Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (10 page)

After a week of exceptionally unpleasant confinement, Monsieur de Montespan revoked the power of attorney he had made in Athénaïs’s favor. A few days later he was released on the proviso that he remain in exile on his country estate.

Perhaps the marquis might have gone quietly if he had been paid off, but his reaction to his wife’s affair was so vitriolic that no remuneration was forthcoming. He fired a parting shot at Athénaïs in the only other way he could legally do so, by taking their three-year-old son Louis-Alexandre back to Gascony, where his mother was already caring for their daughter. Madame de Montespan was not allowed to see Louis-Alexandre again until he was fourteen. The loss of her legitimate offspring was the first casualty of Athénaïs’s liaison with the king.

At his country estate in Bonnefont just north of the Spanish border, the marquis declared that his “dear and beloved spouse” was dead, due to “coquetry and ambition,” and staged a mock funeral for her at the village church, complete with a church service and a coffin.

It was trendy in seventeenth-century France for posh ladies to consult
devinesses
, or fortune-tellers, and “sorcerers,” from whom they would purchase aphrodisiac powders or love potions. Athénaïs visited two of the popular ones, Lesage and Mariette, whose emporia lay in the slums of Saint-Denis, to purchase a concoction that would permanently net her the king, and allow her to replace Louise de La Vallière as his
maîtresse en titre
. The abbé Mariette recited some mumbo jumbo over her head and gave the marquise a packet of powder (possibly Spanish fly, which in small doses would rev up Louis’
heartbeat). Since he routinely took emetic “purges” for his bowels, the other powder would pass undetected. The king’s doctor turned a blind eye to Athénaïs’s secret administration of aphrodisiacs, figuring that whatever was in the “love potions” was fairly harmless, and certainly no worse than whatever
he
was prescribing for His Majesty. But there would come a time when her little excursions to the local witches wouldn’t be deemed so innocuous, and the marquise would wish she hadn’t established such a well-known pattern of visiting sorcerers and clandestinely feeding their products to the king.

After the 1668 Grand Divertissement, thirty thousand workmen had been brought in to transform the existing structure of Versailles into the masterpiece of Louis’ vision.
“Versailles, c’est moi,”
he declared, and it would be a palace with no rival on earth. It was not completed until 1682, when it became the French court’s permanent residence. In 1670, the king built a pleasure palace for Athénaïs on the grounds of Versailles, located on the site of a razed village. Known as the Porcelain Trianon, this series of miniature pavilions dedicated to their love was covered with fragile blue-and-white Delft tiles and surrounded by lush gardens that bloomed with their favorite fragrant blossoms: tuberoses, Spanish jasmine, anemones, and orange trees.

That year, Athénaïs instituted proceedings for a legal separation from her husband on the grounds of “cruelty and improvidence.” She also requested permission to live apart from her spouse, known as “separation of bed and board,” and demanded the return of her dowry (which for the most part remained unpaid, although the sums had been pledged to the marquis’ numerous creditors).

Although Louise had
still
not been dethroned, in practice, Athénaïs was now Louis’
maîtresse en titre,
and he was clearly head over heels in love with her, whether genuinely so or chemically induced. She was conspicuously at his side at a lavish fête hosted by his cousin the prince de Condé in Chantilly, and that spring, when the court toured the towns in the Spanish Netherlands (Flanders) conquered by the French. Writing of that excursion years later, during the reign of Louis XV, Voltaire observed, “It was to Mme. de Montespan that all the court paid homage, all honors were for her save those reserved by tradition and protocol for the Queen.”

Yet Marie-Thérèse, astonishingly, had yet to deduce what was hiding
in plain sight and what everyone else in France seemed well aware of. Under the assumption that Athénaïs was merely her attendant, she had nothing but smiles for her, while she remained openly rude to Louise de La Vallière, the acknowledged
maîtresse declarée
.

Even the German mercenaries they encountered during Louis’ hail-the-conquering-hero tour seemed to know what Her Majesty did not, and had no such difficulties expressing their views. When Athénaïs accompanied the king during a review of his German troops she was greeted with cries of
“König’s Hure, Hure!”
—the king’s whore.

Where others might have pitched a fit, Madame de Montespan accepted the epithet with good humor and grace, archly informing her lover, “Since I had the German translated, I find they are very naïve to call things by their proper names.”

As long as the other “whore,” Louise, remained in the picture, Athénaïs could never be confident of the king’s love; she certainly didn’t have a hundred percent of it. While the two women pretended to cordiality, genuine friendship was impossible. Nicknamed “the Dew” and “the Torrent” by the witty memoirist Madame de Sevigné, on one occasion they argued over possession of a costly pot of rouge that Louise refused to lend to Athénaïs. The king himself was compelled to referee the quarrel, and the duchesse de Vaujours would surrender the cosmetic only if Louis would agree to honor the women equally. As a result, Louise became pregnant and Athénaïs became angry. The child was probably miscarried or stillborn, because no further mention of it exists, and Madame de Montespan grew even wearier of Louise’s maddening tenacity.

Louis XIV had a pattern of extramarital affairs: His current
maîtresse en titre
would introduce him, in a manner of speaking, to the new one. Louise and Athénaïs had begun as bosom friends (or so Louise had thought). In later years, it would be Athénaïs who would introduce the king to Madame de Maintenon. Yet not only did the monarch juggle simultaneous mistresses; he also enjoyed “meaningless” quickie trysts with additional paramours—ladies who were well-known to his more permanent lovers. For example, Athénaïs’s older sister, Gabrielle, Madame de Thianges, scratched the king’s itch on occasion. Louis would also tumble one of Athénaïs’s lady’s maids if the urge struck. These dalliances, even with her own sister, didn’t
seem to bother Madame de Montespan, because she knew the king was not emotionally involved with any of these minor conquests. His attachment to Louise de La Vallière, on the other hand, remained a source of consternation.

The birth of Athénaïs’s first royal bastard, her purported daughter, in 1669 was followed a year later by the arrival of a son, the duc du Maine. It was imperative that these infants, smuggled out of the palace as soon as they were born, were raised by a discreet, trustworthy person who could be relied upon to care for them in relative secrecy. Even if her role as Louis’ mistress (not to mention her job as lady-in-waiting to the queen) had permitted her the time, Madame de Montespan could not have openly cared for her illegitimate children, because they were born with the taint of their parents’ double adultery. Louise’s royal by-blows were adopted by Madame Colbert, the wife of the king’s Pooh-Bah of ministers, but as she’d met the king when she was a virgin of sixteen and had never wed, she didn’t have a husband to make trouble. Athénaïs and the king had to keep the existence of their offspring a secret, or the marquis de Montespan might perversely try to claim them as his own blood.

As governess for their rapidly increasing royal brood Athénaïs recommended the widow Scarron, a pious woman of impeccable moral rectitude who was also a friend from her days at the Hôtel d’Albret, one of the fashionable salons in the Marais. Françoise Scarron was housed with Athénaïs’s children (and a couple of others, including her own niece, so that things wouldn’t seem too suspicious), in an anonymous-looking building in the Marais district. So seriously did Françoise take her role as gatekeeper that she often did the laborers’ jobs to prevent strangers from traipsing in and getting a glimpse of the kids. Few babysitters would suffer
that
much for their young charges!

But in 1672, after the birth of Athénaïs’s third royal bastard, the comte de Vexin, it became clear that a better system had to be devised. The king purchased a charming townhome across the Seine in the rue de Vaugirard near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Françoise Scarron could live quite retired from society and care for the royal children she was growing to love. In 1673 and 1674 Athénaïs bore
the king two more daughters, Mademoiselle de Nantes and Mademoiselle de Tours, respectively.

Over the years, Athénaïs lost a number of her children. Not only did her husband remove their legitimate offspring to his family’s seat in Gascony, but their daughter Marie-Christine passed away before reaching her teens. Athénaïs’s firstborn child by the king died in her third year at the house in the rue de Vaugirard; the little comte de Vexin would die at the age of eleven in 1683; and Mademoiselle de Tours was only six when she perished. By that time, the semiroyal children were all openly acknowledged and living at court, but proximity could never lessen the pain of parting.

As a mother, however, Madame de Montespan found herself in a terrible bind. For years she was deprived of the ability to see her children very often, or even to acknowledge their existence, ironically to protect them from her lawful husband. Were Montespan to claim them as his own, it would damage their brilliant futures as the offspring, even illegitimate, of the king of France. The children, too young to be aware of the societal rules and behind-the-scenes machinations, saw only that their
maman
was an absentee, and consequently directed their devotion toward their governess.

Unsurprisingly, this dynamic engendered countless spats and a good deal of tension. Athénaïs and Madame Scarron, although they were ostensibly friends, and the widow needed her job, often disagreed on child-rearing methods. The
maman
would arrive for a visit with sweet treats in an effort to overcompensate for rarely getting to see her children, while the nanny was the firm but benevolent disciplinarian who supplied the tots with routine and stability.

In time a new form of tension developed between the women; they became rivals for the king’s attention and his love. The quietly virtuous and somewhat sanctimonious Madame Scarron made Athénaïs feel guilty about her lifestyle. “In God’s name, do not make any of your great eyes at me,” la Montespan once snapped at the governess, when she’d paid a call on the nursery, pregnant with another of the king’s by-blows.

Athénaïs was jealous of the way her children had bonded with their caregiver. Even worse, soon their father was spending more time
than usual in the nursery. The king adored his children by Athénaïs, but Madame Scarron, whom at first he had found to be a bluestocking and a prig, had begun to grow on him. He enjoyed her intelligent conversation, but what had changed his mind about her was that she loved and cared for his kids as if they had been her own.

On September 7, 1673, by issuance of letters patent, a legal instrument formally issued by a sovereign conferring a title or grant upon a designee, Louis XIV formally legitimized his children by Athénaïs de Montespan. It was a risky move, because her husband could contest it, but Louis had already declared legitimate his offspring by Louise de La Vallière, and he could do no less for his beloved Athénaïs. This act, more than any other expression of favor he had shown the marquise, demonstrated to the court that Athénaïs was now his
maîtresse en titre
after spending six years as an also-ran beside Louise. But His Majesty had to dig deep for a legal precedent that would allow him to legitimize the children without naming their mother (the specter of the marquis de Montespan galloping in from Gascony was an omnipresent fear, and the adulterous sin in which the
légitimés
were conceived was even more problematic).

The ceremony dripped with irony. To avoid the mention of Madame de Montespan, even though everyone knew the children were hers, the wording of the letters patent was spectacularly oblique. Louise was undoubtedly humiliated to have been selected as one of the godparents, yet did she hide a triumphant smile at the memory of the letters patent legitimizing her own royal bastards, which referred to “our well-beloved Louise de La Vallière”?

In 1674, Madame Scarron’s arrival at court with Athénaïs’s children, where they would all be housed from then on, created additional conflict, as the former official mistress and the current one competed for the attention of the king, who was finding the nanny ever more intriguing. “The Dew and the Torrent are bound close together by the need for concealment, and every day they keep company with Fire and Ice [Louis and Françoise Scarron]. This cannot continue long without an explosion,” wrote Madame de Sevigné.

That year, recognizing that His Majesty had romantically moved on for good, Louise decided to leave the court—and her children—forever.
Atoning for her sins, she took the veil, becoming a Carmelite nun.

With her longtime rival safely behind the high walls of a convent, Athénaïs was overjoyed to finally take her place in the sun as Louis’
maîtresse en titre
. Her formal separation from the marquis de Montespan was finally adjudicated in 1674 as well, but he continued to contest it, journeying to Paris for the hearing. His presence unnerved the monarch as well as his estranged wife, and the hotheaded Gascon did indeed make things as uncomfortable as possible for Athénaïs. He demanded reimbursement for the entirety of her dowry, despite the fact that her father didn’t have the funds in a lump sum, and in any case the marquis was hardly entitled to it, as he had squandered the dowry (in loans against it) at the gambling tables. If anyone had a claim to Athénaïs’s dowry, it was her husband’s creditors.

The case before the bar got ugly. Athénaïs availed herself of the king’s counsel as an attorney, and he did all he could to demonstrate Montespan’s pattern of cruelty against her. Louis-Henri’s lawyer was, of course, bent on proving that
his
client was the injured party. Witnesses for both sides were called, and final judgment was passed by a panel of magistrates on July 7, 1674. The vote was overwhelmingly in Athénaïs’s favor. It would seem like a no-brainer, since her lover was the king, but the court relied upon all the evidence presented. Her husband had stalked her, physically attacked and beaten her, and dissipated her money; all that, as well as his own pattern of disorderly conduct and adultery, contributed to their verdict.