Athenais (8 page)

Thanks to the intervention of Monsieur, who was a close friend of her sister Mme. de Thianges, Athénaïs achieved one of the coveted posts, and her days were now completely consumed by court entertainments. That season, she appeared as a charming sea nymph in the Carnival ballet
Amours Déguisés,
though thanks to the improvidence of Montespan, she was reduced to borrowing money for her costume. That summer, she was at Versailles for the famous Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchantée.

Athénaïs had now shared her court life with Louise de La Vallière for four years. Together they had waited on Madame Henriette, dressed for balls and ballets, gossiped as they fastened up their hair and arranged their dresses, rushed to the next party, the next carriage ride, the latest play. But that night, as Versailles sparkled with fireworks for the first time, they were no longer equals, giggling together over the latest scandals. Louise was the star illuminated in the fireworks’ quivering light, and Athénaïs a nobody in the crowd. Dull, worthy Louise de La Vallière, Athénaïs thought, was no more qualified than the dumpy little Spanish Queen to dispense the scintillating grace such an event required. Nothing could have done more to emphasize Athénaïs’s disillusionment with her husband of just over a year than the contrast between her own position, jostled and inconspicuous, and the elevation of her old companion. That witless wallflower was the King’s cherished darling, while she, a Rochechouart de Mortemart, no less, had to put up with a spendthrift provincial. Surely she deserved better. The King, after all, was timid, and she superlatively confident, brilliant, beautiful. Adept and graceful in public, to flatter his pride; seductive in private, to provoke his desire. Athénaïs knew the rules, and it was now, perhaps, that she confessed her ambition to herself. Use all the weapons of coquetry, then, but remain prudent, feign friendship towards her you mean to betray, secure the support of the King’s friends.
Et sur ma foi vous aurez le premier d’amants.
²
Wait.

Chapter Four

“Where love is, no disguise can hide it for long;
where it is not, none can simulate it.”

O
n a hot summer night in Flanders, the Duchesse de Vaujours was weeping again, for shame or for chagrin, who could tell? There had been a time when her tears had been precious to the King, but he was no longer present to witness them. Louise had done very well. She could sit on a stool before the King, on a chair before a grandchild of France, and before a prince of the blood she might recline, if she so desired, on no less than a sofa. In times to come, people would dedicate their lives to the attainment of such privileges, yet Louise seemed to care very little for them. The Queen, meanwhile, lay wide awake, scorch-eyed in the heavy darkness. She was curious as to what kept her husband away so late.

In the two years since the Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchantée, Athénaïs had grown increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage. Still in search of military glory, Montespan had departed for Algiers in the summer of 1664 on an expedition to claim the port of Djidjelli from the Ottoman Empire. Again he used this as an excuse for borrowing, yet another 56,000 livres against Athénaïs’s still unpaid and exhausted dowry. Initially, the fleet, commanded by Athénaïs’s brother Vivonne, was successful, and the town was taken after heavy fighting. Soon, however, the French found themselves besieged by the furious Muslims and the commanders quarreled among themselves, to the disgust of many gentleman soldiers, including Montespan, who departed fortuitously with their lives before the French suffered a sorry defeat and were forced to evacuate by sea. Once again, Montespan returned ignominiously, loaded with debt rather than honors. Athénaïs was angry, humiliated and anxious. It seemed clearer than ever that the Montespans’ hopes of success and security were dependent upon her efforts at court, for which she needed the money Montespan was scattering casually over the gaming tables of Paris. Despite the salary she earned, the maintenance of her position required substantial expenditure, a fact which her boastful, hot-headed husband refused to take seriously. A second child, a son, was born on 5 September 1664, another source of anxiety for his mother. The baby, Louis-Antoine, Marquis d’Antin, would have no inheritance if his father’s extravagances continued. More immediately, a larger household was required for the expanded family. Montespan, it seemed, was condemning them all to embarrassing mediocrity, and Athénaïs’s Morte-mart blood revolted.

Given the circumstances, it would have been understandable if Athénaïs had consoled herself with an affair — she certainly had plenty of admirers — but she continued to live a life of remarkable virtue at such a licentious court. Her decision to do so perhaps marks the beginning of her deliberate strategy to ensnare the King. Louis might tumble into bed with a woman whose reputation was less than spotless, as he did from time to time with Athénaïs’s sister, the Marquise de Thianges, but he would never make such a woman a serious mistress. It was at about this time that Athénaïs began to hope that this was what she would become. Just like Mme. de Thianges, Athénaïs was rather
folle,
crazy, in her belief that her good looks and nobility made her superior to other women, and Mme. de Caylus’s criticism of her elder sister — “she believed that her beauty and the perfection of her temperament arose from the difference which birth had made between her and the world in general” — would serve equally well as a description of Athénaïs. Modest she might appear, but as Athénaïs realized that her husband risked making her a proxy nonentity, her vanity, her sense of what was due to a Mortemart, began to fuel her every ambition. The King’s love might appease her wounded pride, and assuage her most commanding passion. “She does what she can,” remarked Louis of the beautiful Marquise around this time, “but I don’t want her.” Perhaps he protested too much, for during 1666 it became apparent that Louis wanted Athénaïs very badly, with a desire that even a King might fear.

It was a momentous year for Louis. In January, his beloved mother, Anne of Austria, succumbed to breast cancer. Anne had been a formidable influence in her son’s life. While retaining the intense piety of her Madrid upbringing, she had proved herself both a patriotic Frenchwoman and an adept politician, saving the kingdom for her son during the wars of the Fronde. Louis’s birth had been the great joy of Anne’s life after twenty-three childless, hollow years with her indifferent husband. To Anne and to the nation, he had deserved his name of Dieu Donné, God-given: he was the answer to France’s anxious prayers for a Dauphin to secure the succession. The relationship between Louis and his mother was close, and they had an affectionate, natural manner with one another. Until Louis was nine years old, Anne heard his lessons, played with him and spanked him when he misbehaved. During the civil wars, she smuggled her children out of the Louvre in the night, wisely recognizing that the possession of the King’s person held the key to power, and their uncomfortable peregrinations, sometimes without the most basic necessities, forged a bond between mother and son that endured for the rest of her life.

It was a horrible death. The doctors gouged holes in Anne’s cancerous breasts and inserted little pieces of meat into them to “nourish” the disease and prevent it from devouring her body. But there was little they could do to save her. Louis watched over her deathbed, until, as she faded, he collapsed and had to be carried from the room. She was buried in the third-order habit of a nun, and her heart was placed in the church she had built to celebrate her son’s birth at Val de Grâce. Louis was deeply affected by his loss, but it was in a sense a liberation, as her increasing disapproval of the pleasures of his court had cast a pall over his enjoyment of them. Nevertheless he was devoted to her memory, and always held her up as his ideal of a queen.

The following month, Athénaïs, too, lost her mother. Diane made a good Catholic death in Poitiers, far from her neglectful husband and his mistress. Athénaïs, too, may have experienced a feeling of sad release, for Diane’s religion, and her close friendship with Anne of Austria, may have acted as a check on her daughter’s ambitions. More than ever now, Athénaïs was alone in the world, with no one to rely on but herself.

Freed from his mother’s restraining influence, Louis was able to make his affair with Louise de La Vallière fully public. Much to the fury of the long-duped Queen, Louise appeared officially at his side at Mass as soon as Anne’s body had been removed from the church. Unfortunately for Louise, the mystery that had added a piquancy to their relations was no longer necessary, and beneath the merciless gaze of the court she wilted like a nocturnal flower. As Louis’s confidence developed, he took more pleasure in the extravagant witticisms of court conversation, and Louise’s deficiencies as
maîtresse en titre
became more marked. She was embarrassed by the obligation to parade what she saw as her shame in public. Pregnant for the third time, she began to lose her timorous good looks, and she felt herself a poor match for the voracious beauties who surrounded her lover. Desperate for a means of retaining his attention, she turned to her old companion Athénaïs de Montespan.

There is very little excuse for the duplicity with which Athénaïs cultivated the favorite’s friendship in order to get closer to the King. She willfully deceived Louise with assurances of affection; perhaps she listened with attentive sympathy as the simple girl poured out anxious confidences. Athénaïs was as ruthless as a general, and to her the conquest of Louise was no more than a necessary skirmish en route to her main encounter. There is no greater indication of Louise’s foolishness than her choice of such a friend to amuse the King. “Her conversation is so attractive,” recorded Mademoiselle. “La Vallière had little. If she had been more prudent, she would have looked for a woman in whom the beauty and charms of her person did not correspond to her wit.”
¹
The Marquis de la Fare confirmed that Athénaïs did all she could to please the King, an easy task, in the presence of Louise, for a woman with wit.
²
Unlike her naïve undeclared rival, Athénaïs was prepared to fight her campaign “
avec bec et ongles.
”
³
Yet she played subtly. With consummate diplomatic skill, she had also won the good graces of the Queen, impressing her with hilarious anecdotes of how she virtuously rejected her numerous suitors. One courtier, the Comte de Lauzun, had had the impudence to suggest meaningfully that Athénaïs had not been “unkind” to him, and although Athénaïs turned the insult into a joke to amuse the Queen, she never entirely forgave Lauzun. Clearly, it would have been impolitic at this stage to annoy the King by succumbing to a lesser lover, and besides, Athénaïs’s vanity would have jibbed at the prospect of any man but Louis. She used her flirtations to pique his interest with precision. At the Hôtel d’Albret, Athénaïs had learned that
esprit
was the perfect aphrodisiac, and she knew, as Louise did not, that to make a man sigh with desire rather than boredom it was necessary to stimulate his uncertainty, alternating hope with severity, to confuse in order to beguile, to grant hope only in retreat, to create delight in despair.

It was helpful that Louise was unpopular. Athénaïs was not the only courtier who felt that the official mistress made a poor showing. In spite of her innocent reputation, she had in fact aroused resentment by being responsible for more
placets,
petitions to the King, than any of Louis’s subsequent mistresses. Nor, despite her piety, was she altogether averse to the wages of sin. She obtained the Abbey of Chelles for her sister, married her brother to a rich heiress and her daughter to a prince of the blood, and acquired for herself the small but sumptuous Palais de Brion near the Tuileries gardens as well as the title and estates of Duchesse de Vaujours. When Louise complained of a lack of friendly support in maintaining her position, the Maréchal de Gra-mont responded: “She should have taken care to make others rejoice with her, whilst she herself had cause to rejoice, if when she had cause to mourn, she desired that others should do likewise.” Be nice, in other words, to the people you meet on your way up . . .

This unpopularity gave Louise greater cause to turn with relief to the support of Athénaïs. She invited her friend to little supper parties at the Palais Brion, where Louis was entertained by Athénaïs’s cultivated conversation. She was delighted with the success of this strategy, for the King seemed to enjoy visiting her more than ever. In October, Louise gave birth to Marie-Anne de Bourbon, styled Mlle. de Blois, some consolation for the early deaths of her previous two children. But any contentment she felt was short-lived. By November, the court gossips had recognized the real focus of the King’s interest at the Palais Brion. “We are saying at the court,” wrote the Duc d’Enghien, “that he sighs a little after Mme. de Montespan, and, to tell the truth, she well deserves it, because one could not have more spirit nor more beauty than she has, but I, however, have remarked nothing going on there.” Louis’s interest was apparent to Athénaïs, but she had the sense to keep him waiting. So what were her plans at this interesting stage?

It seems that when Athénaïs became aware of her power over the King, she feared his love as much as she desired it. Some commentators have attempted rather implausibly to cast her as a reluctant victim of the King’s passion, while others are determined to see her as a ruthless strategist with a clear mission to seduce him. Montespan’s role is thus equally ambiguous. Was her husband’s absence a convenience, allowing Athénaïs to pursue her schemes unimpeded, or was it his neglect that left her unprotected and vulnerable? Neither view is incompatible with the other. Though her pride and ambition may have pulled her towards Louis, her religion and sense of social position may have drawn her away. At the end of 1666 she was certainly vacillating between her duty to her husband and her desire for the King. She famously remarked, “Heaven defend me from becoming the King’s mistress, but were such a misfortune to befall me, I should certainly not have the audacity to appear before the Queen!,” an observation which, despite its obvious hypocrisy, may yet contain a germ of truth. It is true, as Saint-Simon recounts, that she pleaded with her husband to take her to his country estate at Guyenne as she was afraid of the consequences of the King’s interest. Montespan, with characteristic indifference to his wife’s feelings, did not find the journey convenient, and she remained at court.