Montespan’s freedom did not, however, extend to the possibility of his marrying again. When he courted Mlle. Riquet, the daughter of a celebrated Toulouse engineer, announcing in characteristically theatrical style that he intended to write to the Pope to have his marriage annulled, the plan was given short shrift by Louvois, for even now the taint of Louis’s double adultery was a sensitive subject. And clearly it remained so for Montespan who, if he was able to play the fluttering gallant at Versailles, reverted to his usual manners in the provinces. In a game of
lasquenet
in Toulouse, Montespan lost his king of hearts. “Ah Monsieur!” piped up a witty lady. “That is not the king of hearts which has done you most harm.” The company sniggered, but Monsieur le Marquis was not amused. “If my wife is worth a louis, Madame,” he punned, “then you are valued at thirty sous.” Some days later, Toulouse held one of those masked balls where clumsy provincials aped the wicked behavior of the glittering denizens of Versailles. Taking advantage of their mutual anonymity, Montespan rewarded the witty lady with a good kick.
6
Montespan’s tumultuous existence settled towards the end of his life into apparent contentment; he divided his time between his château, Toulouse and the court, enjoying the increasing success of his son D’Antin and amusing his country guests with bear hunts and amateur theatricals.
Even so, it is not difficult, given the romance of his lingering love, to pity Montespan. It was hardly his choice to play Amphitryon to Louis’s Jupiter. While it is tempting to cast him as a victim of his wife’s ambition, it must be recalled that Montespan had been an appalling husband: extravagant, neglectful, abusive and violent, behavior for which adultery, even on such a spectacular scale, seems, if not an equable, then at least an appropriate return.
The contents of Montespan’s will are all the more surprising considering that, some time earlier, Athénaïs’s confessor, Père de la Tour, had exacted an act of penance in which Athénaïs had had to humbly beg her husband’s forgiveness. Athénaïs had chosen La Tour, whose sermons were well known in Paris, as her spiritual adviser as he was both devout and sufficiently worldly to be good company, but in the matter of her moral duty he was exigent and strict. It is a measure of Athénaïs’s sincere desire to repent and return to God that she accepted a humiliation that would have been intolerable to her pride a few years before: she had written to Montespan not only apologizing for the wrongs she had committed, but even offering to resume their conjugal life if he wished it, or alternatively to retire to any place he chose for her. Perhaps this submission was not entirely disingenuous, for even after such a long separation, Athénaïs knew her husband, and must have counted on his pride making such a reconciliation impossible. If so, she was proved right. Montespan replied tersely that he wished neither to see her nor to direct her in anything, nor indeed to speak to her for as long as she lived. What Athénaïs could not have known until after his death was how much such a renunciation must have hurt him.
Of Athénaïs’s circle at court, the first to die was Monsieur, in June 1701. The royal brothers had dined together at Marly, but had quarreled about the extramarital activities of Athénaïs’s son-in-law the Duc de Chartres. Louis had become insufferably pompous on the subject of adultery now that he was piously married to La Main-tenon. The Duc was having simultaneous affairs with one of his mother’s ladies and a Parisian actress. The latter presented the Duc with a son at exactly the same time as the Duchesse de Chartres produced a daughter, Charlotte-Aglae, Athénaïs’s granddaughter. The Duc made no secret of visiting both new mothers in Paris together, much to the annoyance of his wife, who complained to Louis about the insult. Louis attempted to remonstrate with Monsieur, who pointed out that the King was hardly in a position to throw stones. What about the times he himself had driven Louise de La Vallière and Mme. de Montespan through Flanders in the same coach as the Queen? Louis was outraged that his brother should dare to allude to his past, and they both grew so angry that a servant had to remind them that the company in the next room were hanging on to their every word. Monsieur returned to his château at St. Cloud in a rage, and rather overrefreshed himself in an attempt to calm his nerves. When he suddenly collapsed, a thin trickle of blood oozing from his nostrils, a messenger was sent to Marly. La Maintenon, fearful and bitter towards a man who had always despised her, persuaded Louis that there was no immediate danger, so the King did not leave for St. Cloud until three in the morning, by which time his brother had fallen into a coma from which he never awakened. The deathbed scene was not edified by the spectacle of La Palatine, waddling about in terror in a nightgown, shrieking “No convent for me!”
Louis wept publicly, and was for once unable to eat, but after an early night he seemed quite composed, and could be heard humming opera tunes the following morning. That evening, the Duc de Mont-fort expressed his disgust at Louis’s grandson the Duc de Bourgogne, who had set up a card table in the salon while his great-uncle was practically still warm. The young man blushingly exclaimed that he was acting on orders, since “the King wishes that no one be bored at Marly.” Soon the room was full of tables and the gaming went on as usual.
Athénaïs was deeply saddened by the death of Monsieur, her friend and ally for over forty years. Of course, her daughter the Duchesse de Chartres would now become Duchesse d’Orléans, since her husband inherited his father’s title, and therefore one of the most important women in France, but Athénaïs could feel no pleasure in this triumph, as much now as a result of her inclination to dissociate herself from the world as of her absence from the court. Uncharacteristically, she took long walks in the fields, remembering Monsieur and the life they had shared. With the death of her husband that same year and, tragically, that of Marie-Madeleine in 1704, Athénaïs was becoming obsessed with the prospect of her own end. The loss of her sister left Athénaïs prostrate with grief, and her spirits never really recovered. When Louis heard the news, at supper, he expressed his “extreme regret” at the passing of a woman he had esteemed as a friend, but he made no offer of condolence to Athénaïs, even though she was nearby in Paris when the word arrived.
Athénaïs returned to Oiron and unpacked her clavichord and her writing desk, her four dozen plates embossed with her arms, her white taffeta bed curtains. With the exception of the “King’s bedroom,” she furnished the rest of the house with tasteful simplicity, choosing elegant pieces such as her marquetry dressing table, but avoiding the excessive luxury of Clagny. She unfolded her dresses, in gold and silver lace, in purple damask, in satin and velvet; her thirty corsets, coats brocaded in gold, embroidered skirts and taffeta gowns in blue, violet and lemon yellow or cerise-striped, blue and silver, green with silver working, white or blue covered with meadows of seamstresses’ flowers. Beneath her gorgeous Queen’s gowns, she wore a hair shirt to chafe her white skin, cruel belts and bracelets of steel with iron spikes to torment that “too beautiful, too weak flesh.”
That year, Athénaïs expressed her new spiritual awareness in a long letter to a friend.
For much of the time, we are to ourselves a great world, and we often converse in our souls with a numerous populace of passions, desires, plans, inclinations and tumults which agitate us with their worries, trouble us with their disobedience, and prevent us from hearing God, who speaks to our hearts, and who alone ought to be our world and our everything . . . there is no more time to lose, because if this grievous night surprises us, all is lost for us, without reprise . . . look for God while he can be found, for fear of searching for him uselessly at the end of a life which will not be very long, and shrink from dying in sin and disorder.
7
Now aged sixty-three, and seeing the tomb closing on her beloved friends and relations, Athénaïs was struggling to prepare her soul for death. Such preparation (which is a central theme of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, to give one example) was a convention, but one viewed as vital, since a sudden, ill-considered death was considered both tragic and shameful. Its importance can be gauged from contemporary inventories of the possessions of those who had died. In 1700, 80 percent of such inventories contained some sort of essay or pamphlet on what was known, quite seriously, as “the art of dying,” and many more people than those represented by such figures would have heard such works read aloud.
After the death of Marie-Madeleine, Athénaïs began to reflect on the principles of Jansenism, the puritanical, severe order that had once caused her husband’s family such embarrassment. Since Jansenism taught that “works,” that is, charitable activities, were insufficient in themselves to secure a salvation only obtainable through grace, Athénaïs, who had recently devoted so much of her energy and fortune to precisely such activities, had to accept that her struggle for reformation would be much more private and difficult. That the majority of the works in her library at Oiron were religious, if not Jansenist texts, attests to her search for the elusive spiritual essence of grace. They included writings by St. Augustine and David’s Psalms, Grenade’s Catechism in four volumes, a
Guide for Sinners
and the works of Jansen, along with at least eight other theological collections. Such texts were crucial to the essential preparation for death, which necessitated a gradual drawing away from the distractions of the world and a humbling of the flesh in readiness for communion with God. Athénaïs, never one to do things by halves, took her new studies very seriously, now directing her intelligence and energy to this austere discipline as well as to the supervision of her charities.
She was helped by an old friend, Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches, whom she had encountered at court during his time there as an undertutor to the Grand Dauphin. Huet was an appealing character, not sour and joyless like Bossuet, but almost as learned — a talented mathematician and philologist as well as a skilled theologian — and it is a testament to Athénaïs’s intellectual ability that he was prepared to correspond seriously with her. It was with Huet that she debated the value of letters over conversation. Athénaïs, that great talker, suggested that there was necessarily something rather static and lifeless about letter-writing, while the Bishop countered that conversation was too anarchic and spontaneous, that the cleverest remarks could fall unrecorded on the stupidest ears, or worse, that the speaker might express himself thoughtlessly merely in order to amuse. This objection encapsulates both the charm and the deficiency of Athénaïs’s conversational gift, for its ephemerality was the very source of its wit. Another discussion recalled the
précieuse
questions that had entertained Athénaïs and her friend Mme. Scarron many years before at the Hôtel d’Albret, such as “Which is better, illusion or truth?” Predictably enough, Huet expostulated at length on the desirability of the truth, but perhaps Athénaïs, who had lived for so long within the theatrical myth of the Sun King, saw some whimsical advantage in the attractions of illusion.
The correspondence did not always take such an elevated turn. Sometimes the friends exchanged poems, as they did when Huet wrote in verse to tell her that he could not visit her until the following spring.
N’attendez pas donc mon retour
Qu’au retour de chaleurs nouvelles.
Je n’irai vous faire ma cour
Qu’au premier vol des hirondelles.
8
By way of reply, Athénaïs tries to tempt him to come sooner:
Là, vous receviez de mes mains
Fruits, pois verts, artichauts, salades
Tandis que tous les médecins
Les defendoient a leur maladies.
9
Elsewhere in her letters to Huet, and in those to her friend the Duchesse de Noailles, Athénaïs is anxious to emphasize that she has conquered her love of the world, embodied for her in the life of the court. “Of the intrigues of the court, I no longer wish to hear talk of them,” she asserts, or, “I assure you, I have no ambition in this world, and I dare say that I am empty of desires, and that this spares me from all sorts of pains.”
10
In spite of such protestations, there is a lingering sense of need in her letters to remain informed of the events at Versailles, partly because she missed Louis and her children so terribly, and partly to reassure her that she had chosen a better path in retiring from the world. “When one acts in good faith, one would rather be far away than near, and I have found in the short time I have spent in Paris so much need for care and circumspection, especially in regard to appearances, that it seemed to me the pain greatly exceeded the pleasure.”
11
Is Athénaïs speaking here of
apparence,
the duty to preserve a good social face, or of the mortifying efforts required to make her dead beauty presentable? The need to step away from worldly concerns also meant the relinquishing of vanity, at once a relief and a torment for a woman whose beauty had once been a legend in Europe.
La Palatine, who had always been cheerful about her own absolute lack of attractions, nevertheless exulted in Athénaïs’s vanished looks. “I see that those whom I used to see when they were so beautiful are now as ugly as I am: Mme. de La Vallière no one in the world would know any more, and Mme. de Montespan’s skin looks like paper when children do tricks with it, seeing who can fold it into the smallest piece, for her whole face in closely covered with tiny little wrinkles, quite amazing. Her lovely hair is all white, and her face is red, so her beauty is quite gone.”