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, sister of Monsieur le Duc. Bénédicte made up for her lack of size with a sharp wit and a ranging intelligence which was quite prepared to challenge the orthodoxies of the court of Louis XIV.

All this was for the future, when the girls one might term the dragons' teeth of Louis XIV, with all their rivalries of birth and position, grew up.
*
In 1682 however the important family event was seen with reason to be the accouchement of the Dauphine. To Marianne-Victoire was entrusted the responsibility of producing a male heir in the direct line (if the Dauphin had no son, the succession went to the Orléans branch: his uncle Monsieur and so to the latter's only son Philippe Duc de Chartres), and she had already suffered two miscarriages.

On 6 August 1682, therefore, the tension was considerable as she went into labour, using the famous royal plank between two mattresses on which both Louis XIV and the Dauphin had been born. Louis was in attendance, taking his turn in promenading the Dauphine round the room as the hours passed. Also present among the host of courtiers exerting their rights to be in on important occasions of state were both Athénaïs and Françoise: the former as Superintendent of the Queen's Household, the latter as Second Mistress of the Wardrobe of the Dauphine herself. It was ordered however that no one wearing perfume should be admitted to the birthing-chamber: overwhelming scents were thought dangerous in this situation. Sniffer-dogs were posted at the door to make sure there were no back-slidings.

In attendance was the royal
accoucheur
(man-midwife), the calm and competent Julian Clément: he had already performed the same function for Athénaïs. When the baby was finally born shortly after ten o'clock in the evening, he answered the King's question about its sex according to a prearranged code: ‘I do not know
yet
, Sire.' This meant a boy. (‘I do not know, Sire' was code for a girl.) It was therefore the suddenly radiant King who cried out: ‘We have a Duc de Bourgogne!’.
²¹
The baby was put on a silver platter and examined – successfully – for perfection.
*
‘The little Prince', as Bourgogne was known, was promised a splendid destiny according to his horoscope, with the Sun in the sign of the Lion, Saturn in the eleventh house at the hour of Jupiter. From Louis XIV's point of view, the dynasty was now secure, especially since Marianne-Victoire became pregnant again without mishap a few months later. As a forty-four-year-old grandfather (little older than his parents had been at his birth) he could now relax. He personally had no more need to produce further legitimate heirs.

The King's patriarchal contentment contrasted with the mood of Liselotte. In July 1682 she described herself as ‘miserable as an old dog'. Everyone went on about her being so sad, she wrote, ‘when they themselves are the daily and hourly cause'. Once again, as with Henriette-Anne, it was not Monsieur's homosexuality which was at issue, since for the last four years, following the birth of a healthy son and daughter, ‘I have been permitted to live in perfect chastity.' (A few years later she decided that abstinence had actually made her ‘a virgin' again.) It was Monsieur's slavish adoration of the Chevalier de Lorraine which upset the balance of what could have been a perfectly acceptable condition. There were also rumours, probably spread by Monsieur's supporters, of Liselotte's own gallantry with the Chevalier de Saint-Saëns: quite untrue, since Liselotte much preferred her dogs (‘the best people I have come across in France, I never have less than four about me … no eiderdown could ever be as cosy').
²²

In her unhappiness and her indignation Liselotte asked to retire to a convent where one of her Palatine aunts was a Catholic Abbess. But Louis refused. He gave her three reasons. ‘First of all, you are Madame,' he said, ‘and obliged to uphold that position. Secondly you are my sister-in-law and my affection for you will not allow me to let you leave. Thirdly, you are my brother's wife and I cannot let him be touched by scandal.' To this Liselotte had no alternative but to submit with the words: ‘You are my King and thus my master.' King, Monsieur and Madame all three embraced.