Seductress (17 page)

Diane, according to folk tradition, hexed Henri with diabolic spells and potions of potable gold. The very gates of her home were bewitched. On the pediment she placed a clock flanked by two bronze hounds that barked on the hour and a stag that tapped out the time with its hoof. Whenever it chimed, the townspeople said demons were at work; the resident goddess was up to her old tricks, bespelling men and time.

A century later another eldersiren made an equally astounding conquest of a king, in this case, the John Kennedy of French monarchs, Louis XIV. Like Diane de Poitiers, the suprafascinating Françoise de Maintenon was also accused of witchcraft, but hers was a different maternal voodoo, tailored for another age. There were no torrid scenes on the turkey carpet, no flamboyant festivities and castle renovations. With the ascendance of Puritanism and its impact on the Counter-Reformation, a Madonna cult swept through France, exalting docile, gentle, self-sacrificing homemakers and mothers.

The Silver Fox this time was a lily pure nanny on the cusp of forty without money, magnificence, or (overtly) the slightest interest in sex. That alone ought to disqualify her since sirens are known by their carnal zest. But Françoise deserves honorable mention because she shows just how prepotent a trained senior enchantress can be, especially when she unleashes the divine mother.

As a boy, Louis’s favorite bedtime story was “
Peau d’Âne
” (The Ass’s Skin) about a prince who marries a princess disguised in a dress made of an old ass’s skin. In Françoise he found his lady of disguise. Subjected to a miserable childhood, with a mother who hated her and an aunt who forced her to scrub stairs in wooden sabots, Françoise d’Aubigné learned early to dissimulate for her keep. At seventeen, faced with incarceration in a convent, she married a hopeless cripple of forty-two, Paul Scarron. Though immobilized by rheumatoid arthritis and strapped to a wooden box on wheels, Scarron ran the rowdiest, bawdiest salon in Paris, a kind of seventeenth-century Animal House.

During this eight-year marriage Françoise walked a tightrope between mistress of revels and sainted nurse. Fortunately she had superb rabbis, male and female. Her husband, a court poet, educated her in letters and
bel parlare
so that she could hold her own and amuse the company, while the great Ninon de Lenclos taught her to captivate men without compromising her stellar image. Françoise went further and combined it with a stainless reputation. “Nothing,” said this cunning vamp, “is cleverer than irreproachable conduct.”

Françoise was, if not conventionally pretty, a disturbing presence. Lovelocks spilled to her shoulders in long corkscrew curls, and her black eyes, “the most splendid in the world,” flashed like hot coals, eclipsing her Gallic nose and small wire-drawn mouth. “It was a fight,” she later recalled, “who would have me.” “I was universally loved.” Amid her sister of mercy ministrations to Paul, she loved them back. She trysted with Maréchal d’Albret and the duc de Villars and used Ninon’s bedroom for assignations with the marquis de Villarceaux, the darling of the adultery circuit. Yet few, except Paul, suspected. “You are as much a little devil as you are spotless,” he fleered.

After he died and left her penniless, Françoise dug in further behind her pious facade. In the mid-century prudery backlash, charity depended on stainless respectability. Although rumored to have entertained troops of lovers, she lived for nine years in a convent, ingratiating herself with the aristocracy by performing domestic services.

One of these aristocratic ladies, Athénaïs de Montespan, hired Françoise in 1668 for a delicate mission: to nurse her illegitimate children by the king at a secret hideaway. Nothing could have seemed like a safer bet. La Veuve Scarronique was the picture of middle-aged stolidity and domestic virtue. Louis at first found Françoise (three years older than he) “difficult in every way,” and Athénaïs, a proficient sex-pert and witty, curvaceous glamour girl, had the king wrapped up, some said under a love spell.

But Athénaïs, not the swiftest seductress, didn’t know her man. Louis had a secret fixation, like many rakes, on mother women. Not only did he love children, he idolized his pious mother and hungered for maternal solace, support, and ego ratification. Beneath his autocratic formality he harbored deep insecurities. Childhood wounds still festered: inadequate nourishment as a baby, inferiority feelings from an irregular education, and the lasting trauma of the Fronde revolution in his youth. When he saw the “pure” older Françoise, then, in the garden one day in a pietà posture with his three children, she hit him where he lived. “She knows how to love,” he said famously. “It would be pleasant to be loved by her.”

In less than ten years Françoise had supplanted the divine Athénaïs. Increasingly Louis visited his children to talk to her. Nicknamed the Thaw for her disinhibitory effect on others, she permitted him to feel “perfectly free” and “wholly at ease.” She amused him so much with her “delicious talk” that he told Athénaïs not to gossip with Françoise after he left because she’d find her conversation more entertaining than his own. She called him a “hero,” listened and consoled, and provided him with excellent advice.

By the time Athénaïs caught on, it was too late. She rounded on Françoise with wildcat fury and fired her. But Louis XIV, who’d already made Françoise Madame de Maintenon, appointed her second lady-in-waiting to the dauphin’s wife to have her closer at hand. By 1680 the court placed its bets on the “rise of the elderly
gouvernante
with the magnificent black eyes.” Françoise now passed Athénaïs on the stairs at Versailles and quipped, “You are going down, Madame? I am going up.”

Three years later Louis XIV married the fifty-year-old Madame de Maintenon in a secret ceremony. Courtiers feared for his sanity. To have singled out an old fossil from a mosh pit of young blondes bespoke a sorcery deeper and darker than Madame de Montespan’s. As with so many senior sirens, Françoise was called the “old witch,” the “black spider.” More uncanny still, Louis, a confirmed horndog, remained faithful to her for over thirty years. He monopolized her time, could not bear to have her out of his sight, and referred every important question to “Madame Reason.” “However much you love me,” the king declared, “my love for you will always be greater.”

Undoubtedly Françoise
did
love the king—in her fashion. She put up with Athénaïs only “for the love of him” and dedicated her very existence to mollycoddling him. But her reign at court was a “veritable martyrdom.” Although she was genuinely domestic and maternal (unlike most seductresses), her libido wasn’t in it. The king sapped her energy with his gargantuan needs and demands and left her cold in bed.

Wearily she put herself through her seductive paces like an old circus pony, organizing fetes, forcing herself to shine, charm, and mother well into her seventies. She outlived Louis by four years, and ended her days at St.-Cyr, the female academy she founded, in the company of her favorite “turbulent” girls. She died at eighty-three and achieved her last wish—“to remain an enigma for posterity.”

She may not look like an eldervixen surrounded by Bibles and crucifixes in her hawkish portraits. She may not have cashed in on the seductress rewards: sexual happiness, self-actualization, and independence. In the end her dissimulation racket backfired and trapped her in her own hall of trick mirrors. She lost her groove to a Madonna game. She nevertheless pulled off one of the most stunning seductions by an older woman in Western history. She rose from nothing—poverty, disgrace, and a checkered past—to the highest position in France. She always credited her extraordinary rise to a “miracle,” “a work of God.” She should have said “goddess,” specifically the one at the foot of the grand staircase at Versailles, Latona—the derivative of Lat, the archaic all-in-one maternal deity in her last, most powerful phase.

 

Besides maternal allure, men gravitate to Silver Foxes for their wisdom. Again this is primordial, beyond conscious control. The archaic mistress of the universe, the cosmic sex bomb, knew it all, and her avatars, like Inanna, conferred language and learning on mankind. According to ancient myth, the goddess’s brainpower peaked with age. Because of her retention of menstrual fluids (a sort of smart juice), she had Wise Blood. She persists in the archetype of the Wise Crone, though in a castrated form. Rather than a bifocaled postsexual fogy, however, she was a dishy dame as well as the “Perfect Mind,” delivering sex appeal and wisdom with equal shazam.

The ancient classical world was no Elysium Estates for older women. The misogynistic Greeks relegated the overaged to the slag heap of society, stigmatized them as loathsome hags, and bombarded them with a hail of invective. Yet this viciously ageist civilization produced powerful Silver Foxes, some of whom engineered their triumphs through mental prowess.

Of the twelve senior courtesans in Athenaeus’s Grecian chronicles, two of the most successful were wise women, gifted with Aphrodite’s deadliest weapon, “verbal power.” Gnathaena and Glycera, both topflight elder hetaerae, “thought very highly of themselves,” “apportion[ed] their time to learned studies,” and “were quick in making answers.”

Gnathaena’s bon mots outnumber everyone else’s on record, and her book
Rule for Dining in Company
competed with philosophers’ tracts on the subject. Admirers jammed her pricey carriage trade, and the comic poet Diphilus loved her to distraction.

A generation later Glycera retired to Athens to enjoy the fruits of her career in courtesanry, which had included a queenship and her own goddess cult. But she attracted so many beaux with her wit and learned persiflage that she opened shop again and attracted such celebrity lovers as the playwright Menander. Until she died, she held this ex-playboy writer in thrall, just as she “ruined” the many other young Athenians with her autumnal, mind-spun charms.

In 1852 the British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning made a pilgrimage that was a de rigueur rite for every major intellectual of the day. She visited George Sand, the “Good Woman of Genius” and icon of senior wisdom. The encounter left Elizabeth visibly shaken. “La Sand,” the seeress of romantic thought, looked shockingly unethereal—ugly, in fact. She had the face of a jowly Sioux warrior with buckteeth, a beaked nose, and a “deep olive” complexion. More startling was her company. Surrounding the “priestess” sat a “circle of eight or nine men,” all of whom “adore[d] her
à genoux bas
[on bended knee].”

A “female Don Juan” in her youth, George didn’t quit in her twilight years. With the sizzle conferred by her intellectual fame and accrued knowledge, she attracted even better men. “Old women,” she announced after a particularly successful catch, “are more loved than younger women.”

Which is saying a great deal. From her early teens she drew adorers like iron filings. Born to seduce, George (christened Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin) was the product of a match between a professional Parisian mantrap and a hot-blooded aristocratic father. Her grandmother’s unorthodox training augmented her genetic inheritance.

After Aurore’s unstable mother abandoned her, this enlightened grande dame taught her literature and the pleasing arts of dance, music, and drawing, then handed her to an eccentric ex-abbé, who educated her like a boy. Under his tutelage, she learned medicine, agronomy, and estate management and galloped through the Berry countryside in men’s clothes. The boys who accompanied her on these jaunts, one by one, fell in love with her.

But at eighteen, with her grandmother dead and no one to advise her, she made an ill-fated marriage. She accepted Casimir Dudevant, a dull, conventional minor squire of twenty-six. By the third year and birth of one child she snapped and sought satisfaction elsewhere—with a magistrate (who said her “mind” spoiled him for mere “pretty” girls) and with a group of neighborhood blades, one of whom fathered her daughter. Five years later she flung down her celebrated gauntlet: She defied Casimir’s marital authority (which was absolute under the Napoleonic Code), demanded an allowance, and fled to Paris with her lover and children.

Her audacious gamble paid off. Her first novel,
Indiana,
under the pen name G. Sand, was a succès de scandale, a scathing “manifesto” that assailed feminine marital bondage and masculine privilege. This was followed by a spate of other books, all messianically radical and produced with manic industry. Over a lifetime she accumulated a staggering 150 volumes: 70 novels and novellas, 25 plays, a dozen collections of essays and miscellany, an immense autobiography, and 40,000 letters. Although praised for its sensuous musicality, George’s writing was informed by a “passion for the idea.” Everything she wrote was a cri de coeur for reform, for a new socialist, egalitarian order that influenced thinkers from George Eliot to Karl Marx.

Never beautiful—even in her “bachelor” heyday in Paris—George not only swayed men’s minds through the “fascination of her genius,” she totally captivated them sexually. With an “odalisque’s authority,” she chose and beguiled her lovers, often two or more at a time. These affairs were conducted
con furioso.

All Europe followed her soap opera amour with celebrity poet Alfred de Musset with bated breath. She handled this spoiled womanizer like an erotic maestra. At the zenith of her fame she invited him to her apartment, where he found her in a Turkish negligee inundated by admirers, smoking a pipe. While he caressed her babouches, she warned, “Do not speak to me of love.” He did, according to plan, and spirited her off to Venice, where George checkmated his night of brothel hopping with a grand slam infidelity of her own. When she threw him over, he tore out his hair in tufts and cried, “Tell her that I love her with all my heart, that she is still the most womanly woman I have ever known.”

With maturity, George’s erotic heft increased. Wiser in love and learning, she floored it romantically. Under cover of a maternal, one-of-the-guys persona, she assembled a squadron of male admirers who “were more or less in love with her.” A seasoned enchantress by now, she throttled up the elder aphrodisiacs. Making the most of her ripened, unfathomably complex personality, she drove a handsome Swiss poet to public tears at a soiree. “This complicated being is unintelligible to me,” he cried. “Oh siren!”