Athenais (2 page)

It is high time that history was hard on Louise de La Vallière. Of all the Bourbon mistresses (and if the kings of France had shown the same taste in wives as they did in mistresses, the country might well be a different place today), posterity has granted virtue only to Louise, the Sun King’s first love. Her reign as
maîtresse en titre
coincided with the blossoming of the Great Century, which developed that spectacular combination of genius in the arts which was to make France, and things French, the arbiter of taste in Europe for centuries to come. Louise’s “innocence” and “simplicity” have proved an irresistibly sentimental metaphor for that renaissance, in contrast with the dismal conclusion of Louis’s reign. In fact, some contemporaries considered her a sorry creature, as this unkind poem demonstrates:

Soyez boiteuse, ayez quinze ans

Pas de gorge, fort peu de sens

Des parents, Dieu le sait. Faits en fille neuve

Dans l’antichambre vos enfants

Et sur ma foi, vous aurez le premier d’amants

Et La Vallière en est la preuve.
²

This skillful riddle is attributed to one of Louise’s fellow ladies-in-waiting, a beautiful, spirited girl named Athénaïs de Montespan. Louise had been Louis’s mistress since 1661, the year the young king had come into his own. He had inherited the throne of France aged four, and had suffered a confusing, peripatetic childhood during the series of civil wars known as the Fronde. This conflict, which continued sporadically from 1648 to 1652, set the crown powers against both Parlement and the great nobles of France, notably the Prince de Condé and the Prince de Conti, distant relations of Louis through his grandfather, Henri IV. Although his widowed mother, Anne of Austria, aided by her minister, Cardinal Mazarin, had eventually restored security to the crown, Louis was determined that his kingdom should never again be threatened. When his beloved mentor Mazarin died in March 1661, Louis summoned his councillors and told them he intended to act as his own prime minister. No treaty could be signed, no money spent, no mission dispatched without his personal approval. In this way, as part of the strategy later consolidated by his organization of the court at Versailles, Louis hoped to keep the potentially rebellious aristocracy under control.

France, with a population of 18 million, was the largest nation in Europe, and Paris the continent’s greatest city. Released from the influence of the wise but penny-pinching cardinal, Louis was free to address the enormous problems facing the country. The state was practically bankrupt, the army in confusion, agriculture destroyed by years of war. The future looked uncertain, but Louis was passionately determined that France should fulfill her potential as a powerful nation. Despite a cloudy horizon, France was at the dawn of a new age.

And France was Louis, as in Shakespeare’s plays, in which France can mean either king or country, or both. This symbiotic relationship was reinforced in the coronation ceremony, in which the Bishop of Soissons placed a consecrated diamond ring on the third finger of Louis’s left hand, marrying him to the nation (given the state of the royal finances, Anne had to loan one of her own rings for the occasion). To understand the man, then, is to understand his role.

To be a king of France meant more than exercising a power bestowed by birth, it meant enacting a system of beliefs which governed the monarch’s entire understanding of the world. To be royal, much more so than nowadays, was to be divided by a vast psychological chasm from ordinary people. When the courtiers teased the newly arrived Marie-Thérèse about her earlier suitors, she replied sincerely, “There was no king in Spain but the King my father.” It was inconceivable to her that she could even look at a man who was not one of God’s anointed. This is the primary, crucial aspect of Louis’s understanding of his kingship: that it was ordained by God. He was the divine representative on earth. In the words of one of his subjects, “Sire, the place where Your Majesty is seated represents for us the throne of the living God.”
³
It was largely agreed (though the limits of monarchical power were certainly disputed — witness seventeenth-century England) that the only stay on the king’s divine right was adherence to Christian principle. Accordingly, Louis was also the spiritual governor of his people, and in France, unlike other Catholic countries, the power of the Pope was effectively subordinate to Louis’s own, since as king he could vet any papal edict before it was ratified by the Parlement. In short, the king was answerable only to God.

Since the French kings claimed their descent from the Roman emperors, Louis was also considered a demigod by many of his people, a belief which supported the idea that he embodied France. The country, still a collection of provinces with indeterminate borders, had not yet fully emerged as a geographical unit, and Louis’s incessant warring on these borders was motivated partly by the need to establish precise national territories.

So the king was not as other men, and this difference was based on something more profound than wealth or political power. Louis well understood how to emphasize his “kingliness” by cultivating an awe-inspiring persona. Petitioners were advised to try to catch a glimpse of the King before approaching him, lest his appearance should strike them dumb, and at his magnificent public exhibitions he would adopt the role of Apollo or Jupiter, the classical gods whose imagery was still a part of the vocabulary of the educated of the time. Versailles itself is as much a testament to Louis’s power as a cathedral, a feat of architecture which appears to have been created by a superhuman ego. A French peasant from the medieval squalor of the countryside might easily have believed that this was where God held court. It is characteristic of Catholic culture at the time that faith, in gods or kings, should manifest itself externally, in baroque display, and Louis manipulated this so successfully that the monarchy was not laicized until the mid eighteenth century.

In the early part of his reign, the contrast between Louis the man and Louis the King was distinct. Although graceful, athletic and good-mannered, he was a diffident, if not rather shy young man, uneasy in the company of women, awkward at social chitchat. He was self-conscious about the shortcomings of an education which had been interrupted by the wars of the Fronde, and later tried to compensate by giving his son, the Dauphin, a rigorous classical schooling, although thanks to the assiduous thrashings of his tutors, the poor young man ended up far more foolish than his father. Louis was passionately fond of music, and danced beautifully in the court ballets. He adored hunting, riding out nearly every day when he was not on campaign until the end of his life. But he was shy of intellectuals and had little confidence in his own attractiveness. It was his second mistress who taught him to feel as a king.

In public, at least, Louis was determined to show that he had the resolution to carry out his policy of autocratic government and to keep the aristocracy firmly in their place. He enacted this resolve symbolically in the Carrousel du Louvre, three days of equestrian sports performed in the gardens between the Tuileries palace and the Louvre in 1662. Over 600 riders took part, divided into five companies, and Louis, demonstrating the talent for spectacle which was to become the signature of his reign, headed the first company himself, dressed as a Roman emperor in a gold and diamond tunic with a plumed silver helmet. Louis’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, led the second, the “Persians,” in satin and white plumes; a former Frondeur, the Prince de Condé, the “Turks,” in silver, blue and black; his son the “Indians,” in yellow, and the Duc de Guise, wearing a green velvet suit, blazed the trail of the “American Savages,” riding a horse draped in tigerskin. In a strategy he was to perfect at the divertissements of Versailles, Louis dazzled the audience with a dragon, pages dressed as monkeys, satyrs on unicorns and with his motto,
Ut vidi vici
(“I saw, I conquered”). As he was to do throughout his life, he manipulated the vanity of the aristocracy to create a self-regulating order of subjection. Symbolically, the Carrousel enacted the submission of the arrogant feudal privilege which was the source of the Fronde to a new monarchical power that would reside exclusively in the person of the king. It was also, of course, a chance to display himself to advantage to his subjects, and no one in Paris stayed at home. The ladies of the royal household watched from a stand, the colors of the five companies pinned to their fluttering dresses. Would the King notice a shy smile behind a fan, a flirtatiously lowered gaze?

For the present, it was Louise de La Vallière who had the King’s attention. In the summer of 1661, the court was at Fontainebleau, the exquisitely decorated palace where François I had launched the renaissance of French art. Amid the elegant Mannerist eroticism of Fiorentino and Primatice, the young court gleefully swept away the cobwebs of the troubled past. The former Queen Regent, Louis’s severe, dominant mother, found herself increasingly marginalized, while the dour pieties of dull, dumpy Marie-Thérèse were confined to her circle of Spanish attendants. The King’s set was made up of bright young things: the Duc d’Orléans, Louis’s attractive, effeminate younger brother (known as Monsieur) and his glamorous wife, Henriette d’Angleterre, the sister of Charles II (known as Madame); the King’s cousin by his wicked uncle, Gaston, the Duchesse de Mont-pensier (Mademoiselle); the Comte de Guiche, who was in love with Madame, and the Marquis de Vivonne, the brother of the unkind poetess Athénaïs de Montespan. None of them was older than twenty-five; Madame, the youngest, was seventeen. Her ladies-in-waiting, known as the “flower garden,” were the most beautiful and well-born girls in France, all of them vying to catch the King’s eye. Oblivious of political realities, this
jeunesse dorée
abandoned themselves to balls, concerts, moonlight promenades — and to love.

“Behold the reign of love,”
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wrote the Parisian intellectual Madeleine de Scudéry. Love was everywhere, in the ballets,
La Puissance d’Amour, Le Triomphe d’Amour, L’Amour Malade,
and in the operas and poetry written for the court. The cult of love was conflated with the cult of the monarch, and since there was no more delicate way of flattering the King than by celebrating his prowess as a lover, gallantry, flirtation and intrigue ruled the day. In July, Louis took the role of Spring in the ballet
Seasons,
symbolizing in his person the emergence of new life. Now that the King had revoked Mazarin’s law against the use of lace, fashion delighted in gaudy excess, and the courtiers draped themselves gorgeously with gold ornaments, lace collars and shimmering pastel ribbons known, of course, as
galants.
Molière, who had already scandalized the old guard with
Les Précieuses Ridicules,
a send-up of the rarefied manners of Parisian society, gave a new play,
L’Ecole des Maris.
Marie-Thérèse watched the performance in her old-fashioned Spanish farthingale, but she was not amused. Louis had married her dutifully, as an appropriate state alliance, but he needed another queen for his court of love.

“There can be no court without love as there can be no opera without love,” proclaimed the gossip newspaper the
Mercure Galant,
so no one considered this odd. Traditionally, French kings had had two wives, one for reasons of state, for duty and procreation; the other for pleasure. Charles VII (1403–61) had inaugurated the “position’ of titular mistress with the elevation of his lover, Agnès Sorel, and it was to some extent honorable, after the fashion of a biblical concubine. “Many ladies,” wrote Primi Visconti, an Italian adventurer whose memoirs recount his life at court, “have told me it is no offense either to husband, father or God to succeed in being loved by one’s prince.” In fact, Their Most Christian Majesties were frequently polygamous. Although the position of official mistress was not a formal post,
maîtresse declarée
was a title recognized within and without the King’s circle, designating the royal favorite. While some queens, such as Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Antoinette, used their beauty, intelligence or the monarch’s youth to their advantage, this was not the case with Marie-Thérèse. Despite her dowry, her dynastic alliances and her dutiful pregnancies, Marie-Thérèse was never to have more influence over Louis than a woman who could offer only her chemise.

Moreover, adultery was a way of life at court, and as the writer Diderot was to remark in the next century, the French have always been terribly good at it.
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In aristocratic circles, love in marriage was merely a polite formality that glossed over what was essentially a business arrangement, and so, as the playwright Racine observed, it was only possible to believe oneself unfaithful if one believed oneself to be loved. Loving one’s husband was in fact considered positively déclassée. One priest, Abbé Coyer, reprimanded one of his penitents who confessed to lusting after her husband with the words: “It is only six months since the sacrament joined you, and you still love your husband. I dare say your dressmaker has the same weakness for her own, but you, Madame, are a marquise.”
⁶
Another writer, La Bruyère, later remarked that it was as easy to identify the women of Louis’s court by the names of their lovers as those of their husbands. It could only be a matter of time before Louis followed the example of his famously philandering grandfather, Henri IV, and plucked a pretty flower from Madame’s garden to reign as his mistress.

Since she had neither beauty nor wit, Marie-Thérèse had no wiles to keep her husband faithful. The Queen’s upbringing had been shamefully inadequate for her future role. For a century and a half, Spain had been the most important power in Europe, dominating the continent with the support of the plunder of her enormous colonies in the Americas. France was bordered on almost all sides (except for about 300 miles of Switzerland, Savoy and Piedmont) by the Hapsburg empire, and as a result there was near-permanent conflict. Anne of Austria had been married to Louis XIII in an unsuccessful attempt to cement an alliance, and it was her beloved project that Louis should marry a Spanish princess as a means of reducing the threat. After lengthy negotiations with Mazarin, Philip IV of Spain permitted a diplomatic mission by the Maréchal de Gramont, who would woo the Infanta Maria Theresa on Louis’s behalf.