Athenais (16 page)

Things came to a head in November, when Athénaïs found herself in public opposition to Lauzun over the appointment of a new lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Athénaïs was pushing her friend Mme. de Richelieu, while Lauzun supported the candidacy of Mme. de Créqui. Athénaïs chose this moment to confide to Louis that as long as Lauzun was at court, she feared for her life. Called upon to explain himself, Lauzun lost control and let loose a torrent of abuse against the mistress, claiming to Louis’s face that Monsieur and he himself had slept with Athénaïs. The King was so furious that, in what Saint-Simon called “perhaps the finest action of his life,” he broke his cane and threw it out of the window, saying that he would have regretted having struck a gentleman. The King gave Lauzun five days to make a public apology, but instead he produced a document attempting to justify his conduct. This rash behavior, together with the rumors planted by Louvois, were enough to finish him, and on 26 November, following his arrest at St. Germain, Lauzun was conducted by the commander of the musketeers, D’Artagnan, to the fortress of Pignerol to join the former minister Fouquet. Here, in a dreary cell, without even books or writing materials to amuse him, Lauzun was given nearly ten years to reflect on the folly of offending the King’s beloved.

Athénaïs had shown her claws. Yet although this display of power would terrify anyone who thought of usurping her, Athénaïs paid for her victory with a growing paranoia about her safety, a fear so strong that she would not even walk from her room at St. Germain to the chapel without her bodyguards. (She did at least remain a confidante of Mademoiselle’s, since the King’s cousin did not suspect her involvement in Lauzun’s disgrace.) It is probably this situation that Mme. de Sévigné is describing in a letter of January 1672 in which she writes of “the continual ravings of Lauzun, the black despondency or miserable troubles of the ladies of St. Germain,” suggesting that “perhaps the most envied of them all is not always free of them.”
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However silken the ropes that bound her, Athénaïs was learning that the struggle to maintain control of her life left her, in some ways, no freer than the unfortunate Lauzun.

Chapter Seven

“Virtue would not go so far without
vanity to bear it company.”

I
n the summer of 1665, an eager Italian tourist, the Abbé Locatelli, sneaked into the gardens of St. Germain early one morning to catch a glimpse of the famous grottos whose fountains, with their mythological sculptures, anticipated those of Versailles. Much to Locatelli’s discomfort, he was also treated to a surprise view of the King of France taking a clandestine promenade with Louise de La Vallière. The trespasser threw himself to his knees, and then, as Louis beckoned him over, tried in his best French to explain himself, saying that he was visiting from Bologna. “You are from a wicked country,” replied the King sternly.

“How so?” asked the brave little abbé, to the horror of his companions. “Is not Bologna the mother of universities, the palace of religion, the birthplace of many saints, among whom we honor the incorruptible body of St. Catherine, at whose feet Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France, laid the scepter of her realm?”

Louis politely raised his hat at the mention of St. Catherine, but he snubbed Locatelli firmly by declaring: “You undertake a difficult thing in wishing to defend a country where men butcher other men.” (In the commedia dell’arte, of which Louis was an enthusiast, Bologna was represented as the most brutal of the Italian city states.) Locatelli blushed with mortification, and his party made their escape, but his curiosity about the French monarch remained undimmed, as did his admiration for Louis.
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Some years later, he contrived to be present as the King heard Mass in Paris, and his account of his emotional reaction is representative of the religious awe Louis inspired.

The King remained standing, but followed the office with much attention ...My eyes having encountered his at the moment when I began to look at him, I immediately felt once more within myself that secret force of royal majesty, which inspired me with an insatiable curiosity to gaze at him ...but I only dared to fix my eyes on him when I was certain that he could not see me. I returned to the hôtel so happy that in wishing to express the joy with which I was transported, I seemed to have lost my reason ...Forgive me, reader, if this joy seems to make me rave; in my happiness at having seen the King, and having been seen by him, I believe that I have attracted the regard of an Empyrean divinity.
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As his conversation with Louis at St. Germain proves, Locatelli was no cringing sycophant. His apparently excessive joy is no more than a reflection of the belief in the semidivinity of the monarchy held by both Louis and his subjects. Not only was the King the arbiter of all temporal power, the focus of all worldly ambition, he was also a living symbol of God’s order. No wonder that his doubly adulterous relationship with Athénaïs would come to be seen by some as a blasphemy, a sacrilege visited physically on his holy body. For one woman, possessed of a most worldly piety, the struggle to reform the King’s errant soul came to be seen as a religious mission, a vocation to which she would dedicate herself as devotedly as the strictest bride of Christ.

Françoise Scarron, who was to become the Marquise de Maintenon, is an enduringly fascinating and enigmatic character, adored and loathed by the French in equal measure, now as then. Her relationship with Athénaïs de Montespan was lengthy and hugely complicated, encompassing mutual support and mutual hatred, intense sympathy and intense rivalry. Yet it was Athénaïs who originally discerned La Maintenon’s talents and brought her from obscurity, a charity she would come bitterly to regret. The birth of Athénaïs’s first child by the King in 1669 was swiftly followed by the arrival of the Duc du Maine in 1670, and she found herself in need of a discreet, capable person to raise her children in the requisite secrecy. She could not have kept them with her even if her career as
maîtresse en titre
had allowed her sufficient time to care for them, as the unresolved issue of her marriage meant that neither she nor Louis could publicly acknowledge them. Louise de La Vallière’s children had been officially adopted by Mme. Colbert, but Athénaïs’s more precarious circumstances demanded someone far removed from court circles. The obvious choice seemed to be Mme. Scarron, that ubiquitous presence in refined Paris society who had dried Marie Mancini’s tears as the King’s wedding procession rode into town and exchanged witticisms with Athénaïs at the Hôtel d’Albret in the first years of her marriage.

Although she was very poor, and lodged as a lady boarder in a convent, the young widow Scarron had carved a niche for herself in the select world of the Paris salons with her elegant manners and education, allied to a tremendous talent for making herself useful. She nursed her friends through illness, ran errands, assisted them on weary journeys; in short, she acted as an ideal lady companion to half the hostesses in Paris. She was very easy to like, because her rich friends found her truly
sympathique
and at the same time were able to patronize her a little, an excellent combination for social success. Athénaïs was very fond of her, and when her husband, the poet Paul Scarron, died, it was Athénaïs who had seen to it that Mme. Scarron eventually received the pension granted to him by Anne of Austria.

Françoise Scarron began life in 1635 in a prison cell. Her father, Constant d’Aubigné, was a spendthrift who, among other criminal activities, had murdered his first wife by stabbing her seven times with a dagger when he caught her in flagrante delicto. His second wife, Jeanne de Cardilhac, gave birth to Françoise, their third child, in the prison at Niort, where her husband was serving a sentence for espionage. After a few squalid years with her mother in Paris, Françoise was adopted by a Protestant aunt, Mme. de Villette, who began her education. Surprisingly, given what a bigoted Catholic she became in later life, Françoise’s family had strong Protestant links: her grandfather, Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, who lived in Geneva, was a well-known Huguenot writer.

When Françoise was eight, her father was released from prison. He took the family to the colony of Martinique to try to make his fortune. Hopeless to the last, he promptly died instead, leaving his widow and children penniless again. When she returned to France, aged twelve, Françoise was taken in by another aunt, Mme. de Neuillant. This one was a fervent Catholic who had obtained a royal order from Anne of Austria to prevent her niece from being brought up as a vile Calvinist. She forced Françoise to work like a peasant in ragged clothes, enduring beatings and starvation designed to purge her of Protestant devils. For a while, she defiantly turned her back to the altar when her aunt dragged her to Mass, but unsurprisingly, she was soon worn down by this miserable existence and agreed to change her faith. In her correspondence, which forms the bulk of what we know of her life, Mme. de Maintenon claims she rescinded her vows to Protestantism only after hearing a learned theological debate at her Ursuline convent and being reassured that her dear Aunt Villette was not to be eternally damned. Nothing in Mme. de Maintenon’s life, it seemed, ever occurred for anything but the most worthy reasons.

On completion of her convent education, Françoise returned to her mother, who introduced her to the forty-year-old Paul Scarron, whom she had met at his rooms in the Hôtel de Troyes with an acquaintance from Martinique. Scarron’s burlesque satires enjoyed a great deal of popularity in his lifetime. He was patronized by Anne of Austria and well known in literary circles. He was famously Z-shaped, a ripple of a man, contorted with rheumatism after a carnival frolic in the Seine, but he held court to a salon of aristocrats, artists, courtesans and intellectuals as he squatted, rootlike, in his wheeled chair. He called himself “the Queen’s invalid,” joking that his patron had founded a hospital to support him since he had assembled in his blasted body all the diseases to which the flesh was prey. Scarron was attracted to Françoise, described at the time as having “a smooth, beautiful skin, light pretty chestnut hair, a well-shaped nose, a sweet, modest expression and the finest eyes you could wish to see,” and he nicknamed her “
la belle Indienne,
” with reference to her time in the tropics.
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Although she cannot have been physically attracted to him, Françoise in turn enjoyed his wit and appreciated his kindness. Scar-ron offered the impoverished girl his protection, giving her the choice between marriage and enough money to enter a convent.

Mme. de Maintenon may have been an intensely pious Catholic, but the young Françoise wanted to become a woman of the world, and she plumped for marriage. Half a man seemed better than no man at all, especially when the alternative was shivering on one’s knees in the Rue St. Jacques, and however holy she became, at sixteen years old, Françoise was too pretty for the convent. Indeed, throughout her later career at the court, despite her frequent and conventional professions of a desire to retreat from the world, La Maintenon was un-troubled by any conflict between her religious convictions and her worldly ambitions. She was later to interpret the post given to her by Athénaïs as a sign that she ought to enter into court life to recover the soul of the King. All that she cared about was the world’s regard, and her religion, although perfectly sincere in terms of her faith, was no more than a tool in her attempts to obtain it.

During her marriage to Scarron, she began to establish herself socially, holding a serious and intellectual salon in their home in the Rue Neuve St. Louis in the Marais. Scarron educated his wife in Latin, Spanish and Italian, taught her to write verse and encouraged her gift for conversation. During their wedding, when the notary had asked him the customary question on the matter of what he would bring to his wife, Scarron answered “Immortality!” His prediction was correct, though Françoise was not to be remembered as the wife of a forgotten poet, but as a very different kind of spouse: the morganatic wife of the King of France.

When Scarron died, his widow showed no desire to relinquish her purchase on the social world, and Athénaïs’s offer of the position of secret governess to the royal children was the perfect way to establish herself further. Scarron had left her with very little money, despite her careful management of his earnings, and she was attracted by this prestigious, albeit covert role. She was careful, however, to ensure that her acceptance should not be interpreted as evidence of a desire to advance in the world. She consulted her confessor, and agreed with him that it would be improper to accept the charge of Mme. de Montespan’s adulterous offspring, but that if it were the King’s children she was to concern herself with, that would be permissible.Very cleverly, she insisted that Louis himself make a formal request to her to take up the post, and did not begin her duties until his commands had been issued in an interview at St. Germain.

At first, the job was not without its disadvantages. “If this step was the beginning of Mme. de Maintenon’s singular good fortune, it was likewise the beginning of her difficulties and embarrassments,” wrote Mme. de Caylus. Because of the need for absolute discretion while Athénaïs remained technically married and the children’s paternity could be claimed by Montespan, the children were living with their nurses in separate houses in Paris. The governess therefore had to shuttle between them without making any obvious changes to her usual lifestyle that might arouse suspicion. Mme. Scarron famously described this awkward arrangement in her memoirs.

This strange kind of honor caused me endless trouble and difficulty. I was compelled to mount ladders to do the work of upholsterers and mechanics who might not be allowed to enter the house. I did everything myself, for the nurses did not put their hands to a single thing lest they be tired and their milk not good. I would go on foot and in disguise from one nurse to another, carrying linen or food under my arm. I would sometimes spend the whole night with one of the children who was ill in a small house outside Paris. In the morning I would return home by a little back gate and, after dressing myself, would go out at the front door to my coach, and drive to the Hôtels d’Albret or Richelieu, so that my friends might perceive nothing, or even suspect that I had a secret to keep.
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