Athenais (42 page)

“Born of love and made for love,”
⁸
the new Duchesse de Bourbon had inherited all her mother’s charm. She was “the wittiest, most malicious of women,”
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one of those whom Saint-Simon recollects as continuing to use the particular Mortemart language and manner of speech after her mother had left the court. Even La Palatine, who hated Athénaïs’s bastard children, had to admit that “she ridicules everything in such a droll manner that one can’t help laughing . . . in all her life she has never had a bad-tempered moment.” Unlike Athénaïs, Mme. la Duchesse left some record of this distinctive style, in a scandalous novel set in the time of the Roman emperor Augustus, with the characters drawn from the court at Versailles, which she wrote to amuse herself. Though as diminutive as her little husband, she towered over him intellectually, and it was not long before she began an affair with Marie-Anne de Bourbon’s brother-in-law, the far more dashing Prince de Conti, while the Duc was away at the front. Later, she had a longstanding affair with the Marquis de Lassay, which endured until her death in 1743. She built an enormous house, the Palais Bourbon, on the banks of the Seine, with a smaller residence next door for her lover.

Although she proved a less than faithful wife, Louis always approved of his elder daughter. In 1686, she and her sister Mlle. de Blois both fell ill with smallpox at Fontainebleau. Athénaïs, in one of her last seasons at court, nursed them both round the clock. The Grand Condé, who was deeply attached to his granddaughter-in-law, also insisted on attending her bedside, where he was joined by Louis himself when her condition appeared grave. At the door of her bedroom, Condé, anxious that the King should not jeopardize his own health, tried to prevent him from entering, and “a great struggle ensued between parental love and the zeal of a courtier, very glorious for Mme. la Duchesse.”
¹⁰
But Louis was so concerned that he insisted on being with his daughter, and did not return to Versailles until the Duchesse had recovered. Sadly for the elderly Condé, the strain was too much, and his exhausting devotion to the little girl cost him his own life.

Despite her frequent presence at Marly in 1686, Athénaïs endured further humiliations that year. In May, Louis departed to take a course of waters at Barèges in an attempt to cure the famous fistula. Athénaïs was not invited to join the party, and collapsed in a fainting fit when she heard that she had been excluded. Leaving for Paris in a temper, she came back a few days later to collect the Comte de Toulouse, who she planned to take with her on a visit to Rambouillet while the King was away. Just as the boy and his mother were stepping into the carriage, a spiteful message arrived ordering Toulouse to stay and accompany his father to Barèges. The cure was eventually postponed, and Athénaïs remained at Versailles with her children, but it had been a nasty reminder of the new order of things for the woman who had once commanded the King. In October at Fontainebleau, Athénaïs was lodged as an ordinary courtier, while La Maintenon enjoyed the fine suite of apartments next to the King’s, where Athénaïs had made Louise de La Vallière comb out her hair so long before.

One of the most painful snubs La Maintenon inflicted on Athénaïs was publicizing the treachery of her old friend Racine. As the writer grew older, he had returned to the Jansenist beliefs of his youth, and became suspicious of his own genius, abandoning the drama because he thought it was sinful. Instead he contented himself with his role as royal historian and with the writing of occasional pieces such as inscriptions for medals. But when Mme. de Maintenon decided that the schoolgirls of St. Cyr should have a suitable religious play to perform as part of their education, she persuaded Racine to make an exception in this worthy case.

St. Cyr displayed all the best qualities of the Marquise de Main-tenon’s character — her cultivation, her love of learning and her talent for education. She had founded the school with Louis’s help in 1686, in specially constructed premises not far from Versailles. It was intended to offer an education to poor girls from noble families — they had to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility on the father’s side — whose maintenance and dowry would be provided by the monarchy. For girls from the
hobereau
class, the poorer nobility who could neither afford to come to court nor make their fortune in any profession, it was a wonderful opportunity. Unfortunately, since the school immediately became fashionable, the poverty ideal did not endure for long, but the education provided by St. Cyr for the lucky ones was sensible and enlightened, with none of the pious limitations of so many girls’ convents. Athénaïs was one of the school’s first visitors, accompanied by the ten-year-old Mlle. de Blois, and she admired the girls in their black dresses and aprons, with colored ribbons on the bodices to distinguish the different forms. St. Cyr endured unchanged until the French Revolution. La Maintenon was to spend the last years of her life here, and when she died she was buried in the chapel. Her pride did get the better of her a little, though: Horace Walpole, visiting the school in 1769, observed that the infirmary was adorned with “every text of scripture by which could be insinuated that the foundress was a Queen.”
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La Maintenon was particularly concerned that the pupils should excel at French composition, and she thought that acting would improve their style. Racine obliged them with his penultimate play,
Esther,
in 1689, and the performances were a tremendous success, with Louis attending the first and last nights. But it was obvious that the piece was a thinly disguised allegory of the current state of affairs at Versailles, and in the discerning opinion of the novelist Mme. de Lafayette, it was a contemptible piece of flattery designed to bolster La Maintenon and humiliate Athénaïs. In the play, the holy, humble Esther triumphs over the imperious Vashti, and the identity of the king, Ahasuerus, needed no explanation. The wits joked that in locating St. Cyr so close to Versailles, old Esther was creating a harem for Ahasuerus, but the fact that anyone with taste declared the piece a nonsense can have been of little consolation to Athénaïs. Now that Racine had returned to religion, his loyalties were all with the enemy of his former patron, and in changing his allegiance he made Athénaïs an object of very public ridicule.

She still had her children. Athénaïs was close to both of her daughters, though in later years her maternal role evolved into that of mediator, since after the marriage of Mlle. de Blois, the two sisters became, for the most part, deadly rivals. If the court was surprised that two of Louis’s illegitimate daughters had been married to princes of the blood, they were speechless at the King’s choice of husband for his youngest. Françoise-Marie was to marry Philippe, Duc de Chartres, the son of Monsieur and La Palatine, and the eventual head of the house of Orléans, whose rank was grandson of France, from his descent from Louis XIII. At the time, no one suspected that her husband would ultimately become the Regent of France.

Mlle. de Blois had not, unlike her elder sister, been brought up by La Maintenon, for although she had been born at that lady’s château in 1677, during the alliance Athénaïs had made with the governess to dispose of Mme. de Ludres, La Maintenon had refused to have anything to do with her, or with the Comte de Toulouse, who were, of course, the result of Athénaïs’s reunion with Louis after his religious crisis in 1676. La Maintenon, cheated in her attempt to conquer the King’s soul, “did not spare her exhortations and remonstrances”
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at the birth of Athénaïs’s youngest daughter, and she and her little brother were brought up in the old house at Rue Vaugirard in Paris, where La Maintenon had begun her career. Although rather too plump, Mlle. de Blois was pretty, with perfect skin and her father’s melting eyes. She suffered from the defect of having one shoulder higher than the other, which Mme. de Caylus interpreted as evidence that she bore “the conflict between love and duty” in her person.

Philippe, Duc de Chartres, who became Regent of France on Louis’s death in 1715, was far more talented than his indolent cousin the Dauphin or his cowardly cousin Du Maine, and suffered as a consequence. He was clever, cultivated and brave, interested in science as well as the arts. But Louis very unwisely allowed himself to be prejudiced against his nephew, and Philippe was kept kicking his heels at Versailles, forced to hear inflated accounts of the Duc du Maine’s exploits on campaign and going mad with frustration. Not having inherited his father’s penchant for boys, he vented his humiliation in a string of affairs with women (he became a father aged thirteen after impregnating the daughter of the concierge at the Palais Royal), drinking, gambling and dabbling in such dangerously unorthodox sciences as alchemy. Louis was perhaps rather intimidated by Philippe’s promise, and forcing his daughter upon him as a backhanded honor was one way of demonstrating his power over the lesser House of Orléans.

A good deal of plotting was necessary to bring about the marriage. In 1688, Louis announced that he intended to raise a few lucky men to the Order of the Holy Spirit, one of the highest honors in France. Among the nominees were Monsieur’s boyfriend the Chevalier de Lorraine and his brother the Comte de Marsan. Monsieur also submitted the names of two more of his favorites, the Marquis d’Effiat and the Marquis de Chatillon. This outrageous nomination of flagrant homosexuals to the holy order was Monsieur’s pay-off for his support of the marriage. On Athénaïs’s suggestion, he was also given the Palais Royal, which had previously been leased from the Crown. The real opposition to the match, however, was likely to come from Madame, La Palatine, who would never stomach such an insult to her proud German blood.

Madame had a curious relationship with the King. Like her predecessor, Henriette d’Angleterre, she was more than a little in love with him, as her obsessive reportage about his activities, preserved in her voluminous correspondence, shows. These letters, the writing of which consumed hours of Madame’s day, give one of the best portraits of life at Versailles, although inevitably they are as full of gossip and prejudice as they are of hard facts. Madame and Athénaïs may not have had much in common, but they both appreciated that the most interesting part of a person’s character is often the untruths attributed to it. The letters were opened by the King’s spies, as Madame well knew, and she used them to make criticisms of Louis that his terrifying manner would have prevented her from making to his face. When she got wind of the marriage plot in 1688, she made her opinions clear in a letter to her aunt Sophie, the Electress of Hanover.

I must confess to my dearest Tante that I have been most distressed lately ...I have been made privy to the reason why the King treats the Chevalier de Lorraine and the Marquis d’Effiat so well; it is because they have promised him that they would persuade Monsieur to ask the King most humbly to marry the Montespan’s children to mine, that is, the limping Duc du Maine to my daughter and Mademoiselle de Blois to my son. In this case Maintenon is all for the Montespan, since she has brought up these bastards and loves the limping boy like her own...Even if the Duc du Maine were not the child of a double adultery but a true prince, I would not like him for a son-in-law, nor his sister for a daughter-in-law, for he is dreadfully ugly and lame and has other bad qualities to boot, stingy as the devil and without kindness. His sister, it is true, is rather kind . . . But most of all, they are the children of double adultery, and the children of the most wicked and desperate woman on earth . . . whenever I see these bastards, my blood boils over.

Whatever her view of Athénaïs, La Palatine was quite accurate in her estimation of Du Maine. He was eventually married to a daughter of the Condé family, who was popularly thought to resemble a black beetle. The couple were so very short and so very proud that Du Maine’s sister referred to them contemptuously as “
les poupées du sang
,” the dolls of the blood. Madame, relieved that her own daughter, Elisabeth-Charlotte, had been spared such a fate, explained in a letter: “I believe that the King’s trollop must have been told what the populace of Paris is saying, and that must have frightened her. They are saying very loudly that it would be shameful for the King to give his bastard daughter to a legitimate prince of the house.” Madame may have been pleased to flatter herself that she had public opinion on her side, but in truth Athénaïs was not in the least bit afraid of the Parisians, or of Madame, come to that, especially as Louis had already married one illegitimate daughter to a Conti.

Madame’s son, however, did not escape. On 10 January 1692, she wrote again to her aunt, with “eyes so thick and swollen that I can barely look out of them,” with an account of how the betrothal had come about. Apparently, Monsieur had come to her room and said, “Madame, I have a message from the King for you, which will not be too pleasing to you, and you are to give him your answer in person tonight. The King wishes me to tell you that since he and I and my son are agreed on the marriage of Mademoiselle de Blois to my son, you will not be foolish enough to demur.”

Madame was far more at home on the hunting field than in the hushed antechambers where intrigue bred, but in this extremity she had bestirred herself to play the courtier. After Philippe had been talked around by his tutor, the Abbé Dubois, La Palatine had attempted to persuade him to stand up to his uncle and refuse the match. But given that Louis’s manner famously reduced everyone, especially his relations, to a state of terrified agitation, it was hardly likely that he would refuse his “consent.” So when Madame was summoned to Louis’s Cabinet, it was to be presented with a fait accompli. She was so appalled that she barely managed a wobbling curtsey, and immediately withdrew. The engagement was announced that evening at Appartement, and the court rushed to congratulate the couple while reveling slyly in Madame’s delicious discomfiture. La Maintenon could hardly disguise an air of triumph. Although she must have hated the elevation of Athénaïs’s daughter, whom she had refused to raise, she had endured so many insults from Madame’s pen that her delight at La Palatine’s humiliation overcame her jealousy of Athénaïs. No one, however, dared to approach poor Madame, who strode weeping noisily along the Galérie des Glaces, sniffling into her handkerchief and looking, according to Saint-Simon, like Ceres after the abduction of her daughter Proserpina. At supper, neither Madame nor Philippe could eat, always a sign of extreme distress for the Bourbons, and Mlle. de Blois was so nervous in her gaudy outfit that her governess had to take her on her knee. Saint-Simon adds that the next day Madame answered her son’s nervous greeting with a powerful slap in the face.