Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (8 page)

Louis was indeed the state—although historians believe that the attribution of the phrase
“L’État, c’est moi”
is apocryphal. It is, however, held that on his deathbed, he did declare,
“Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours”
—I depart, but the State will always remain.

L
OUIS
XIV
AND
F
RANÇOISE
-A
THÉNAÏS
DE
R
OCHECHOUART
DE
M
ORTEMART
,
MARQUISE
DE
M
ONTESPAN
(1641–1707)

For several years, although the Sun King was very much married to a pious and humorless Spanish-born princess with protuberant eyes and black teeth (the product of too much Hapsburg inbreeding), Athénaïs de Montespan was known as “the real queen of France.”

Lush and louche, Madame de Montespan possessed an innate sense of confidence, which contributed immensely to her sex appeal as well as her pretensions to entitlement and were (in her view) bred
in her DNA; both sides of her family were grander, centuries older, and more aristocratic than the Bourbons. The Rochechouart de Mortemarts looked down their straight, highly attractive noses at the royal family, viewing them as a bunch of parvenus who, by marrying into the merchant class and taking Medici wives, had diluted their blue blood with the stigma of trade.

In 1660, Madame de Montespan made her social debut at the age of twenty. In the glittering salons of Paris’s Marais district, she dropped the pedestrian Françoise, preferring her more exotic middle name (pronounced Ah-TEN-Ay-EES), which perfectly suited her nature, for she unquestionably had the ego of a goddess.

Athénaïs’s own father was an adulterer; among his numerous lovers was the celebrated courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. His philandering caused her honorable mother, Diane, considerable heartbreak. In 1653, the fifty-something duc de Mortemart abandoned his wife and children for a lover nearly twenty years his junior. Throughout her life Madame de Montespan felt tugged in competing directions. On the one hand there was her father’s worldliness and her own ambition to further herself at court; on the other, her mother’s piety and the desire to live virtuously. Both were legitimate aspects of her complex personality.

Athénaïs spent her childhood in the medieval castle of Lussac in the countryside of Poitou. At the age of twelve she followed her elder sister Gabrielle into the convent of Ste. Marie des Saintes, which, for a pretty price, educated the daughters of noblemen. There she studied the traditional (and surprisingly well-rounded) curriculum for aristocratic young ladies: sewing and embroidery, dancing, music, history, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. She was also taught to act, as it was assumed that all of these girls would be presented at court and would be expected to perform in the king’s ballets and masques. Additionally, Athénaïs became a rather good poet; many of the nasty verses that would later circulate through the gilded corridors of the royal châteaux came from her quills. She also learned to cook at Ste. Marie des Saintes, which served her in good stead during her royal romance, because Louis loved to eat and expected his paramours to have equally healthy appetites. Unfortunately for
Athénaïs, corpulence ran in the Rochechouart de Mortemart genes. One of her cousins held the dubious distinction of being the fattest man at court.

The seventeenth century in France was known as the
Grand Siècle
—the Great Century—a flowering of wit and culture, the age of the playwrights Molière, Racine, and Corneille, of the architect Jules-Hardouin Mansart, the landscaper André Le Nôtre, and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. But every courtier was expected to be quick on his feet as well, literally a nimble and graceful dancer, but also ready with a quip or a bon mot. Here, too, Athénaïs excelled. Even the duc de Saint-Simon, one of her greatest detractors at court, acknowledged that Madame de Montespan had “the gift of saying things both amusing and singular, always original, and which no one expected, not even she herself as she said them.”

Athénaïs’s family was known for what they said as well as for how they uttered it—cutting remarks in high, cultivated voices and languid tones that Madame de Montespan’s daughters and even her ladies-in-waiting sought to imitate. However, there would come a time when courtiers would fear to walk beneath Athénaïs’s windows at Versailles. In the mid-1670s, when she presided over a suite of twenty rooms adjacent to the king’s, she delighted in delivering scathing critiques of each passerby for the amusement of her royal audience of one, who stood beside her, eager to hear every clever insult. “Going before the guns,” the courtiers called it.

As soon as she was presented at court, her family connections garnered Athénaïs a post as maid of honor to the new queen, Marie-Thérèse. As a courtier she was expected to participate in the ballets and other court diversions. In her maiden appearance she was cast in the ballet
Hercule Amoreux
opposite the Sun King himself. But it took some time before she’d catch his eye as anything other than a dance partner—for in 1661 Louis took his first
maîtresse en titre
, the meek and dewy Louise de La Vallière. Although it seemed that the Grand Monarch had zero interest in her, the ambitious Athénaïs bided her time. Unlike the vapid blond Louise,
she
had sex appeal and knew it.

In 1663, at the age of twenty-two, having spent two seasons in
Paris, Athénaïs became engaged. She was considered old for the era, as aristocratic girls typically wed in their mid-teens. Her fiancé, the marquis de Noirmoutiers, had been selected by her parents. But after the marquis became involved in a duel on the morning of January 21, he was exiled to Portugal, where five years later he died fighting the Spanish.

While Athénaïs was grieving over the banishment of her betrothed she received a condolence call from Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, marquis de Montespan, the brother of the man killed in the duel. He was from Gascony, a region known for producing hotheads, and the stereotype proved true in many cases. Montespan’s dark good looks appealed to Athénaïs, and although he had little to bring to a match beyond his family’s ancient name, he fell in love with her. On January 28, only a week after the fatal duel, their marriage contract was signed, and they were wed on February 6.

Their union would prove to be a textbook example of the adage, “Marry in haste; repent at leisure.”

Montespan’s kinsman, the Archbishop of Sens, was a member of the ultraconservative Jansenist sect critical of the king’s lifestyle, so not only was he persona non grata at court, but the other members of his family were unwelcome as well. Thus, it fell to Athénaïs to advance the young couple’s fortune there. But while his spouse was at court, the marquis de Montespan was busy gambling like mad, amassing debts, and borrowing against her dowry. On one occasion, before Athénaïs was scheduled to dance in a court ballet, she had to schlep him to a lawyer’s office in an effort to prevent his arrest for debt. Another time, he had to pawn her pearl earrings to satisfy a creditor.

Finally, Montespan decided that the only way to make a name for himself was to fund a regiment and join the army. It kept him out of town, but landed him even deeper in debt. Perhaps it was a good thing he wasn’t around, because seventeenth-century Frenchwomen were not encouraged to bathe during pregnancy, as it was thought to relax the womb. In November 1663, Athénaïs gave birth to a daughter, Marie-Christine. She would bear nine children during the course of her life; only two of them were her husband’s.

Upon her marriage, because she was technically no longer a “maid,” Athénaïs lost her position as maid of honor to the queen. Consequently, it was imperative to find another post. By February 1664, both she and the king’s
maîtresse en titre
Louise de La Vallière (who’d given birth to a royal bastard around the same time as Athénaïs bore her legitimate daughter) were short-listed for Queen Marie-Thérèse’s six-woman retinue. In accordance with court etiquette, only two marquises, a duo of duchesses, and a pair of princesses would be selected as ladies-in-waiting. As a marquise, only two of those positions were available to Athénaïs.

By now Athénaïs and Louise had spent four years at court, but Madame de Montespan found herself perennially tamping down her envy of the dull-as-dishwater official mistress, while she had to contend with a spendthrift absentee husband. Nonetheless, scintillating and supremely confident in her assets, Athénaïs decided to use her wits and wiles to supersede Louise in the king’s bed, all the while feigning friendship with the insipid girl.

By the summer of 1664, after Montespan had borrowed another fifty-six thousand livres against his wife’s dowry to finance another (failed) military venture, Athénaïs was utterly over him. Louis-Henri’s success at court depended on hers, but he was squandering her money (including her salary) at the gaming tables in Paris, when she needed those funds to maintain her position. Keeping up appearances was costly. Not only that, there was going to be another mouth to feed. On September 9, she bore a son, Louis-Alexandre, who was given one of his father’s lesser titles, that of marquis d’Antin. But the infant would have nothing else to inherit if Monsieur de Montespan didn’t give up his gambling.

Other women in similar straits at court took lovers. Her own sister Gabrielle, the very married marquise de Thianges, was one of the king’s occasional flings. Yet Athénaïs remained faithful to Louis-Henri. Was it part of her strategy to ensnare the sovereign, on the assumption that making herself available for casual sex was not the way to win him permanently?

Louis XIV noticed her, but his reaction was hardly what she was looking for. “She’s desperate to make me fall in love with her,” he once remarked to Louise de La Vallière, as they snickered over Madame
de Montespan’s transparency. “She does what she can, but I don’t want her.”

But two years later, in 1666, Louis and Athénaïs both lost their mothers. Free from the restraining influence of the formidable Anne of Austria, Louis no longer felt compelled to remain discreet about his affair with Louise de La Vallière. Ironically, under the court’s incessant scrutiny, the fragile blonde withered. The great chronicler of the age, Madame de Sevigné, described Louise as “that little violet which hid itself under the grass and was ashamed of being mistress.” Not only did it become apparent that she was abundantly lacking in the requisite clever repartee, but she would have to have been made of steel to withstand the perpetual gossip and the constant efforts to undermine her.

And no one tried harder to do so than her dear friend the marquise de Montespan, who by now had become the royal favorite’s confidante. In the parlance of the day, Athénaïs was fighting for the king
“avec bec et ongles”
(with beak and talons), but with the subtlety of a hawk observing her prey, waiting for the perfect moment to swoop down and pounce. She also managed to charm her other rival, the queen, with her witty anecdotes about how she was perpetually fending off the advances of rakish courtiers.

Louise gave birth to the king’s daughter in October 1666. Only a month later tongues were wagging that the real reason His Majesty so frequently visited her at the Palais de Brion (the charming château was a gift from the king) was to spend time with her glamorous friend. The duc d’Enghien observed, “We are saying at the court that he sighs a little after Mme. de Montespan, and, to tell the truth, she well deserves it, because one could not have more spirit nor more beauty than she has….”

Athénaïs was more than a great beauty of her day; there were some, including the king, who were convinced she was the most gorgeous woman in France. Louis was an exceptionally acquisitive man, and so he doubtless felt the urge to append her to his collection of adornments the same way he might add a brilliant statue, a spectacular fountain, or the
Mona Lisa
. With her spectacular curvaceous figure, enormous china blue eyes, and tumbling honey blond curls that she arranged in a style she called the Hurluberlu (pulled off her
forehead and cascading in soft ringlets about her face—a coiffure copied by every woman at court, including the queen), the glorious Madame de Montespan was herself a status symbol.

Yet toward the end of the year Athénaïs declared, “Heaven defend me from becoming the King’s mistress, but were such a misfortune to befall me, I should certainly not have the audacity to appear before the Queen!”

Was she being coy, deflecting attention from her true stratagem, or did she really mean it? A ruthless and calculating personality has historically been attributed to Athénaïs, but at the time, that opinion was far from universal. Madame de Caylus, a noblewoman and cousin of the king’s secret wife Madame de Maintenon, whose impressions of the court were edited by Voltaire, insisted that “far from being born debauched, the character of Mme. de Montespan was naturally distanced from gallantry [a catchall word for flirtations and affairs], and drawn towards virtue.” Regardless of her long-term adulterous relationship, Athénaïs was devout throughout her life, once angrily retorting to a duchess who expressed surprise at her adherence to the Church’s prescribed fast days, “What, Madame? Because I commit one sin am I to commit all others?”

Nevertheless, Athénaïs needed to believe that her own fine qualities, rather than any calculated agenda, had won the king’s heart. She believed, as did Louise de La Vallière to a point, that the only excuse for adultery was true love.

Louis XIV spent most of his long reign at war, and for several years during the earlier part of his rule, when he decamped for the front he was accompanied by an entourage that included the most important women in his life. In May of 1667 the conflict in question was the War of Devolution in the Spanish Netherlands, now Belgium. Athénaïs and the queen were among the party, both determined to bear the long hours on the road like troupers. But it was the beginning of the end for Louise when, in an uncharacteristic and rather desperate display of bravado, she rode out in great state to greet her royal lover, utterly humiliating her boss, the queen, thereby causing considerable embarrassment to His Majesty. The
maîtresse en titre
’s breach of etiquette became a chasm and Louis began to stray.