Athenais (38 page)

With Louis’s implicit encouragement, Athénaïs had set to work on Mademoiselle in the hope of obtaining lands for Du Maine. She had hinted that perhaps it might still be possible for the thwarted marriage between Lauzun and Mademoiselle to come off. Louis’s anger towards Lauzun had cooled, and Athénaïs, who was now in need of as many allies as she could find, guessed that Lauzun’s enmity towards her for having him put in prison would probably dissolve in his gratitude to her at obtaining his freedom. What could Mademoiselle do, she had wondered, to please Louis enough to grant “her heart’s desire”? Mademoiselle had soon perceived the aim of Athénaïs’s insinuating flatteries, the invitations to carriage and boat rides and the friendly intimation that, “in time, circumstances change.” One of Lauzun’s friends, Pertuis, put the point more bluntly. “Make them hope that du Maine will be your heir.”
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To convince Mademoiselle that she still had enough power to secure Lauzun’s release, Athénaïs had had Colbert intervene at Pignerol for an amelioration of the terms of Lauzun’s imprisonment, and from 1679 onwards, he had been permitted to take walks and receive visits. Colbert, using a friend of Lauzun’s named Barrail as a go-between, had conveyed the Marquise’s terms clearly to Mademoiselle.

Athénaïs was asking for the two juiciest titles of Mademoiselle’s estate, the principality of Dombes and the earldom of Eu, for her son. She wheedled and charmed and coaxed so energetically that she wore Mademoiselle down. The King’s cousin begged for time to recover from her troubles. When she heard that Athénaïs wanted the titles bestowed immediately, rather than as a posthumous inheritance, she was outraged. She felt too well, she said, to see any present advantage in dying. Worried that the plan might collapse, Athénaïs hinted at ever more favorable terms — who knew whether the lovers might not be reunited at last? On 2 February 1681, Mademoiselle, too exhausted to resist any longer, and pinning all her hopes on the possibility of happiness with Lauzun, signed away Dombes to Du Maine and bestowed Eu upon him, in a false sale, for the sum of 1,600,000 livres.

Athénaïs probably knew all along that Louis, who was too nice to play any active part in such a despicable swindle, had never had any intention of permitting Lauzun to return to court, let alone to the welcoming arms of his cousin. All Mademoiselle received in exchange for her king’s ransom was Lauzun’s release and permission for him to live as an exile on his estates. Athénaïs, though, was quick to blame Louis’s strictness for the failure of a plan conceived out of her own dishonesty. When she was finally forced to admit to Made-moiselle that there was still no question of a marriage, she tried to pretend that she had never made such an extravagant promise. “What, he will not come straight here, after all I have done!” gasped Mademoiselle.

“How difficult you are to please,” drawled La Montespan.

The coup de grâce came on a walk in the park at St. Germain, when Athénaïs airily mentioned that “the King also asked me to tell you that he does not wish that you should think of marrying M. de Lauzun.” Officially, then, Lauzun would not be recognized, but Athénaïs carelessly suggested that he and Mademoiselle could perhaps marry in private. Mademoiselle was furious, since it would be impossible for her to live openly with her husband if they were not equally publicly wed. Athénaïs was hardly in a position to pronounce on the propriety of anyone’s marital situation, and she dismissed Mademoiselle’s conscience with the argument that in fact she would be much happier, as Lauzun would love her even more if their relationship were clandestine. “Secrets add to the taste of things,” she added wistfully.
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Mademoiselle was not a Bourbon for nothing, and she had kept one trick up her sleeve. She had granted Athénaïs’s request only on the understanding that Lauzun would be able to return to her, and now, she announced, she would have to compensate him, for during his imprisonment she had “sold” the earldom of Eu to him. In September 1681, therefore, mourning her daughter, Athénaïs was dispatched to Bourbon to try to persuade Lauzun to surrender the title. She proposed to grant him lands worth 40,000 livres a year in exchange, but Lauzun demanded the restoration of his post as captain of the bodyguard, a gift from the treasury of 200,000 livres and for the pensions he had missed while in prison to be backpaid. Since Mademoiselle was complaining that she had already given enough, Athénaïs had to pay dearly to secure her son’s future. Lauzun eventually received the barony of Thiers, the estate at St. Fargeau and a further revenue of 10,000 livres as joint compensation from Made-moiselle and Athénaïs, who was now obliged also to negotiate between the King and his cousin. Having been duped once, Made-moiselle was determined that this time she would get her way, and that Lauzun should be allowed to return to court. If he wasn’t, the grant to Du Maine would not be permitted to be made public. Louis wrote a hypocritical letter to Colbert, feigning surprise at Athénaïs’s intervention on Mademoiselle’s behalf, and reiterating that while “I am upset when I do not know how to do what she wants,” his cousin had been shown amply “my pleasure in granting to Lauzun what I have just granted him.”
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Athénaïs finally managed to bring Mademoiselle around, and Du Maine publicly received his estates, yet neither she nor Mademoiselle was ultimately rewarded for their efforts. With hindsight, Mademoiselle admitted that she had been checkmated by Athénaïs, who was far more skilled in court politics, but Athénaïs herself gained no real satisfaction from her shabby victory. Du Maine felt no gratitude to his mother, and turned against her viciously in favor of his old governess, while Louis, whatever the extent of his collaboration in Athénaïs’s efforts on their son’s behalf, was not prepared to acknowledge her help. Lauzun, whose eventual rehabilita- tion at court was due in a large part to Athénaïs, married not poor Mademoiselle, but the fourteen-year-old sister-in-law of the Duc de Saint-Simon. In private, he would squeeze himself into his old guards uniform and dream of what might have been.

The episode demonstrated all too plainly just how marginal Athénaïs’s role at court was becoming. The King did visit her in her apartments, between Mass and dinnertime, and briefly after supper with the Dauphine, but he now restricted their private contact to conversations of only a few minutes’ duration. The only truly intimate moments in the day of a man who lived his life before a permanent audience of 5,000 people were the two or three hours he spent between working or hunting and in the evening with Mme. de Maintenon.

With the permanent establishment of the court at Versailles, Louis solidified the rigid, ritualistic timetable for which he became so famous, known as
le mécanique du Roi.
Anyone in the country could look at a clock at any given hour and know exactly what the King of France was doing. He rose at eight o’clock sharp, awakened by his valet and those privileged mortals who had the right of the Grande Entrée. After prayers and brief ablutions came the Seconde Entrée, which consisted of the most assiduous courtiers competing fiercely to attract a word, or even a look, from the King. The day after his father’s death, Saint-Simon was ecstatic when Louis favored him with the remark: “Ah, here is the Duc de Saint-Simon.” It was one of just three occasions on which Louis spoke to him.

After a brief session with his ministers, the King proceeded to Mass. During his walk to the chapel, any courtier was permitted to speak to him, though since he kept up a brisk pace, their inquiries had to be brief, and were invariably met with a laconic “I’ll see.” After Mass, Louis was closeted with his ministers, and the courtiers had to hang around waiting to bow to him as he left his Cabinet for the Petit Couvert, his first meal, which he ate alone, or occasionally with Monsieur, though in full view of the court. Then it was time for an outing. The King, in a new suit and wig, would set forth in his carriage to inspect the park. Another change of clothes, and he retired to his rooms, or Mme. de Maintenon’s, with his family and his dispatch box. At ten in the evening there was the ceremony of Grand Couvert, in which the King dined with his family, and which anyone in France had the right to observe. Then, until midnight, Louis withdrew to his rooms, again with La Maintenon, everyone sitting stiffly on their armchair, straight-backed chair, or stool, the princes on their feet. The King’s official bedtime brought a reverse of the morning’s ceremony, with one gentleman selected for the honor of holding the royal candle for the reading of the evening prayer.

The royal family now presented a most edifying spectacle of orderly domestic life. The King seemed to be converting sincerely to religion. He was spending those hours he did not bestow on Mme. de Maintenon with his wife, and the neglected Queen blossomed beneath this unexpected attention. “I am informed that the Queen is very well at court, and that the complaisance and interest she has shown during the journey [to Flanders in 1681] ...have gained her a thousand marks of regard,” reports Mme. de Sévigné. In a scheme of consummate hypocrisy, it was Mme. de Maintenon who had encouraged Louis to finally pay attention to his little Spanish wife. Marie-Thérèse was pathetically grateful to the woman who had once conspired to keep her husband’s illegitimate children invisible. “She was touched to the very verge of tears, and exclaimed in a kind of transport, ‘God has raised up Mme. de Maintenon to bring me back the heart of the King!’” La Maintenon worked on the poor Queen’s timidity with no disinterested motive, happily accompanying that lady to pay a call on the King when she was too overawed by her magnificent spouse to do so alone. The Queen’s gratitude was very public, and La Maintenon notes that she has been presented with the royal portrait as a mark of esteem, adding gleefully “Mme. de Montespan never had any such thing.”

In the eyes of her supporters, Mme. de Maintenon was achieving marvels, restoring order and respectability at last to the libertine court. “All good men, the Pope, the bishops, applauded the victory of Mme. de Maintenon, and considered that she had rendered a signal service to the King and to the State,” comments M. Lavallée.
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Pope Innocent XI did indeed take an interest in the activities of Louis’s self-appointed spiritual mentor, hoping that the King’s conversion might pave the way to a reconciliation between the Vatican and the French court, between which relations were strained. La Maintenon received various gifts of relics and prayer books from His Holiness, the most appropriate of which was surely the preserved corpse of a martyr. La Maintenon was in paradise at this gratification of her immense spiritual pride, but she was careful to represent her joy to her confessor, Abbé Gobelin, as mere satisfaction at discharging her pious duty. “I am but too much extolled,” she wrote to him, “for certain good intentions which I owe to God.” The only outward signs of her changed position were her indulgence of a hitherto dormant taste for finery and an increased haughtiness in her manner, though she continued to behave sycophantically to the Queen.

The court was bewildered by their monarch’s attraction to this quiet, mysterious, middle-aged lady. How had she come to have such an influence over him? Primi Visconti summarizes their theories:

No one knew what to believe of it, because she was old: some saw her as the confidante of the King, others as a procuress, others as a skillful person to whom the King was dictating his memoirs of his reign. It is certain that with regard to the change in her clothes and manners, no one could explain what had taken place. Many were of the opinion that there are men who are drawn much more towards older women than to younger ones.

This last suggestion hints at the truth. For despite the pomposity of her pronouncements on sin, her harrying of Athénaïs over her adultery, and her rejoicing in the conversion of her monarch, which she had been trying to effect for the previous seven years, Françoise d’Aubigné had become the King’s mistress. If he had not previously had a taste for mature charms, Louis seems to have developed one.

It seemed to be Marie-Thérèse’s eternal fate to be deceived by those who professed friendship towards her. As Athénaïs had done long ago, La Maintenon impressed the Queen with her demonstrations of piety and used her encouragement of a reconciliation between the royal couple as a cloak for her own machinations. But why had she chosen to make what was clearly a tactical surrender? Interestingly, her correspondence with the Abbé Gobelin for that year has been lost, but the letters she exchanged with her siblings seem to impart a new sense of joy and confidence. It is uncertain exactly when their sexual relationship began, and therefore impossible to know whether the post of
dame d’atour,
for example, was a reward or a bribe. Since there was no new official mistress after the fall of Angélique de Fontanges (although Athénaïs still nominally held the title), it seems probable that Mme. de Maintenon took her place in about 1680. It is improbable that such an energetic forty-two-year-old as Louis would remain chaste for long, and likely that La Maintenon felt it was more prudent to succumb to his advances than to risk losing her hold over him to yet another mistress. The conclusive proof that she had become his lover is a remark she subsequently made to Mme. d’Aumale: “I was happy, and only concerned to amuse him, to remove him from women, which I could not have done had he not found me complaisant and always ready. He would have sought his pleasure elsewhere if he had not found it with me.”
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Perhaps this chilly widow of forty came to regret this “complaisance,” since she found herself fulfilling her conjugal duties into her seventies.

How, though, did she reconcile her own adulterous behavior with years of condemnation of that very sin? The
correspondance générale
of Mme. de Maintenon gives some clue, although these papers should be read always as a contrived exercise in posthumous public relations rather than the ingenuous revelations of the lady’s private thoughts. Since Mme. de Maintenon professed to believe that she had been chosen by God to bring the King, and thus the realm of France, back to the path of virtue, she saw the sacrifice of her own virtue as a necessary and therefore forgivable inconvenience. This long explanation by M. Lavallée, one of her most ardent supporters, suggests as much.