Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (33 page)

Gossip spread across Europe on the subject of the marriage, and by 1686 a song was being sung contrasting the reputation of Françoise's old friend the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos with that of the virtuous Roman wife Lucrece: ‘Whether she's wife or mistress / Whether Ninon or Lucrece / I couldn't care less.' As for the King who ‘from lover has become husband / He does what one does at his age'. In 1687, according to Liselotte, few people at court doubted that the couple were married; though she personally found it hard to believe ‘so long as there has been no official announcement'. Being Liselotte, she could not resist adding a swipe at the morals of the French court: ‘If they were married their love would hardly be as strong as it is. But perhaps secrecy adds a spice not enjoyed by people in official wedlock.' The following year Liselotte, with her strong sense of rank, was still perplexed by the lack of official announcement (she should not have grumbled because it enabled her to continue to take precedence over ‘the old woman'). But Madame had to admit that Louis had never felt ‘such passion for any mistress as he does for this one'.
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Françoise had her own ideas of how her position should be handled. She refused for example to take the post of Dame d'Honneur to the Dauphine, the senior female appointment at court, when the Duchesse de Richelieu died, despite the pleas of Marianne-Victoire. (The latter had seen the light: when she arrived in France she had displayed hostility to Françoise, encouraged by her husband; now she realised her mistake.) This self-denial was said to be ‘very generous and noble behaviour' on Françoise's part; but in truth she did not want to be seen to tread the path of Athénaïs, the mistress created Superintendent of the Queen's Household. On the other hand, by 1692 Françoise was enjoying the right to visit enclosed convents, theoretically exercised only by the Queens of France. She also had the crucial privilege of sitting down in royalty's presence – always a vital clue to status at Versailles.

The real proof of the marriage lay, however, in the attitude of the clergy, above all that of the Holy See. In order that Françoise should maintain her position as a woman of virtue, it was necessary that the Pope should be informed privately of the marriage. This had probably happened by 1685. Certainly the Papacy awarded her every respect, which would hardly have been the case if she had continued simply as the mistress or the so-called best friend of the King. A lapis lazuli crown for a statue of the Virgin and a gold medal were among the presents sent from Rome to Françoise.
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As the years passed, there were clues, slips of the pen or of etiquette, which would admit of no other solution than marriage between the two of them. The drunken reference of the dissolute Charles d'Aubigné to his royal ‘brother-in-law' should not be counted as evidence, since Charles liked to embarrass when he could and certainly had no privileged information. But there was the letter of the Abbé Godet des Marais, Françoise's director of conscience following Gobelin, who referred to her as ‘a woman occupied with the glory of
her husband
(italics added). And there was the more ribald incident when Monsieur happened upon his brother alone with Françoise on a bed with the covers drawn back because of the heat (he was taking medicine rather than making love). The King merely laughed and said: ‘In the condition in which you see me with Madame de Maintenon, you can imagine what she is to me.'
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One of the clear indications Louis XIV had given that there would be no new official Queen of France was his transformation of his late wife's living quarters. Now Madame de Maintenon's own apartments were adapted from time to time to suit her new status – whatever it was – and she was granted a proper reception room (and a better
garde-robe
) so that the King could enjoy the domesticity he wanted. Instructions for redecoration were mixed up with orders for the King's own apartments, and those of the Dauphin and Dauphine. But despite the heavy damask in the various rooms, red, green, crimson and gold, on seats, beds and tables as well as walls, they could never be mistaken for the apartments of a Queen. Only the bed in the alcove with its four bouquets of feathers waving above had something quasi-royal about it.
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The King gained no kudos from the match, which in the eyes of his subjects awarded him neither the prestige of a royal bride nor the virility signified by a glamorous mistress. A popular rhyme indicated this: ‘I sinned many times with Montespan / I sinned with that good wench / And with this one here / I do my penance.'
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What he gained was what he wanted to gain: a new puritanism at court.
O tempora! O mores!
There were gallants of both sexes at the court who must have reflected with Cicero upon the change of morals brought by time when at Easter 1684 the King criticised sternly those who had not performed their religious duties.

A certain gallant lady who must have looked quizzically upon the change was Athénaïs, still present at court, still receiving her ritual daily visits from the King. Her sumptuous New Year present to the King in 1685 was much admired: it consisted of a book inlaid with gold and miniatures depicting all the towns in Holland which Louis had captured in 1672; the text was partly supplied by Racine. The Marquis de Dangeau reported on its exquisite appearance and good taste in his
Journal
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(though there was surely an element of nostalgia in recalling those vanished campaign days – and nights). A triple outing for the hunt in the autumn of 1685 in a carriage containing Françoise, Athénaïs and the King also recalled the pairing of Louise and Athénaïs fifteen years earlier. But power had shifted for ever.

Already Athénaïs had been moved out of her gorgeous apartments to dwell solely in the Appartement des Bains on the ground floor. The inlaid marble floor had to be replaced with parquet to make it habitable in winter. In December it was Françoise to whom Athénaïs applied to get a position with the Dauphin for her son by her first marriage, the twenty-year-old Marquis, later Duc, d'Antin. (She had hardly seen him in childhood after her husband took him away, and her daughter Marie-Christine had died in her early teens.) At Françoise's instance, the King agreed. D'Antin, handsome and lively, with his mother's good looks and her wit, went on to have a distinguished career at court and in the army.

Françoise's power was however circumscribed both by her own inclination – she had her particular notion of what she should do – and by the King's disinclination to suffer feminine interference in what he saw as the male sphere. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was a case in point. In 1598 a law promulgated by Henri IV had granted civil and religious liberties to his Huguenot subjects. Although Cardinal Richelieu had annulled its political clauses in 1629, it was Louis XIV's Revocation which put into effect forced conversions, with other Huguenots fleeing abroad. All this had everything to do with the direction of Louis XIV's ecclesiastical policy since the beginning of his reign, and nothing to do with Françoise.
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The only people who blamed her for it were the spiteful Liselotte, who tried to pretend that ‘the old whore' and Father La Chaise together had imposed this penance on the King for sleeping with the Montespan, and Saint-Simon, only nine years old at the time. Distasteful as the Revocation is to modern hearts and minds, still more so the horrifying sufferings of the Huguenots left in France which followed, the Revocation was popular among Louis's predominantly Catholic subjects.
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Tolerance at this time was widely seen as leading to social disorder – Charles II had met with no success in attempting to establish ‘freedom for tender consciences'. The principal first proposed in 1526 at the Diet of Speyer of
cujus regio ejus religio
(the religion of the territory was to be that of its ruler) was widely approved. The persecution of the ‘pretended Reformers', that is the Protestants, was seen as adding to the King's glory rather than detracting from it. Louis was praised as extirpating the monster of heresy: ‘this hydra that your hand has strangled’.
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For reasons to do with her mixed Protestant–Catholic background, Françoise had a far more pragmatic attitude to religion than many of her contemporaries. She was not a persecutor by nature but a persuader. As a young woman, she had come to appreciate the truth of the Catholic religion in which she now profoundly believed. But she also had come to understand that in Catholicism, the state religion, lay the key to the better life, and she expected others to come to the same conclusion. As she wrote in 1681 to her cousin's wife, the Marquise de Villette, who was a Protestant: ‘I hope that God who has given you so many good qualities will withdraw you from a state which makes you useless for this world and the next.'
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One notes the order in which the two worlds are placed.

Starting in about 1684, Françoise kept a series of little leather-bound ‘Secret Notebooks' in which she noted religious texts, biblical quotations and sayings of the Saints that appealed to her such as St Francis de Sales and St Augustine, along with her own annotations.
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The result is a holy rag-bag with some anodyne pious sentiments: ‘Keep a rule and it will keep you,' for example, and the frequently repeated text from the New Testament: ‘He who does not become as a little child will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' At the same time it does provide a clue as to how Françoise saw herself and her destiny. She must be as submissive towards the King as Sarah was towards Abraham (who were of course husband and wife). Nevertheless, Françoise resolves: ‘that I may not keep from him anything of the things he needs to know from me and that nobody else has the courage to tell him'. Where kings in general are concerned, there is considerable emphasis, in the manner of Bossuet and Bourdaloue, on the reign of God: ‘It is from me, God, that wisdom comes …', ‘Kings reign thanks to me.' And there is a critical reference to the hedonistic court behaviour Françoise had witnessed from the outside: ‘Jesus Christ is offended above all by the lovers of pleasure' (
amateurs de plaisirs
).

It was in her work for education, particularly the education of the sort of poor girl she had once been, that Françoise found her true vocation; for it could be argued that guiding the King was a vocation which had been thrust upon her by a combination of circumstances. For all her professed aversion to court life (an aversion which was expressed more strongly as the years passed) Françoise had not been able to resist the challenge and the triumph. But the education of the young was something she had always cared about, even before she was appointed governess to Maine and his siblings. By the means of two ‘adoptions' Françoise honed her skills in this respect.

Marthe-Marguerite de Villette, known as Mademoiselle de Mursay after the château, was the daughter of the first cousin Françoise had loved in youth, Philippe de Villette. Born in 1671, Marguerite was an intelligent and lively girl, but her relationship with the famous lady she always called her aunt was not to be without its ups and downs. Marguerite also had a rebellious streak. She did not at first appreciate being turned into a little Catholic, although it was to her worldly advantage, any more than Françoise herself had done. By her own account, ‘at first I cried a good deal, but next day I thought the King's Mass was so beautiful that I agreed to become a Catholic, on condition that I could hear it every day – and that I would not be whipped!'
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Something in Marguerite seems to have irritated Françoise: why could she not accept her place in society and see how lucky she was to have been advanced so far? But not too far. Françoise found her lazy, despite her natural gifts at singing and dancing, and suspected her of frivolity when Marguerite came to prefer the amusing Mortemart-style circle of Madame la Duchesse (Louise-Françoise, the King's daughter by Athénaïs) to the severe circle of her ‘aunt'. Early on, Marguerite, who was pretty enough in her own right to attract suitors, had a putative romance with a member of the King's guard. Madame de Maintenon seems to have taken a kind of grim pleasure in Marguerite's failure to capitalise on her chances, as she saw it. ‘She won't do as well as she might have,' Françoise reported in September 1684, ‘but she will always be better matched than she could have expected naturally.'

However, when it came to a question of Marguerite's marriage, Françoise actually turned down one suitor, the Duc de Boufflers, saying: ‘My niece is not a good enough match for you.' Yet her eventual choice of the Comte de Caylus, to whom Marguerite was married off at fifteen, was disastrous. Despite his good court connections as a member of the Dauphin's household, despite his military talents, Caylus turned out to be a drunk, who wanted to eat apart from his wife in order to indulge in alcohol unobserved.

Françoise's second ‘adoption’, that of her actual niece, Françoise-Charlotte d'Aubigné, went much better. Françoise-Charlotte, born on 5 May 1684, the year after the secret royal marriage, was the child of Charles d'Aubigné and Geneviève Piètre, the
bourgeoise
he had insisted on marrying to his sister's disgust. Against Françoise's persistent benevolence towards the ungrateful Charles should be weighed her equally persistent scorn for Geneviève. Here was a woman who not only ate butter and jam at the wrong time of day but also had a terrible accent ‘as from Les Halles' (the Parisian market). In fact the best and worst of Françoise's character was displayed in her twin reactions to the d'Aubignés as a couple.

Almost immediately after the little girl's birth, Françoise decided that this child should be her heiress, that is, to the Maintenon estate. Her letter to her brother on the subject was brisk: she would ‘marry [Françoise-Charlotte] according to my taste, since you gave her to me'. He must not expect too much. However, little Françoise-Charlotte turned out to be the most delightful child,
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pretty and obedient, young enough to be the grandchild of the King and his secret wife, a foretaste of the pleasures of such a relationship, where sheer youth amuses an older man. However, the admirable Françoise-Charlotte did not escape her aunt's strictures altogether: at one point she was warned not to regard herself as ‘a person of importance' since she was totally dependent on Madame de Maintenon for her prospects and might be fobbed off with ‘some miserable country gentleman if her aunt died.
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