Athenais (21 page)

jasmine and carnations; a beautiful, surprising, enchanting idea — everybody adores this spot.”

A charming conceit was the model farm Athénaïs created, prefiguring the vogue for mock rusticity that took off in the following century. This little caprice cost 2,000 ecus, which were spent, in Mme. de Sévigné’s words, on “the most passionate turtle doves, the fattest sows, the fullest cows, the frizziest sheep and the goosiest geese.” Athénaïs, then, was playing at milkmaids long before Marie Antoinette thought of it.

Clagny has been described as “perhaps the most regularly beautiful house in France,”
¹⁰
and while it lacked the awesome scale of Versailles, many contemporaries considered it far lovelier.

Little is known about the interior of Clagny, aside from the famous gallery which forms the background for the seductive portrait of its mistress. The décor would have imitated that of the interiors of Versailles, where Le Brun and Hardouin-Mansart replaced the gilded paneling popular under Louis XIII with an Italian scheme of pictures inset in multicolored marbles and gilded bronze. Furniture at the time was magnificent but generally rather sparse. However, as the idea that it should provide comfort gained ground, it was becoming more diverse. Moreover, with the stability and refinement of the social life at Louis’s court, it was beginning to be positioned more naturally, grouped for conversation rather than placed standing stiffly against the walls. Appropriately, the “commode” became popular at this time, and although French furniture did not reach the zenith of its beauty and ingeniousness until the eighteenth century, artists like Boulle were already creating pieces which reflected a new style of domestic arrangement, more private and relaxed.

Athénaïs certainly possessed some of the tapestries that were being produced at the Gobelins manufactory, reorganized by Colbert in 1662 and immortalized in Le Brun’s painting of Louis’s visit there. Many of the images on these tapestries were created from cartoons by Le Brun, some of them, such as the
Histoire du Roi
or the
Histoire d’Alexandre,
featuring the King’s personal iconography and others reflecting contemporary fashions such as interest in the exotic East.

Clagny was very much a baroque house, like Versailles engaging in the heterogeneous dialogue of styles promoted by the ease of intellectual exchange in seventeenth-century Europe. It anticipated, but was not of, the neoclassical age; rather it represented an interaction of the baroque and the classic, the simpler, more contained, classical design of the house being enlivened by the baroque decorations, whose richness and variety formed a contrast to the static lines of the structure. In a sense, Athénaïs herself was very much a “baroque” personality: mercurial, emotional, capricious, excessive. One writer describes her “
galanterie,
” at once proud and disturbing, ambitious and eccentric, as quintessentially baroque. Her taste combined an exquisite refinement with a liking for the bizarre, almost the brutal, the one exemplified by the delicate silver filigree carriage drawn by white mice she devised to amuse Louis; the other by pet bears she was to keep in her private menagerie at Versailles. The characters of Louis and Athénaïs were drawn to each other not only by their love of magnificence, but by their delight in the fantastic, the theater they could make of their lives; yet this delight might be labeled “classical” for the paganism inherent in the elevation of Louis the Sun King over His Most Christian Majesty. Thus in the personalities of the
amants magnifiques
was reflected their location at the cusp of a fluid, contrasting interaction between the dominant and the emerging artistic forms of the day.

One of Louis XIV’s finer qualities as a king was his extraordinary capacity for
le détail de tout,
which probably stemmed from his great need for control through knowledge. He was interested in everything, and never too concerned with great matters of state to neglect domestic niceties. His letters to Colbert regarding his plans for Athénaïs’s house or her jewelry demonstrate just how intimately she was involved with his life, and the extent to which he consulted her taste in artistic, if not political matters. At St. Germain, for example, which Athénaïs found tired and old-fashioned, Louis directed Colbert to redesign her apartments. “How is it,” he wrote to his minister, “that you have inquired nothing concerning the work that must be done at St. Germain on the terraces of the apartment of Mme. de Montespan?”
¹¹
Athénaïs was to have new decorations, a fountain, a birdbath, a little garden, and Colbert was expected to find the time to see to them, in between dealing with small matters such as the government and the economy. Louis always tried to anticipate Athénaïs’s responses. His constant questions were, “What will she say?” and “Will this please her?” If it is allowed that the greatest years of the Great Century were between 1668 and 1680, this greatness must be seen as involving Athénaïs to a significant degree, since Louis was as concerned with and influenced by her taste and her appreciation as he was with his own.

It was Primi Visconti who christened Athénaïs the Real Queen of France, a role in which she was recognized by at least one ambassador. She was, after all, internationally famous. An African embassy respectfully presented gifts of a tiger, a panther and two lions to Louis, for his new menagerie; a golden pheasant and a Moorish dwarf to Marie-Thérèse, and a selection of pearls and sapphires to the King’s “second wife” (presumably a commonplace for the ambassadors). Athénaïs’s status was such that Saint-Simon describes her salon as “the center of court life — the center of pleasures, of fortunes, of hopes, the terror of ministers” (though as Saint-Simon could not for long contain his loathing for the legitimized royal bastards, he added that it was also “the humiliation of all France”). In later years, the cachet of a royal mistress was such that the eminently chaste Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg selected a lady to whom he gave the title and court functions of being a mistress, though not the more intimate favors the position usually merited.

The extent of Athénaïs’s political influence was, however, negligible. Despite Mme. de Caylus’s estimation that “Mme. de Montespan had an ambition to govern and to make her authority felt,” it was really only Mme. de Maintenon who secured any purchase on the King’s political direction. Athénaïs was able, of course, to secure powerful and lucrative positions for herself and for her family, and she had some influence on other appointments (her admiration for the oratory of Bishop Bossuet, for example, had led to his appointment as preceptor to the Grand Dauphin, a piece of discernment which, as in the case of Mme. Scarron, Athénaïs would come to regret), but Louis adhered adamantly to the principle that love should not be allowed to interfere in politics. Early in his reign, he had asked his councillors to inform him if they suspected that any woman was exerting undue influence on his decisions, and promised that in such a case he would be rid of her in three days. In his “memoirs,” he expressed his conviction that “time given up to love affairs must never be allowed to prejudice affairs of state . . . And if we yield our heart, we must never yield our mind or will ...We must maintain a rigorous distinction between a lover’s tenderness and a sovereign’s resolution ...and we must make sure that the beauty who is the source of our delight never takes the liberty of interfering in political affairs.” Louis’s rhetoric had certainly collapsed by the time of the ascendancy of Mme. de Main-tenon, but perhaps this motivated him all the more strongly to assert the principle.

This political mistrust of women was not confined to the King’s lovers. After Mazarin’s death, Louis had effectively banned his mother Anne from politics, despite her obvious capability, while Marie-Thérèse was barred from attending councils, traditionally a prerogative of the Queen Regnant. Athénaïs may have been disinclined to meddle when she recalled the fate of Marie de Hautfort and Louise de Lafayette, the only two women who had held any sway over Louis’s father: Cardinal Richelieu had swiftly dispatched them respectively into exile and a convent. Indeed, with the exception of Anne of Austria, the period is notable for its lack of politically influential women. Louis’s attitude may have been fueled by the brief resurgence of feminine power that had taken place during the hated Fronde, in which the Duchesse de Longueville and his own cousin, Mademoiselle, had played an active part. Women were generally considered dangerous, meddling and too light-minded to comprehend the magnitude of military or diplomatic strategy. It is a pity that neither Mme. de Maintenon in Louis XIV’s reign or Mme. de Pompadour in Louis XV’s, both of whom were women of tremendous intelligence, did nothing to disprove the theory.

Louis also made it clear that he was bored by too much demanding political discussion, and Athénaïs understood that it was her role to amuse rather than to advise. Still, she created a private sphere of influence through her intimate circle. As well as the advantages she obtained for her immediate family, she was instrumental in the selection of the Duc de Montausier as the Dauphin’s tutor (the appointment that originally alerted her husband to her infidelity), and the gift of the governorship of Guyenne to her old friend the Maréchal d’Albret, in whose salon she had first met Mme. Scarron. Her allies the Duchesse de Richelieu and Louvois’s mistress Mme. du Fresnoy were given positions in the Queen’s household, and she encouraged the King to make the Queen’s doctor, Antoine d’Acquin, his own
premier médecin
(a favor that D’Acquin returned by turning a blind eye to those little “love potions” Athénaïs purchased in Paris). Rather eccentrically, Athénaïs chose La Vienne, a famous Parisian swimmer, as the King’s first valet of the chamber. To have power over such a person, even though he was officially only a servant, would have been extremely useful to a royal mistress, for Vienne became one of Louis’s closest confidants. Finally, in addition to the Thianges–Nevers marriage, Athénaïs arranged matches between her nephew Louis de Rochechouart and Colbert’s third daughter, and her niece Gabrielle-Victoire de Rochechouart and the elderly, but very rich, Marquis de Canaples. It was in the marriages of her own children, though, that the extent of Athénaïs’s power was eventually demonstrated. By conferring such favors and obligations, Athénaïs profited from the negative example of the friendless Louise de La Vallière by surrounding herself with powerful supporters, thus ensuring that it was in the interests of many courtiers that she remain
maîtresse en titre.

If Athénaïs’s political power was concerned merely with her immediate circle, her influence on the culture of the court, and hence that of the nation, was highly significant, prefiguring that of Mme. de Pompadour in the eighteenth century. Louis was determined that the artistic grandeur of his reign should match its military triumphs, to which end Colbert founded four academies between 1666 and 1672 for the encouragement and perfection of the arts. To the Académie Française, founded by Richelieu in 1635, and the Petite Académie de Peinture et de la Sculpture, founded by Mazarin in 1648, were added the Académie de France à Rome (1666), the Académie des Sciences (1666), the Académie d’Architecture (1671) and the Académie de Musique (1672). “His Majesty,” explained Col-bert, “loving the fine arts as he does, will cultivate them with all the more care since they could serve to eternalize his great and glorious actions.”
¹²
All such egotism perhaps seems petty, but Louis’s was at least a glorious ego, and it was matched by that of his mistress. Athénaïs, too, used her new power of patronage and her exquisite taste to promote the grandeur of her lover and of France.

The Mortemarts were all discerning
amateurs
of the arts. Athénaïs’s brother Vivonne was one of the first great noblemen to allow that artists and writers might be treated as social equals, on one occasion hauling himself up three flights of stairs to pay a call on the eminent writer Boileau, as the latter proudly records. Athénaïs shared her brother’s appreciation of literature, and was among the first to promote the talents of the “four friends,” the writers Molière, Racine, La Fontaine and Boileau. It was she who selected Racine and Boileau as the official historians of Louis XIV’s reign, and she and the King enjoyed listening to readings of the manuscripts describing the progress of the Dutch wars immediately as they were written, and discussing them afterwards.

Molière, whose delight in audacious comedy and hatred of hypocrisy appealed to Athénaïs, could not fail to become a favorite of hers, and perhaps she had an additional private affection because it was she who had to some extent inspired him to write
Amphitryon.
Athénaïs once complained to Louis that his gardens lacked
fantaisie,
that appearance of enchantment which was so essential in the ballet, and which was to become such a feature of the divertissements at Versailles. Such
fantaisie
was lavishly orchestrated in Molière’s productions. Thanks to his royal sponsor, he was able to stage extravaganzas such as
Psyche,
which cost 170,000 livres and boasted a chorus of 300 divinities floating on clouds, as well as a wave machine, flying zephyrs and furies and a troop of imps.

La Fontaine, author of the famous fables, paid a fulsome compliment to Athénaïs’s taste in his 1678 dedication to Book Seven:

Le Temps, qui detruit tout, respectant votre appui

Me laissera franchir les ans de cet ouvrage:

Tout auteur qui voudra vivre encore après lui

Doit s’acquerir votre suffrage

C’est de vous que mes vers attendaient tout leur prix

Il n’est beauté dans mes écrits

Dont vous ne connaissez jusques aux moindres traces