Athenais (19 page)

That year, 1674, was also a watershed for Louis. France had declared war on Spain once again in October 1673, and the French armies had conquered the disputed region of the Franche-Comté after a difficult yet gloriously brief four-month campaign. France stood alone in Europe, and Louis was determined that his ambitions would not be cowed, even if he had to make war on Spain and Holland at the same time. Now he faced the greatest challenge to his aspiration for European dominance, which would eventually be achieved in 1678 with the Peace of Nijmegen. That year marked the turning point in a policy he and his ministers had been attempting to realize since the outbreak of the wars with Holland in 1667.

The first Flanders campaign, fought in the name of Queen Marie-Thérèse and during which Louis and Athénaïs had become lovers, had ended with the successful cessation of the Franche-Comté to Louis by treaty. However, anxiety about France’s expansionist tendencies provoked Sweden, Holland and England to sign a treaty of alliance in order to contain them. Louis was forced into a coalition with his former enemy Spain, and re-ceded the Franche-Comté in exchange for Spain’s acceptance of his conquests in the Spanish Netherlands. This was confirmed by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of May 1668. So Holland now faced the French armies without the barrier of the Spanish territories in Flanders. The next four years were a frenzy of diplomatic maneuvering. Thanks to the efforts of his sister-in-law Madame Henriette, Louis had effectively bribed the English into abandoning their former alliance and entering into a new war with Holland on the French side, a move which was hugely unpopular in England. Dutifully, though, the English had begun the campaign with an attack on a Dutch convoy off the Isle of Wight in March 1672. In May, Louis joined his army, now a force of 120,000 men, at Charleroi.

The French army seemed unbeatable. After the practically simultaneous conquest of four important strongholds — Weinberg, Wesel, Burick and Orsai — Louis set his sights on Amsterdam. The Dutch, commanded by William of Orange, whom they had elected as stadtholder, had destroyed the bridges across the Rhine, but the French, in a particularly bloody battle, swam their horses defiantly into the river. The crossing of the Rhine was probably the greatest moment of Louis’s personal military history, and it brought him to within two leagues of Amsterdam. In desperation, William issued an order for the sluices on the flat polders of the Zuider Zee to be opened, and the Dutch valiantly flooded their own country rather than let Louis take its capital. The same day, they sued for peace.

The Dutch were prepared to concede 10 million livres, Maastricht, Brabant and the Rhine towns as well as Dutch Flanders, but Louis wanted more. Beyond these concessions, he demanded another 14 million livres, the towns of Nijmegen, Grave and Moers, a trade agreement favorable to the French, freedom of religion for the cruelly oppressed Dutch Catholics and, in a rather nasty piece of pomposity, a tributary medal to be presented to him annually by the Dutch ambassador in thanks for the peace. Despite his victories, Louis’s exigency with the Dutch now threatened him with a European war. In 1673, he left again for the front, accompanied famously by those three “Queens of France” — Athénaïs, Louise and, of course, Marie-Thérèse — whom the populace were astonished to see in the same carriage. Athénaïs was pregnant at the time, and her baby, Mlle. de Nantes, was born at Tournai. The siege of Maastricht began, during which D’Artagnan, the famous musketeer, was killed. The siege is recorded in one of the fourteen canvases devoted to the campaign by the artist Van der Meulen, commissioned years later for the royal pavilion at the house Louis built at Marly. The pictures have a curious quality of stillness to them, their wide plains and chill northern skies reflecting a more disciplined composition than the crowded, sprawling epics painted by Le Brun. Louis seems to glow in the paintings, always the central figure and slightly larger than life, as though his presence drains the color from the muted tones of the surrounding Flemish landscape. On his white horse, the walls of Maastricht before him, the young hero of the painting is the ideal of the warrior prince. Yet in reality, Louis was increasingly beleaguered. In September 1673, the Hapsburg emperor Leopold declared war on France, as did Denmark and the electors of Cologne and Münster. Spain joined in October, while the English concluded a separate peace with Holland in February of the next year.

In July and August of 1674, Louis staged the last and the most extravagant of his three grands divertissements, designed to display his strength and his mistress to the world. It was a gesture of political defiance, as well as one of love; proof that neither Louis’s armies nor his coffers were exhausted. To dance through his gardens with his lover while the whole of Europe schemed against him was entirely typical of Louis’s majestic insouciance. As the separation from Montespan was practically completed, Athénaïs could now be publicly acknowledged for the first time as Queen of the new Versailles. Over six days, Louis choreographed the familiar but still breathtaking range of entertainments — operas, ballets, collations, fireworks — around the sections of the palace which had just been completed. The first event, a performance of Lully and Quinault’s new opera
Alceste,
showed off the Cour de Marbre; the second, a pastoral ballet entitled the
Eclogue de Versailles,
used the new gardens of the Trianon as scenery.
Les Fêtes de l’Amour et Bacchus,
inspired by the beginning of Louis’s love affair with Athénaïs six years before, was performed in the Allée du Dragon. A feast was served in the new suite of “
grands appartements,
” and the highlight was an illuminated promenade by gondola on the canal, with a light display by Le Brun. For the King, this magnificent homage to his love was a complementary aspect of his increasing martial power, since at Versailles, politics and aesthetics moved in a constant symbiosis.

While the cost of Versailles was one of the trials of Colbert’s existence, Louis always knew how his expenditure would demonstrate his power internationally. One awed envoy from Brandenburg estimated that the house, gardens, fountains, lakes and orangery alone must have cost at least 24 million livres, leaving out the expense of stables, works of art, decoration and domestics.Versailles became a barometer of the political climate of Europe, and when the works paused, the continent worried, since it meant that money was being diverted for the King of France to go to war again. For the court and the ambassadors, Versailles was a book as much as a palace, the means by which the Sun King used all available symbols to create and impose his power. Nothing in the design of Versailles was without its symbolism, from the statues — Apollo in his chariot, or the giant Encelade being crushed by rocks for his defiance of Zeus — to the fountains, whose choreography was minutely devised by Colbert and the master of the fountains in a ten-page manual, so that when the King walked in his garden, they would spring to life in order — the Couronnes, the Pyramide, the Dragon, the grotto of Ceres, the Dosme, the Apollon, the horses, the Latone, the Aigrettes, the bosquets, the Cinq Jets — the music of the water coming alive with Louis’s step and fading with his retreat, as though the rainbow cascades were activated merely by his presence. The legions of undergardeners sprinting between the fountains, struggling at the taps with damp hands and rasping lungs, were invisible, and where the King walked, the music of the water followed him.

“Life,” Louis wrote in his memoirs, “is a mixture of pleasure and greatness.” No one understood this better than Athénaïs de Montespan. One of her chief attractions for Louis was her enthusiasm for and grasp of the crucial seventeenth-century concept of
gloire.
The literal translation of the word, “glory,” seems too vague a term for an idea which, if not entirely coherent, certainly had meaning for the King and his contemporaries.
Gloire
encompassed everything that was done to magnify the King’s power and splendor on earth, and all that would contribute to the greatness of his posterity. In the “memoirs” written (or, more probably, ghosted) as an instruction to his son the Grand Dauphin, Louis uses the word repeatedly, and his tone is picked up by other correspondents, most notably Colbert, in relation to him. No action of a monarch’s life, teaches Louis, can be committed without reference to the idea of
la gloire,
which thus encompasses the monarch’s constant awareness of his own condition as a prince. Even recalling his powerful emotions of grief on the death of his mother Anne, Louis is unable to neglect the opportunity to remind his son of the obligations of kingship: “This event . . . did not fail to affect me so deeply that for several days it made me incapable of giving my mind to any other consideration than the loss I was sustaining. For, although I have told you continually that a prince must sacrifice all his private emotions for the glory of his empire, there are occasions when this principle cannot be put into practice just at first.”

Elsewhere, the King writes to the members of the Petite Académie in 1663: “You may judge, Messieurs, the esteem which I have for you, because I am entrusting to you the thing which is the most precious in the world, my glory.”
¹
Gloire
embraced not only political or military achievements, but cultural and romantic ones, too. Louis saw it as an obligation to encourage the very best painters, sculptors, architects and writers to beautify his reign for eternity — “Nothing contributes more to the glory of the prince than these immortal works which the painters and sculptors leave for posterity.”
²
Equally, the love of the most desirable, beautiful women was an essential component of
la gloire.

Athénaïs perfectly understood her lover’s equation of glory and seduction, knowing that his love for her was the necessary complement to his political power. “Glory,” Louis wrote, “is an exacting mistress . . . In the love of glory, one must display the same refinements — nay, even the same restraint — as in the tenderest passions.” According to the gallant psychology of the times, a love affair was prestigious or glorious in proportion to the qualities of the beloved, and if Athénaïs occasionally accused the King of loving her only because he judged it his duty to have the finest woman in France as his mistress, she nevertheless agreed with his estimation of her. Whether Louis loved her for herself, or for the fact that her beauty, her wit and her blood made her the most desirable woman in his kingdom, Athénaïs was prepared to live the glorious symbolism of her role superbly.

Perhaps in some ways, Louis did choose Athénaïs as
maîtresse en titre
because he owed it to his “image.” Neither Marie-Thérèse nor Louise de La Vallière were fitting consorts for a man of Louis’s ambitions. Yet Athénaïs enraptured him in private as much as she flattered him in public. “Her mettle, her spirit, her beauty which surpassed everything seen at the court, flattered the pride of the King, who showed her off like a treasure. He was proud of his mistress, and even when he was unfaithful to her he returned quickly because she was more gratifying to his vanity.”
³
Athénaïs’s sense of her own worth proved a powerful attraction to Louis, as she seemed to be the only person in his world who was not afraid of him. She teased and scolded him, delighted him with her jokes and terrified him with her tantrums; she loved him as an equal because, as a Mortemart, she believed herself to be so. A Mortemart was a prize even to a King of France. If La Vallière had claimed to prefer the man to the King, then Athénaïs, uniquely, was able to love the King simply as a man, a quality which commanded not only a twelve-year passion, but a powerful respect.

Athénaïs’s faith in her own breeding was the principal basis for her belief in her value. She once wrote to her son, the Duc du Maine: “You are the son of a hero . . . It is well that you should know that you are fortunately spared any admixture of blood less noble — as is often the case with people of your kind [royal bastards] ...You are the exception to the rule, in that in both bloodlines you can count courage, nobility, wit. While this gives you a singular advantage, to be sure, it still imposes an obligation to live up to both.”
⁴

Du Maine’s Mortemart blood, then, imposed as much responsibility as his Bourbon lineage. In enacting the role of Louis’s mistress with maximum splendor, Athénaïs, too, was doing her duty to her great family name.

“Mme. de Montespan was imbued with the same sense of glory as the King,” wrote Mme. de Caylus, and indeed, Athénaïs’s pride was exceeded only by his. She established this mutual goal publicly in 1670 with her selection of the King’s protégé Molière to create a fiveact comedy with music and ballets in which the King would dance as Apollo. She entitled it
The Magnificent Lovers,
as much for herself and the King as for any imaginary protagonists. Athénaïs and Louis, the title implies, were the most beautiful, most splendid, most imperious lovers in the world. Appropriately, this was the last time the thirty-two-year-old King was to dance in public, and it was the perfect swan song for his balletic career.

The art of ballet owes a great deal to Athénaïs, since it was as a result of the enthusiasm for dance she shared with the King that choreographic sequences and different balletic movements began to be categorized and recorded for posterity. Ballet might be seen as the art which most profoundly reflects the beliefs and ambitions of the seventeenth century. To dance well was to demonstrate the perfectibility of human nature, the harmonious expression of the civilized as opposed to the natural. In the ballet, wrote the Abbé de Pure, “you appear as you are, and all your actions are dependent on the eyes of the spectators, exposing to them the good and the bad with which Art and nature have favored or disgraced your person.”
⁵
Louis took the ballet extremely seriously, rehearsing until he made himself ill, as though to be the finest dancer in the realm was yet another manifestation of his kingship. Ballet was the most civilized of fantasies, illustrating the aspiration to transcend, or at least to seem to transcend, the reality of a world which was often harsh and cruel. Even at Versailles, the glittering apex of the social structure, it was impossible to ignore the poverty and misery of most of the world; even at Versailles, justice was arbitrary, hard and increasingly tyrannical — indeed, Versailles imposed its own cruelties, its own humiliations, on those who were not sufficiently beautiful or well born. Hence the ballet became the ultimate manifestation of the need to appear graceful, suggesting that masked, on a stage, a pastoral idyll or a classicized love, untainted by the vulgarity of life, was attainable.