The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (62 page)

In December 1684 Athénaïs experienced what Saint-Simon described as ‘the first major step of her disgrace’ when the King moved her out of the lodgings adjoining his own apartment at Versailles and relocated her in a suite of rooms on the ground floor. Mme de Montespan did not take kindly to being relegated to the sidelines and in 1686 there was an unpleasant incident after she received what she considered to be an intolerable affront. That year, unbeknown to most of the court (including Athénaïs) the King had been afflicted by an anal fistula. On 21 May it was announced that for the good of his health he would leave for the spa town of Barèges in three weeks’ time, but Mme de Montespan was not among those who were selected to accompany him. Incensed at her exclusion, on 25 May Athénaïs had a showdown with the King. She became ‘so carried away that she openly complained’ and was reported to have shouted ‘several things which would not have been prudent to say’. She then stormed from court, announcing she would seek refuge with her sister at Fontrevault Abbey. She wanted her two youngest children to join her there but next day, as they were climbing into their coach, the King sent word that he would not permit his son the Comte de Toulouse to leave.
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In the end all was smoothed over. On 27 May the King decided that after all, he would not go to Barèges. He ordered the Duc du Maine to inform his mother of the change of plan and she at once returned to court. The next day the King visited her as normal without making any reference to the contretemps that had occurred.
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But though the incident appeared forgotten, it had weakened Athénaïs still further by underlining that the King’s tolerance was not inexhaustible and that she remained at court on sufferance.

After this Mme de Montespan took to spending long periods away from court. In the spring of 1687 she absented herself to take the waters at Bourbon and then went to stay for several weeks with her sister at Fontrevault. She did not return to Versailles until September and in subsequent years she repeated this pattern. However, as one courtier remarked, these ‘long absences … merely ruined her little remaining credit; it was furthermore thought [she took them] more to ease her peevish temper than for health reasons’. During the months she did attend court, the King no longer unfailingly visited her in the evenings and she was also not automatically included on excursions to Marly.
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Despite the fact that she was being gradually shut out from the King’s inner circle, Athénaïs was unable to summon up the will to leave the court. Although in former days her pride had been legendary, she could not bring herself to forsake this demeaning existence and instead endured a succession of slights in order to cling on to a life which had become utterly pointless. When at last she did the right thing, it was almost by accident.

Having hitherto been responsible for arranging her children’s education, Mme de Montespan was understandably furious when, without prior consultation, her youngest daughter, Mlle de Blois, was entrusted in March 1691 to the care of Mme de Montchevreuil, a hideous, humourless prude who was the best friend of Mme de Maintenon. The provocation made Mme de Montespan ‘forget all her wise resolutions … not to give the King any pretext to get rid of her’. She angrily sent word to Louis that since she was being deprived of her children, she would like him to authorise her retirement from court. It was a fatal blunder, for the King had been longing for her departure for some time. He ‘joyfully responded’ that she had his permission to withdraw and then, to guard against her changing her mind, he allocated her apartment at Versailles to the Duc du Maine.
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Before long Mme de Montespan came to regret her precipitate action. The following month she told friends ‘that she had not absolutely abandoned the court; that she would still see the King sometimes and that in truth they had been a bit hasty to remove the furniture from her apartment’.
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It turned out, however, that she had taken an irrevocable step: she would never see the King again.

Occasionally, when the King was absent, she crept back to Versailles, paying brief visits when he was away during the summer of 1691, and again in April 1694. Such appearances only made people compare her with those ‘unfortunate souls who return to the places they inhabited to expiate their faults’.
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Despite her evident yearning to be readmitted, her exclusion from the royal presence remained absolute. She was not even invited to the wedding of her daughter, Mlle de Blois, to the Duc de Chartres in February 1692, or that of the Duc du Maine a month later.

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Mme de Montespan lived for sixteen years after her withdrawal from court and, much as she had dreaded leaving, there is reason to believe she found happiness elsewhere. When in Paris she lived at the Filles de Saint-Joseph, a convent of which she had been a munificent patron for some years and which recently had been enlarged at her expense. Her life there was far from reclusive: although she had become estranged from the Duc du Maine, she kept in touch with her other children, including her son by the Marquis de Montespan. Besides this, aristocratic ladies and old friends from court made a point of visiting her. After a time she bought properties at Petit Bourg and Oiron in Poitou, and she also paid regular visits to the spa town of Bourbon. In addition she spent several months each year with her favourite sister at Fontrevault Abbey.

Merely because she passed so much time in religious institutions, it should not be thought that her life was devoid of fun. She once described Fontrevault as ‘a convent which nobody can resist … and where all the nuns are a thousand times happier than anyone who lives in the world’. She succeeded in communicating her enjoyment of what it had to offer to those around her, for she still possessed the quality of infectious gaiety that had been so marked in her youth. Once, when she was at Fontrevault, a niece of hers wrote that Mme de Montespan had the talent of making every day seem like a fete day. Even hearing a sermon with her could be fun. In 1696 Mme de Coulanges informed a friend that Athénaïs was taking her to listen to a celebrated preacher who bore a striking resemblance to Mme de Montespan’s late brother the Duc de Vivonne. Vivonne had died ‘rotten in body and soul’ a few years before and Mme de Coulanges admitted that she and Athénaïs were never able to repress their laughter when they heard pious exhortations and holy sentiments issue from the mouth of one who reminded them so strongly of that renowned debauchee.
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Gradually, however, pleasure ceased to be of such importance to Athénaïs. She had always given generously to charity, but in later years she devoted most of her annual income to deserving causes. Apart from her endowment of the Filles de Saint-Joseph, where she set up an embroidery workshop for poor girls, she established orphanages at Fontainebleau and Oiron, and also alleviated the lot of numerous needy individuals. Even after her departure from court she had continued to receive an allowance from the King of 12,000 gold louis a year, much of which she gave away. In January 1707 the King informed her that his wars were costing him so much that this year he could only give her 8000, to which she replied that while she did not mind for herself, she felt sad on behalf of the poor, who would suffer in consequence.
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As well as giving away her money, she immersed herself in good works, sewing shirts for paupers. All her life she had been renowned for keeping a good table, but now she ate more simply and fasted frequently. Long periods were set aside for prayer and she not only wore a hairshirt at all times but mortified her body in other ways. In 1707 she even asked her old friend the Duchesse de Noailles not to write to her with news from court as, though she had not yet reached the stage where such matters were of no interest to her, she did not want to distract her mind from higher things.
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A letter she wrote in 1704 to a female friend demonstrates the depth of her piety. She confided that she longed for God ‘to create a solitude in the bottom of my heart’ so she could meditate on her salvation at her leisure and then urged, ‘Let us go to him, my dear … Let us weep for our sins now in order not to shed one day … tears of despair’. She reminded her unnamed correspondent that they must guard against dying steeped in sin for, after death, those who had lived ‘in forgetfulness of God and the Church will regret in vain their waste of time’.
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The use of devotional language was, of course, more commonplace at the time and some might be inclined to dismiss these sentiments as worthless on the grounds that even Mme Voisin could feign piety when it suited her. It would be harsh, however, to doubt that Athénaïs’s convictions were deeply held and her evident belief that salvation was attainable provides another argument against believing that in earlier years she had dedicated herself to the devil. While she demonstrated an awareness of her sins of the flesh, these were hardly the words of a woman who had committed actions that would have put her beyond hope of redemption.

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Saint-Simon claimed that, though even in old age Mme de Montespan enjoyed excellent health, she was plagued by a fear of death. Much has been made of the fact that she was also afraid of the dark. She never went to sleep without candles burning in her bedroom and to ensure that she was never left alone, she employed old ladies to sit with her and watch her as she slept. This has been attributed to her terror that Satan would come to claim the soul that had been pledged him, but this is fanciful, for she had been nervous of the dark all her life. In 1675 she mentioned in a letter that she ‘cannot sleep without light’ and it is clear that this had been the case for some time.
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In the end she met her death in exemplary style. In May 1707 she had just arrived at Bourbon to take the waters when she was suddenly taken ill. Her condition worsened after the Maréchale de Clairambault gave her an overdose of emetic and it became apparent she would not survive. Saint-Simon recorded that ‘nothing could have been more edifying than her final hours’. She called her servants to her and proclaimed her regret for her sins, apologising for her bouts of ill temper and the scandal she had caused. Betraying no sign of the dread of death from which she had suffered in the past, she received the final sacraments evincing a serene confidence in the mercy of God.
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The news was at once sent to the King at Marly. Saint-Simon maintained that the King appeared callously indifferent to her death and that when the Duchesse de Bourgogne expressed surprise at this, he told her that Mme de Montespan had been dead to him ever since her departure from court. It seems, however, that the news did not fail to move him, for the diarist Dangeau recorded that on that day the King broke his usual routine by walking in his gardens till nightfall. As for Mme de Maintenon, much as she had detested Mme de Montespan, the news of her death left her strangely shaken. Ever since Athénaïs had left court, Mme de Maintenon had resolutely severed all contact with her, making it clear she did not want to receive even an occasional letter. Yet, on learning of her death, she secluded herself on her
chaise percée
to have a good weep and she told her confidante the Princesse d’Ursins that she had inevitably been affected by the loss of a person who had always excited strong emotions in her.
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Two years later, on 14 June 1709, the former Lieutenant-General of the Paris Police, Nicolas de La Reynie, died at the great age of eighty-four. Civic-minded to the last, he left instructions that his body should not be interred in a vault within a church, as he did not want ‘the rotting of my body to contribute to the corruption and infection of the air in the place where the holy mysteries are celebrated’.
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In 1686 the King had demonstrated his continuing high regard for La Reynie by making him a Councillor of State, a post to which he had long aspired. For some years, however, he had also remained in charge of the Paris police, only relinquishing the position in 1697. By then he was ‘worn out by age and work’ but even so, Saint-Simon had so high an opinion of his abilities that he was sad the King did not appoint La Reynie to succeed M. Boucherat as Chancellor when the latter died in 1699.
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During La Reynie’s lifetime the King had relied on his fidelity and discretion to prevent the public from discovering that Mme de Montespan had been linked with the Affair of the Poisons, even though others had thought that more stringent precautions were necessary. In 1681 Colbert’s legal adviser, Duplessis, had recommended that the records of the
Chambre Ardente’s
proceedings should be burnt as they were filled with ‘execrable impieties and abominable filth whose memory … should not be conserved’.
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At the time this course had not been followed, perhaps because the King thought La Reynie would have interpreted such action as an implicit criticism of his conduct of the case. However, now that La Reynie could raise no objection, the King sought to obliterate all the evidence implicating Mme de Montespan.

In 1681 the documents relating to ‘the particular facts’ about Mme de Montespan had been entrusted to Sagot, Recorder of the
Chambre Ardente.
Then, nine years later, they were transferred into the custody of the King’s secretary, Gaudion. On 13 July 1709, a month after the death of La Reynie, the King sent Chancellor Pontchartrain to retrieve the coffer containing the documents from Gaudion. When it was brought to him in the council chamber, Louis unlocked the coffer with a key which had belonged to La Reynie. Having perused the documents it contained, he methodically burnt them.
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