Athenais (40 page)

Louis’s solution, then, was a simple one. His morganatic marriage, during which he may well have offered his bride his left hand, rather than the right, was simply to remain a secret. He could thus achieve his ends with no danger of public compromise. Perhaps no other woman could have endured such a burden, as Mme. de Maintenon did, for thirty-two years, and this strength and discretion, more than anything else, may have been the reason she was allowed to become his wife. The court was never sure that the marriage had taken place. Writing in 1686, La Palatine declared: “As long as there is no declaration, I find it difficult to believe.” The next year, she commented:

I have not been able to discover whether or not the King has married Mme. de Maintenon. Many people say that she is his wife, and that the Archbishop of Paris married them in the presence of the King’s confessor and Mme. de Maintenon’s brother; others deny it and it is impossible to know which view is correct. But what is certain is that the King has never had, for any of his mistresses, the passion that he feels for her; it is really curious to see them together. If she happens to be in the same place he cannot remain a quarter of an hour without whispering something to her or speaking to her in secret, although he has spent the whole day with her.

Perhaps it was the necessity for secrecy which added such piquancy to the union, for whatever its consequences for the life of the court and for France, it must be conceded that the marriage was a happy one for Louis. Mme. de Maintenon remained impenetrable on the subject, though the slight hints she dropped over time show that she was anxious that people should infer the legality of the union. To Mme. de Perou, a nun at the convent school founded by La Maintenon at St. Cyr, she observed that there was a great difference between her position and that of other mistresses of the King, such as Mme. de Montespan, since his friendship towards her was “based on sacred ties.”

Louis was even able to remain faithful to La Maintenon, even if it was effectively by default, since in the 1680s his health began to fail and he grew tired of the exhausting lovemaking he had once found so rapturous with Athénaïs. Perhaps he even believed that Athénaïs’s insatiability had contributed to his ailments, since medical writing warned that the effects of over-frequent sex on men were “gout, constipation, bad breath and a red nose,”
¹⁵
all of which were now spoiling his earlier handsome looks. After 1686, “the year of the fistula,” Louis was really more in need of a nurse than a lover.

The anal fistula for which Louis was operated on became that year a rather humiliating matter of international interest. The English writer Jonathan Swift alluded to it satirically at some length in his description of

a mighty king who, for the space of above thirty years, amused himself to take and lose towns, beat armies and be beaten, drive princes out of their dominions, fright children from their bread and butter; burn, lay waste, plunder, dragoon, massacre subject and stranger, friend and foe, male and female . . . the philosophers of each country were in grave dispute upon causes natural, moral and political to find out where they should assign an original solution of this phenomenon. At last, the vapour or spirit which animated our hero’s brain . . . seized upon that region of the human body so renowned for furnishing the “zibeta occidentalis” and gathering there into a tumour, left the rest of the world for that time in peace. The same spirits which, in their superior progress would conquer a kingdom, descending upon the anus conclude in a fistula.
¹⁶

Swift’s reduction of Louis’s mighty warrior pose to the “vapours” of his anus gives an impression of just how much the French King was loathed by his neighbors across the Channel at the time, though one story, which must have amused Louis, has it that his infected fundament was the inspiration for the English national anthem “God Save the King.” In 1686, Mme. de Maintenon decided to give a party to celebrate the King’s recovery from
la grande opération
on the problem. It was to include music composed by Lully and sung by the girls from the school at St. Cyr. Apparently, an Englishman who just happened to be passing the convent as the girls were rehearsing liked the tune so much he wrote it down, and then just happened to play it to Louis’s old enemy, King William, and Queen Mary, who admired it enough to adopt it as their anthem . . .

Louis’s operation was performed by the royal surgeon, Felix, who was ennobled for his success. The King bore the intervention of the scalpel with fortitude, receiving an envoy immediately afterwards, racked with pain but betraying no sign of discomposure apart from the sweat on his brow. Nevertheless, the operation signaled a change in the extraordinarily robust health he had previously enjoyed, and with it came an increasing dependency on Mme. de Maintenon. According to the
Journal du Santé du Roi,
the King’s doctors were obsessed with his digestion throughout the remainder of his reign. Fagon waxed positively lyrical on the color of his excrement. Louis’s huge appetite, combined with the courses of “purges” upon which Fagon insisted, left him constantly plagued by the need to relieve himself. One day, for instance, he evacuated “eight times before his dinner, twice during his council and the last, an hour after the
coucher
. . . for which he woke several times.”
¹⁷
Opiates and purgative broths, bleedings and emetics kept him almost constantly uncomfortable. The royal teeth were a mess, too, all the upper ones having been extracted the previous year in an operation which broke Louis’s jaw and ruined the symmetry of his face, causing his cheeks to bag and jowl. Athénaïs must have been as saddened by her once beautiful lover’s physical decline as she was by her own increasing amplitude.

Frustrated by the physical limitations imposed on him by his poor health, the King turned to food for comfort, and gorged more than ever, thus exacerbating the problem which had reduced his virility in the first place. La Maintenon’s body thus became the means by which the Church could control the King’s aging flesh. Although Louis was only forty-eight at the time of the fistula operation, from then on the
Journal
makes him sound like an aged invalid, an impression La Main-tenon encouraged. However, the legendary Bourbon libido had not entirely surrendered. As has been noted, much to her disgust, the King’s wife was required to submit to conjugal relations right up to the end of Louis’s life, sometimes, as she complained to her confessor, as often as twice a day. She was encouraged to acquiesce dutifully, accepting with “grace and virtue” what Athénaïs had once performed with passion. Louis had once teased Athénaïs in a letter, “You are no good whatever as a nurse, being extremely hasty and impatient in everything,”
¹⁸
and she now found herself excluded from the bed of his sickness as she was from that of his pleasure.

La Maintenon’s nursing may well have been a source of psychological as well as physical comfort for Louis.Family relations in seventeenth-century France were typically quite formal among the upper classes, with the “natural” role of the mother often being taken by a child’s wet nurse. Louis’s own nurse, a woman named Pierrette du Four, retained the extraordinary honor of being the very first person to greet the King in his state bed each morning, a recognition of an emotional connection which superseded the stringent court hierarchy. This distinction, described by Philippe Beaussant as “
du sang et du rang,
” blood and rank, continued into the circumscribed dichotomies of adult life. As a mother was a social, rather than a physical nurturer, so a wife was for duty, a mistress for love. Civilized behavior is by definition in some senses unnatural, so emotional needs were distinguished from social obligations as expressions of the self. For Louis, whose every action was calculated as part of his “performance” as King, it must have been a relief to find a woman in whom both roles could be legitimately united.

Was Athénaïs, who belonged to the former pattern of Louis’s emotional thinking, aware of how irrevocably she was now barred from his favor? Did he explain the marriage to her? How else could Athénaïs have begun to understand how the King of France could prefer a poor nobody to a Mortemart? They certainly had some sort of scene, because Athénaïs slammed her door in the King’s face, screaming, “And what should I call Madame de Maintenon? That goose girl, that arse-wipe!” and retired with one of her migraines for some days. Despite this, on the surface nothing changed immediately, and the King continued his routine visits to both ladies as before. In 1684, however, he announced that he wished to enlarge his own apartments by annexing those of Athénaïs. For her new quarters, she was given the renovated Appartement des Bains on the ground floor, where once she and Louis had played in their octagonal pool, Venus and Neptune infinitely reflected in the mirrors Louis had positioned for their mutual delectation. The new rooms were therefore a constant reminder to Athénaïs of what she had lost, all the more so when La Maintenon took advantage of the King’s convalescence after the fistula operation to have the communicating staircase between the King’s apartments and Athénaïs’s bricked up. Looking glasses and fountains, their beautiful insubstantiality now mirroring her loneliness, were all that remained to Athénaïs. From living next to Louis, Athénaïs was now placed directly beneath him, and although she quitted her beautiful rooms gracefully, it was a sad sign of the times. Louis had her former apartments turned into a
cadre prestigieux
where he could display his precious objects, which clearly no longer included his “real Queen.”

Chapter Fourteen

“Hypocrisy is an homage that
vice pays to virtue.”

P
restige at Versailles was very much determined by a person’s location within the internal geography of the palace, so Athénaïs’s descent to the Appartment des Bains was interpreted by the court as the first step towards her disgrace and her estrangement. La Main-tenon had already given a not too subtle hint of the reversal of status between herself and her former mistress. On the court visit to Chambord in September 1684, the King’s secret wife had traveled in the first carriage with Louis and the Dauphine, followed by the
dames d’honneur
in the second. Athénaïs, accompanied by her elder children Mlle. de Nantes and the Duc du Maine, had to content herself with third place. She bore this slight, as she bore the loss of her apartments, with perfect self-discipline. She realized that tantrums and rages were no longer effective, only undignified in the face of Louis’s indifference, and she called upon her well-bred self-control to deny her rival the satisfaction of seeing her misery. Indeed, the two marquises maintained an appearance of great cordiality, even going so far as to embrace one another in public, and seemed to take such pleasure in one another’s conversation that anyone who had seen them without being up to date on the intrigues of the court would have believed they were the best friends in the world.

Now that there was clearly no longer any question of Louis returning to her, Athénaïs was desperate to preserve the role she loved and fulfilled so admirably at court. She was still officially the reigning favorite, and as the mother of Louis’s legitimized children she still commanded a good deal of influence. Moreover, La Maintenon still preferred to keep to the shadows, and in any case had no talent for organizing the brilliant entertainments that were such an important part of the public image of Versailles. Athénaïs, by contrast, had been the center of court society for fifteen years and was adept at creating the balls, masques and parties that not only dazzled foreign ambassadors but were necessary for keeping the captive aristocrats amused. It seems that Athénaïs now accepted her defeat for first place in Louis’s heart, but tried to carve out a career for herself with the skills she had practiced for so long. She kept her composure after the embarrassment of losing her apartments, and offered her former lover a stunning New Year’s gift of an album of illustrated miniatures representing the sieges of the 1672 campaign in Holland, with a text by Racine and Boileau. Bound in gold, it was worth over 4,000 pistoles, a clever, tasteful and provocative present that called to mind such happy memories for Louis that he returned her generosity with the gift of the estate at Clagny to Athénaïs’s children after her death.

For some time, then, Athénaïs continued to lead her usual life at court, driving out occasionally with Louis in his calèche or discussing with him the program of entertainments for the winter season; organizing parties, masquerades and card games; dressing beautifully, amusing everybody. One of her great enjoyments was driving for promenades or suppers to Louis’s new pleasure house at Marly, which had been begun by Hardouin-Mansart in 1679 and which was now nearing completion. The King had consulted Athénaïs about the designs for the new house, a compliment magnified by the fact that La Maintenon, who had no sense of aesthetics, saw Marly only as an irritating extravagance. “Marly will soon be a second Versailles,” she grumbled in a letter to one of her cardinals. “There is no help for it but prayer and patience.”

The atmosphere at Versailles had changed since the days of Athénaïs’s ascendancy. Since the court’s permanent establishment there in 1682, life had taken on a greater formality, a stiffness, that even Louis found oppressive. To some extent, the rigid etiquette maintained at Versailles was a practical necessity, since without firm rules of conduct the vast household of 5,000 people would have descended into chaos, given the crowded and very public conditions of daily life there. La Maintenon once apologized for the state of a letter by explaining that it was being written at St. Germain in a room containing twenty women, three children and seven dogs. Louis’s insistence on absolute control of his courtiers’ lives was also admirably served by a system that kept them squabbling over the minutiae of precedence. This structure could be compared to the hierarchy used to control the ranks of an army, and it was not without a certain elegance; Saint-Simon summed it up by saying that the King existed at the heart of the greatest, strongest and most refined society that civilization could create, and yet there was something cold and inhuman about this enclosed world where every action was performed with the precision of the ballet, something that stifled spontaneity and energy. Athénaïs, to the manner born, was comfortable with the infinitesimal knowledge of detail required of a courtier, and her
esprit
and initiative could create vivaciousness within it, but La Maintenon was too mindful of her own parvenu dignity, too concerned with the secret machinations of her own power, to stimulate any lightness in those around her. Under her influence, the intractable decorum of secular etiquette was compounded by a dolorous and stringent piety. La Palatine complained constantly to her German relations that “the pervasive hypocrisy has made this court so dull that one can hardly stand it any more.”