It seems curious that the King should allow Montespan to remain at large, but it was difficult for him to intervene. There was no legal reason why a man could not insult, beat or rape his own wife, and beyond providing her with bodyguards, there was little Louis could do without attracting the attention of the Queen. It is depressing that Louis did so little to protect the woman he loved.
Was it love or pride that made Montespan lose his mind? If he truly loved Athénaïs, he had hardly given her cause to believe so, with his debts and extravagance, his voluntary absences and his exploits with camp followers. Having experienced his rage, Athénaïs must have felt more than ever that she was justified in trying to escape from such a man. Insults and assaults were hardly the way to win her back.
Eventually, Louis did act. He produced a lettre de cachet which banished Montespan to the prison at Fort-l’Eveque on the grounds that he had challenged the King’s authority with regard to the choice of preceptor for the Dauphin. Lettres de cachet were one of the most objectionable features of the French ancien régime. They enabled the King personally to imprison anyone who displeased him, indefinitely and without trial. A week cooling his heels in an unwholesome strong room seems to have calmed Montespan’s temper, and he accepted that the separation from Athénaïs was inevitable. He indicated this acceptance by revoking the power of attorney he had made in his wife’s favor the preceding spring. A few days later he was released, with strict orders to remain at his country estate, effectively in exile from society.
At this point, there were rumors that Louis had succeeded in paying off Montespan. Mme. de Sévigné’s correspondent Bussy-Rabutin whispered about the sum of 100,000 livres. However, he had his own reasons for making out that Athénaïs was a piece of goods for sale, as he was peeved that one of his own relatives, Mme. de Sévigné’s daughter, had not succeeded in turning an earlier flirtation with the King to the good. Both Mme. de Caylus and Monsieur’s second wife, the Princesse Palatine, later agreed that Montespan might have been more reasonable if he had been rewarded from the first, but he was either too proud to sell his wife or too obtuse to realize that a quiet, civilized acquiescence was a better means of obtaining such a reward. Whatever the case, his subsequent theatrics suggest that he received no financial satisfaction.
Montespan left Paris with his three-year-old son Louis-Antoine to join his mother and daughter Marie-Christine in Gascony. Athénaïs was not allowed to see her boy again until he was fourteen, and this loss of her legitimate children was the first great sacrifice she had to make for Louis’s sake. It seems likely that the anxious and ambitious love she showed for her children by the King was fueled by guilt at her perceived desertion of little Marie-Christine and Louis-Antoine. When Montespan arrived at Bonnefont, he insisted on having the main gates opened, claiming that his cuckold’s horns were too tall to pass through the postern. He informed the waiting household that his wife was dead, sarcastically attributing the demise of “his dear and well-loved spouse” to “coquetry and ambition.” It is claimed that he invited all the neighbors to a sham funeral in the village church, during which a dummy of Athénaïs was buried, and dressed his family in full mourning. He draped his carriage in black crêpe and rattled about the countryside with a large pair of antlers strapped to the roof. His eccentricities might be confined to the provinces for the present, but it was always possible that the mad Marquis might reappear.
As for Julie de Montausier, her elderly nerves never recovered from the shock of the episode. Her mother may have been a famous
précieuse,
but the rude intervention of real passion was too much for a woman more accustomed to the elegant, casuistical gallantries of the salon. Julie went into a decline and died, begging forgiveness on her deathbed for her involvement in promoting the King’s affair with Athénaïs.
For Louis, the next years were happy ones, filled with his favorite activities of fighting, building and lovemaking. Although Athénaïs was now certain of his regard for her, there were still many obstacles in the way of the domination she was coming to crave. Louise de La Vallière was still a lingering, reproachful presence, and Athénaïs’s marriage was still a potential barrier to the certainty she sought.
Perhaps she felt rather exhausted at the prospect of all the plotting and intriguing, lovemaking and quarreling, cajoling and charming that lay ahead of her. Louise was so stubbornly entrenched that more than natural means might be necessary to remove her, and traditionally, the Devil had always been a friend to the Rochechouart women. During her childhood at Lussac, Athénaïs may have shivered with fear in the candlelit nursery as her nurse Nounou recounted the family legend of her early sixteenth-century ancestor, Renée Taveau. In 1530 Renée, the young daughter of the Baron de Mortemart, fell ill, and her husband, François Rochechouart, found her dying. She was buried, still in her teens, covered with her jewels, notably a magnificent diamond ring. After the interment, a greedy servant tried to rob her grave and steal the jewel. Unable to force it off her stiff, cold finger, he decided, horribly, to bite the finger off at the joint in order to get the diamond. As he bit into the chilly flesh, the “corpse” suddenly woke up. It was not long, of course, before stories of vampirism and devil worship were added to the tale. Poor Renée — who, presumably, had not died at all but had merely fallen into a coma — was rumored to be a demon, full of supernatural lust, but her husband was so delighted to get her back that, demon or not, he gave her three children, one of whom was Athénaïs’s grandfather.
In the seventeenth century, many court ladies still consulted “sorcerers,” clattering down in their carriages from St. Germain, masked and giggling, to have a fortune told, a beauty potion made up, or perhaps to purchase a little “powder” to encourage a lover’s flagging ardor. Two such practitioners, Mariette and Lesage, operated from the slum district of St. Denis, and offered a variety of devilish products and services, including aphrodisiac potions imbued with special powers from having been passed under the holy chalice used for Mass. Athénaïs and her sister-in-law, Mme. de Vivonne, paid them a visit hoping to acquire a mixture that would put the finishing touch to Athénaïs’s plan to replace Louise de La Vallière as
maîtresse en titre.
Mariette recited an incantation over Athénaïs’s head and sent her away with a powder, probably composed of Spanish fly, well known for its capacity to excite and harmless enough if administered in small doses. It would not be difficult for her to administer the aphrodisiac, as Louis was in the habit of taking “purges” for his bowels, and was not curious as to their contents. In the 1670s, the royal doctor D’Acquin, who owed his position to Athénaïs’s favor, was prepared to turn a blind eye to her ministrations, particularly as he probably knew that such love powders were no more dangerous than the purges he himself prescribed. Maybe Athénaïs did not really believe that she was actually invoking Satan in her cause, but she would nonetheless have known that he is a treacherous ally however tenuous the connection, and generally exacts a price for his services. Much later, she would come to regret her playful visit to the sorcerers as the greatest indiscretion of her life.
“Greater virtues are needed to bear
good fortune than bad.”
A
thénaïs did not rely exclusively on spells to affirm her position. With Montespan still lurking threateningly in the wings, she decided to attempt a legal separation from her husband, and in July 1670 began proceedings in the Châtelet court in Paris, petitioning for relief from his “cruelty and improvidence,” charges which were reasonable in themselves, regardless of any other motivations for the separation. Athénaïs requested the return of her dowry, which was in fact still largely unpaid and in any case promised to Montespan’s creditors, in order to provide herself with a separate maintenance, and permission to live officially apart from her husband. This was the “separation of bed and board” that her mother Diane had obtained from the Duc de Mortemart, in legal terms the throwing off of the restrictive “shackles of
couverture.
” The case did not progress through the lumbering leviathan of the French legal system for four years, but its instigation at this point testifies to an increase in Athénaïs’s certainty that she would remain an important part of the King’s life.
Indeed, there seemed no question that Athénaïs was firmly established as
maîtresse en titre,
despite the continuing presence of Louise. The King seemed more in love than ever, and showed his passion more publicly, taking Athénaïs with him to the famous fête given by the Prince de Condé at Chantilly to admire the creations of Condé’s celebrated maître d’hôtel, Vatel. During the spring of that year, 1671, the court had progressed through the newly conquered towns of Flanders, accompanied by 30,000 men under the command of the Comte de Lauzun who were to fortify and man the French garrisons. En route, they deposited Madame Henriette at Dunkirk, where she was to be collected by the English fleet for a visit to her brother Charles II, King of England, in order to negotiate a secret alliance between her native and adoptive countries. Known as the “Wheelbarrow Campaign,” this mission prepared the Anglo-French axis for the invasion of Holland in 1672. Athénaïs excitedly described Madame’s departure to her brother Vivonne.
Ah, what a beautiful day! Madame was radiant with joy, the Queen too had a joyful air. I think that all the most beautiful women were united to ornament the fête. I have never seen the King so handsome. One would never have dared to think that he was preoccupied by so many important interests, gallant with all the ladies, as respectful as one could be to the Queen, so that all the world had reason to be content . . . The fleet of the King of England was superb. Madame embarked with a great deal of courage. Nevertheless, we believed, all the court and I, that her last interview with the King had been touching because her eyes were full of tears. The Queen held her a long time in an embrace, and only left her when the King said, “It is not an eternal separation, we will see one another again soon.” So Madame recovered her composure and embarked with a tranquil air, which imposed silence upon us about the dangers of the sea which we were imagining. The court remained at the port for as long as we could distinguish them. Then the King took the Queen on one arm, and me on the other . . .
1
It was during this tour, Voltaire writes, that “Mme. de Montespan’s triumph shone forth . . . At such times as she rode alone, she had four bodyguards posted at her carriage door . . . 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.”
2
Louis had shown a positive genius for separating affairs of heart from those of the state, since Marie-Thérèse was the only person at court not to guess what was going on. Such blindness seems inconceivable, yet she continued to behave affectionately towards Athénaïs as she went about her service. It is doubtful that Athénaïs felt guilty, and she had the good taste not to pretend to, either. It was during this trip that the King’s party was forced to sleep together under the Queen’s beady eye. Mademoiselle describes vividly the miserable dinner they made of chickens so tough they could hardly pull their legs off. Mme. de Thianges tried to make the best of it by remarking from her uncomfortable straw pallet that she felt renewed faith in Jesus, as it was so easy, surrounded as they were by lowing cattle, to imagine herself in the stable at Bethlehem. Such voyages were not without other difficulties for Athénaïs. She was once present at a military review at which she was greeted by the King’s German soldiers with the cry “Koenig’s Hure, Hure!” — “See, see the King’s harlot!” She bore it with good grace, refraining from comment save for to answer the King, when he asked how she had found the experience: “Perfectly correct, except that, since I had the German translated, I find they are very naïve to call things by their proper names.”
3
Madame’s diplomatic mission was a success, resulting in the 1670 Treaty of Dover, whereby Charles II agreed to provide 6,000 soldiers and fifty ships to aid Louis in his planned war against the Dutch in exchange for an annual subsidy of 3 million livres. Sadly, Henriette did not live to savor the approbation she had earned. By 29 June, just eleven days after her return to St. Germain, she was dead.
Madame’s sudden death, occurring as it did so soon after the signature of the sensitive treaty with Charles of England, who had loved “the sweetest princess ever to walk this earth” very dearly, quickly gave rise to ominous rumors. Henriette had expired after drinking a glass of chicory cordial to quench her thirst on a hot day. Shortly afterwards she was complaining of such agony that she declared, “Were I not a Christian, I would kill myself, so violent are my sufferings.” She lingered for nine hours, dying, in Voltaire’s words, “in the flower of her youth and in the arms of Bossuet.”
4
Louis had loved his sister-in-law, too well in the opinion of her husband Monsieur, and the whole court joined with him in mourning the dizzy, charming, delicate Duchesse d’Orléans. Bishop Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin, summed up the general mood in his famous funeral oration. “O cruel night, tragic night, night of terror! When there rang out, sudden as a clap of thunder, that shocking report: Madame is dying, Madame is dead!”
5
He compared her to a fragile wild flower, blooming in the morning, desiccated by sunset. Athénaïs and Louise had visited her deathbed together, weeping for their friend and erstwhile mistress. They had both been plucked by the King from the beautiful coterie of attendants known as “Madame’s flower garden,” and perhaps her death marked for both women, triumphant and vanquished alike, the passing of their youth at the King’s court of love.