Athenais (6 page)

Mme. de Maintenon, the secret wife of Louis XIV’s declining years, took seriously the implications of such an interest in love and sex. When, much later, she came to establish her famous school for aristocratic girls at St. Cyr, she strongly rejected the association of nobility with sophisticated idleness. Old hypocrite that she was, she warned her pupils against the dangers of witty conversation and “expressed most vehemently . . . the antithesis between domesticity and
bel esprit.
”
²⁰
The liberated conversation of the salons suggested that traditional marriage and participation in civilized society were mutually exclusive. A refusal to accept the hypocrisies inherent in society marriage, La Maintenon feared, was inimical to Christian virtue.

Athénaïs had already experienced the application of such lax attitudes towards marital fidelity. In 1653, the Duc de Mortemart, already well past fifty, had fallen in love with Marie Boyer, the wife of Jean Tambonneau, head of the Parisian chamber of commerce. He lived with her quite openly for the next twenty years, and the workings of their scandalous ménage at Pré-aux-Clercs must have had a profound effect on the young Athénaïs. Marie was over thirty when Gabriel became her lover, positively ancient by the standards of the time, and despite her elegant dress sense she had certainly passed the bloom of her first good looks, disguising faint traces of smallpox with a good deal of rouge and powder. The aging lovers attracted some sly comic attention.

Mortemart le faune

Aime la Tambonneau

Elle est un peu jaune

Mais il n’est pas trop beau.
²¹

Despite her humble social origins (a “nothing,” sneered the snobbish Saint-Simon), Marie, too, held a successful salon, where she received “the flower of the court and the town.”
²²
Witty and dashing, Marie gambled furiously, and pursued amorous intrigue with equal fervor. People joked that her skirts were so light that they blew up at the slightest wind. Tambonneau was fully conscious that he was a cuckold, but he turned his horns of shame into cornucopia by recognizing the advantages of his wife’s loose living. Such an adjustment was often the policy of husbands cheated by the King himself. When Louis later cast his eye on the beautiful Princesse de Soubise, her husband prudently made himself scarce for the duration of their fling, and acquired a huge fortune and one of the most beautiful houses in Paris as a reward for his discretion.

Athénaïs must have felt the affront to her mother’s dignity keenly. Diane was perhaps less disgusted by her husband’s infidelity — after all, adultery was a way of life for aristocratic men — than by his irritating constancy to Marie. Humiliated, she would decamp to Poitou for much of the year. In 1663, she obtained a “separation of bed and board” from her husband, which was an acceptable form of estrangement in a practically divorce-free society, a gesture which shows a good deal of courage and independence. It is extremely unlikely that a young girl would have visited her father’s mistress, but Athénaïs must nevertheless have been influenced by Marie’s social success. To a sheltered convent pupil, Diane’s difficulties might have been the first indication of the fragility of aristocratic marriage, in which love and fidelity were confined to polite appearances. Yet Marie demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to flourish beyond the pale of adultery, provided that her charm and ambition secured her a powerful protector. An inconvenient husband could always be bought off.

Many commentators have observed a certain ruthless cynicism in Athénaïs’s character as an adult, a trait which may have originated in the betrayal of her mother. One history places these words in her mouth: “I know well that honor is nothing but a chimera, a pretty fantasy that was invented to hold persons of our sex to their duty.”
²³
The sophisticated cynicism of the salons can certainly be divined in such an opinion, but the contrast between her father’s worldliness and her mother’s disappointed fidelity was to be one of the main sources of conflict in Athénaïs’s life. She was strongly drawn to the piety and gentleness of her long-suffering mother, torn between the desire to live virtuously and her ambition to exploit the hypocrisies of her society as analyzed by the salons.

One woman who had the courage to practice what the
précieuses
preached was Ninon de Lenclos, Paris’s greatest courtesan. Like Marie Boyer, she had been able to attain a position in society despite her disregard for its conventions, and she had also shared Marie’s lover, the Duc de Mortemart, who had interceded for her in a legal action in 1651. Along with her paying customers, Ninon selected her own lovers, whom she divided into three categories, “favorites,” “caprices” and “martyrs.” She was a skillful businesswoman, but her

lifestyle was one of restrained good taste rather than the dissipated luxuriousness associated with successful prostitutes. Ninon demonstrated that women’s condition could be changed, that marriage could be refused, that love and freedom did not have to remain the prerogative of the male. She played a part in the sophisticated verbal and written culture which grew up around the question of love; Molière sent
Tartuffe
for her approval, and her opinions were influential to writers such as Mere and Saint-Evremond, whose essays discussed the
précieuse
project. In her will, she had the perspicacity to leave 1,000 francs to the twelve-year-old son of her lawyer, who struck her as an intelligent child. His name was Voltaire.

Ninon’s
esprit
was famous. The King would inquire after her latest bon mot, and she attracted ministers, society women and the future Regent of France, Philippe d’Orléans, to her salon. Even Mme. de Sévigné admired her, despite the fact that Ninon successively took as lovers the husband, son and grandson of the patient Marquise. Ninon was also known for having “more spirit than heart”; she loved discerningly and never allowed her passions to get the better of her sense. It is delightful to imagine a meeting between Ninon and Athénaïs, the two great sex symbols of the seventeenth century, but even if they did not meet, Athénaïs would have known of the elder woman’s brilliant career, and, as in the case of Marie Boyer, observed that
esprit
and skill could bring tremendous success to a woman bold enough to deploy them in love.

Ninon was acquainted with Mme. de Maintenon, whom she pronounced a charming conversationalist, but too clumsy for love. “Mme. de Maintenon,” Ninon suggested slyly, “was virtuous by weakness of spirit. I tried to cure her, but she was too afraid of God.”
²⁴
It was at the Hôtel d’Albret that Athénaïs first met the young widow of the satirical poet Paul Scarron. In those days, Françoise Scarron was not nearly so pious nor so haughty as the Marquise de Maintenon was to become. The two young women shared a delight in society and polished conversation, and the impoverished young widow was grateful to have so glamorous a friend as Athénaïs. Together, they were the stars of the Maréchal d’Albret’s soirées, and here began a friendship that became a conspiracy which led to the most extraordinary marriage in seventeenth-century France. Perhaps they also exchanged confidences on the vagaries of love, since for Athénaïs, marriage was already a reality.

Chapter Three

“Good marriages do exist,
but not delectable ones.”

F
rom her convent education to her first entrance into society, Athénaïs, like every aristocratic French girl of the seventeenth century, would have been aware that marriage was the primary goal of her existence. A good match could enhance the prestige of her family, bringing wealth and court appointments, so if Athénaïs sighed over the romantic extravagances of
précieuse
novels, or gossiped with Mme. de Thianges over her partners at court balls, she would never have doubted that her own marriage would be a business contract, arranged for her family’s benefit before her own preference.

Romantic love, as conceived of in the twentieth century, had little or no place in courtship, which mainly entailed complex business negotiations between the couple’s families over the girl’s dowry and the settlements the groom would bestow on his wife. French law laid particular emphasis on parental control of marriages. The Church had ruled at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century that while it disapproved of marriages contracted without parental consent, they were still valid under ecclesiastical law, but in France, the Ordonnance of Blois subsequently repudiated canonical authority by claiming that such unions were invalid under civil law, privileging obedience to parents over obedience to the Church. This ruling was particularly concerned with protecting the status quo within the aristocracy: since women were important dynastic tools, their disposal in marriage crucially influenced the familial groupings of political power. So as the

daughter of a duc, from a family closely linked with the court, Athénaïs might have expected from an early age that her marriage would be arranged with a view to enhancing the Rochechouart prestige.

Desirable unions could be solemnized when their principals reached twelve, the age of consent, in order to cement aristocratic alliances. The size of a girl’s dowry — that is, the money settled on her by her family — and the nobility of her birth were the key factors determining matrimonial success. As the
noblesse de robe
and the
noblesse d’épée
became more and more integrated, it was common for these attributes to be “traded,” with one partner, usually the man, providing a prestigiously blue bloodline and the other the hard cash. This way, the nouveau riche could boost their aristocratic alliances while impoverished old families received a vital injection of income. The amalgamation of the two classes also made the marriage market more competitive, as the old aristocracy now had to contend with the fortunes of the
noblesse de robe
and the increasingly wealthy bourgeoisie, and as a result bigger and bigger dowries were required for girls from old families if they wished to marry within their class. An impoverished young duke was likely to prefer a wealthy heiress, even if her family had only recently abandoned trade, to an equally impoverished duke’s daughter whose quarterings were comparable with his own. A family of marriageable daughters could therefore present a ruinous expense (hence the practice common in large families of sending some more or less willing daughters to a convent, as was the case with Athénaïs’s sisters Marie-Christine and Marie-Madeleine). A great marriage could demand up to one third of the family’s entire assets.

In Athénaïs’s case, the family ambitions were compromised by the gloomy condition of her father’s finances. Although the Duc de Mortemart was rich, his extravagances had depleted his resources, and the marriage of Athénaïs’s elder sister, the Marquise de Thianges, had stretched them further. By the time Athénaïs had spent two seasons in Paris, her family had settled on a candidate who found her dowry of 150,000 livres (of which one fifth was provided by her mother’s independent funds) quite acceptable. Louis-Alexandre de Trémoille, Marquis de Noirmoutiers was well born, solvent and decent-looking. Mme. de Lafayette claims that Athénaïs was attracted to Noirmoutiers and pleased with the match. Given that she was already about twenty-two, quite an advanced age for such a beautiful girl to be single at a time when most women of her class married in their late teens, we

might speculate that the famous Mortemart spirit had encouraged her to hold out for a man who appealed to both her pride and her affections. Unfortunately, the second scandal to affect her life was about to intervene.

On the evening of 20 January 1663, a group of young men was leaving the Tuileries palace after a ball given by Monsieur, when a quarrel broke out between the Prince de Chalais and the Marquis de la Frette which quickly developed into a scuffle. Noirmoutiers, Chalais’s brother-in-law, stepped in with two friends and blows were exchanged. The result was a challenge, to be satisfied at dawn the next day at Pré-aux-Clercs (not a lucky spot for the Mortemart women). Eight young men turned out in the icy morning: Chalais, seconded by Noirmoutiers, the Marquis de Flamarens and the Marquis d’Antin, and their opponents La Frette, his brother D’Amilly, the Vicomte d’Argenlieu and the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan. Perhaps, to heads still fuzzy with wine, the encounter seemed a romantic game, a chance to act out the ancient code of chivalry that the aristocracy still held dear, but there was nothing glamorous about the consequences. Henri de Pardaillan, Marquis d’Antin, was killed on the spot by D’Aignan, and his three companions were left seriously injured on the freezing ground. When the affair became known, the survivors’ prospects looked bleak. The King was furious that his edict against the ruinous practice of dueling had been flouted, and he encouraged Parlement to hand down to the survivors the most severe sentence available: execution. Fortunately, the men were able to flee the country before they were arrested. Noirmoutiers was exiled to Portugal, where he was killed five years later fighting against the Spanish.

Athénaïs had lost her fiancé, but in the process she gained a husband. When the brother of the dead Marquis, Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de Montespan, paid her a visit of consolation, their shared sorrow at the catastrophic duel forged an instant bond between them. It soon became clear that, although he might more prudently have married a wealthier woman, the dark young man from Gascony was captivated by Athénaïs. Bussy-Rabutin noted that the talk in Paris was that the Marquis de Montespan preferred her name and her beauty to “a quantity of others who could have much better accommodated his affairs.”

Montespan may have been genuinely in love, but he had little to offer beyond passion. His name was an advantage, since the Pardaillans de Gondrin were an impeccably ancient family. The Montespans, to whom they had allied themselves through marriage in the sixteenth century, were related to the kings of Navarre and also claimed links with the royal house of Spain. Montespan’s father, Hector-Roger Pardaillan de Gondrin, was a distinguished and influential councillor of state. However, his uncle, the Archbishop of Sens, was a prominent member of the Jansenist sect, a religious group that was in low favor at court. Jansenism (named after its founder, Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres) had been established in the early seventeenth century as a response to the Jesuit teaching that eternal salvation could be earned through actions on earth. The extent of the influence of human agency on salvation or damnation was essential to all Catholic teaching, but the Jansenists took a more pessimistic view than the Jesuits, arguing that since man was fundamentally corrupt, salvation was practically predetermined, and only a rigorous expulsion of all “human” aspects of man’s nature might lead the faithful to heaven. As the Jansenists heartily disapproved of Louis, his religious policies and his lifestyle, particularly his womanizing and his love of the theater, they were personae non gratae at court. This situation altered somewhat in the later part of Louis’s reign, as the sect grew in popularity, numbering the writers Pascal and Racine among its members, and indeed eventually prompting the spiritual conversion of the King himself, but in the 1660s, Montespan’s family connection precluded any possibility of a court post. He was therefore without influence or position in the world where Athénaïs’s family had always been prominent — obviously a grave disadvantage to the marriage.