Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (14 page)

Athénaïs returned to court only for a few important events: the birth of her first grandchild in 1692, and his first communion in 1698. She saw her children, except for the duc du Maine, fairly frequently and was reunited with the marquis d’Antin, her son by the marquis de Montespan.

Since 1676, Madame de Montespan had been involved in the Filles de Saint-Joseph, nuns who devoted themselves to educating indigent orphan girls. Her generosity to them had always been magnanimous, and her penitence after she retired from court was just as grand and public as the rest of her life had been. She spent money as extravagantly as ever, but disbursed it philanthropically.

Athénaïs devoted her final years to charitable deeds, setting up a hospital at Oiron. It was there, toward the end of her life, that she began to wear hair shirts, as well as steel belts and bracelets with iron spikes, beneath her sumptuously hued gowns. She pared down her rich diet to the simplest foods, and exchanged her fine linen sheets and soft petticoats for coarse fabrics in order to mortify her delicate flesh. She developed a horror of being alone and a fear of dying, certain that no amount of atonement could erase her sin of double adultery and send her to heaven.

On the night of May 22, 1707, she suffered a fainting fit at the spa town of Bourbon. In the absence of a physician, her attendants,
thinking they were helping, dosed her with enough emetic to choke a horse. She vomited sixty-three times. After rallying briefly, she gave her confession, and last rites were administered on May 26.

At three a.m. on May 27, Madame de Montespan died at the age of sixty-five. As a result of family squabbles over where her body would be laid to rest, she was not interred until August 4. After a torchlight procession, she was buried with generations of Rochechouart de Mortemarts in the Church of the Cordeliers. According to the duc de Saint-Simon, “The poor of the province, on whom she had rained alms, mourned for her bitterly, as did vast numbers of other people who had benefited by her generosity.”

Athénaïs’s memory would not be soon forgotten while her DNA lived on. Through her youngest daughter, Mademoiselle de Blois, who had wed the duc de Chartres, la Montespan’s triple-great-grandson became king of France, the country’s only constitutional monarch. Athénaïs’s great-great-grandson Louis-Philippe d’Orléans (who famously changed his name to Philippe Égalité during the French Revolution and voted for his cousin Louis XVI’s execution) married her great-granddaughter (through the line of her youngest son, the comte de Toulouse). Their child, born in 1773, became King Louis Philippe, a direct descendant on both sides of Madame de Montespan and Louis XIV.

King Louis Philippe married a cousin, one of Marie Antoinette’s nieces. They had ten children, and through
their
various marriages Athénaïs’s genes eventually made their way into the royal houses of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Württemberg, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, and Italy.

On hearing of Athénaïs’s death, her longtime frenemy Madame de Maintenon hid herself in the cabinet of her
chaise percée
(in other words, she locked herself in the bathroom) and privately sobbed her heart out. But la Montespan’s royal lover of nearly twenty years shed not a single tear. Louis XIV retired to his rooms after a hunt without removing his boots, announcing that he wished to be alone. For hours his footsteps were heard pacing the parquet.

Finally, the duchesse de Bourgogne dared to ask why he displayed no emotion over the loss of a woman who had meant so much to him for so long. Evidently, his statute of limitations on mourning had
expired sixteen years earlier. “When she retired, I thought never to see her again, so from then on she was dead to me,” the king replied.

L
OUIS
XIV
AND
F
RANÇOISE
D
’A
UBIGNÉ
, M
ADAME
S
CARRON
,
MARQUISE
DE
M
AINTENON
(1635–1719)

It’s an old cliché—the wife worrying that her husband will have an affair with the babysitter. But what if the man happens to be the king of France? And it’s not his wife who’s tied herself in knots over his crush on the too-intriguing governess of their numerous offspring, but his official
mistress
?

Such was the uncomfortable love triangle between Louis XIV, the voluptuous and fecund Athénaïs de Montespan, and Françoise Scarron, the sexually frigid but tenderhearted nanny of their brood.

The future Madame de Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné was born in Niort prison, near Poitiers, where her father, Constant, had been jailed for conspiring against Cardinal Richelieu. It was not Constant’s first run-in with the law; he had previously been incarcerated for rape and abduction and had murdered his first wife by stabbing her multiple times after catching her in flagrante delicto. Françoise’s mother, Jeanne de Cardhillac, was the sixteen-year-old jailer’s daughter.

Françoise was baptized a Catholic but as a little girl she was sent to live with her father’s Huguenot sister at the family’s charming country Château de Mursay. She was eight and a half years old when her family embarked for the “Isles of America,” or what we now call the Lesser Antilles. There, Constant was set to assume the governorship of one of the minor islands, but eventually ended up on Martinique instead. Françoise became so ill on the voyage that she was mistaken for dead. Her shrouded body was about to be tossed overboard when her mother bent over to give her a farewell kiss. Madame d’Aubigné noticed some tiny sign of movement and the child was fortuitously taken down below. The ship’s bishop presciently remarked, “Ah, Madame, one does not come back from such a distance for nothing.”

In 1647 the family returned to France, but Constant died that
August, en route to Turkey to rebuild his fortune. An ambitious baronne who was friendly with her mother enrolled Françoise in a convent school in an effort to restore her Catholic roots and ingratiate herself with the queen mother. Mademoiselle d’Aubigné hated the experience and from then on had “issues” with convents, although she agreed to give Catholicism a second chance.

When Françoise was sixteen, the baronne brought her to Paris, introducing her to the world of the fashionable salons of the Marais district. There she hobnobbed with the clever minds and the great beauties of the day, including the notorious courtesan Ninon de Lenclos and the stunning marquise de Montespan, who reached out and befriended her. In 1660, Athénaïs and Françoise stood side by side on a balcony as the handsome Louis XIV made his entrance into Paris with his Spanish bride.

The teenage Françoise appeared sober, serious, and modest, although she would later tell people who had pegged her as a prude that it was all a persona, carefully crafted not for God but for love of her reputation. While her masses of shiny, ink dark hair were universally admired, and her heart-shaped face was considered attractive, her mouth was thought too small and her chin a trifle plump. In this age of paper-white beauties, her complexion, owing to all her years in the islands, was too dark for most French tastes, earning her the nickname
la belle Indienne
. According to the contemporary writer Madeleine de Scudéry, her best feature was “the most beautiful eyes in the world…brilliant, soft, passionate, and full of intelligence…. A soft melancholy” pervaded Françoise’s personality; “her gaze was gentle and it was slightly sad.”

“I was what you call a good little girl,” she told her best friend, Madame de Glapion, when Françoise was herself middle-aged. She was always obedient and eager to please. “That was my weakness.” She never complained of her family’s hardships, even though her widowed mother and siblings were so impoverished that she and her younger brother had been compelled to troll the almshouses of Paris three times a week, begging for scraps of bread. “[I]t was my good name that I cared about,” she insisted.

Frequenting the posh salons of Paris in her mid-teens, Françoise, badly dressed, shy, and melancholy, met the depressive poet and
playwright Paul Scarron. He was one of the great wits of the age; at his famous salon, the guests were as vibrant as the yellow wallpaper, but he was often in such financial straits that they were expected to bring their own food, wine, and firewood. It was popularly held that Scarron owed his misshapen and paralytic condition—his body was bent like the letter Z—to a prank he had played at the age of twenty-seven during Carnival. Having tarred and feathered himself as a joke, he was ultimately set upon by an angry mob and had no alternative but to leap into a freezing river to escape them. His malady developed gradually, leaving his mind unaffected, as his body grew plagued with acute rheumatoid arthritis.

The pair began an epistolary courtship when Françoise was only fifteen. Scarron, who was twenty-five years older, was quite the flirt. In 1652, he offered the pretty, intelligent teenager two options that would relieve her poverty and uncertainty: He would fund her retreat into a convent (annual bed and board were as expensive as any private school tuition) or she could become his wife, though it would certainly be an unconventional marriage. Monsieur Scarron assured her that he would not claim the rights of a husband (in other words, he would not expect her to have sex with him).

Although Françoise was pious, she enjoyed the world of the salons, loved fine clothes and intoxicating perfumes (when she could afford them), and adored Paris. So she selected the lesser of the two evils. Her mother gave her consent to the match on February 19, 1652, and the contract was signed on April 4.

The union was fodder for the gossips. “At the time of his marriage he couldn’t move anything but his tongue, and one hand,” said his friend Jean de Segrais. The priest who officiated at the wedding wondered aloud how the marriage would be consummated. “That is between Madame and myself,” the playwright snapped.

Despite his boast to initiate his teenage bride into as many
sottises
as possible (the word literally means “foolishness,” but he was obliquely referring to sexual experimentation as well as other hijinks), it was Françoise who tamed the libertine Scarron, transforming his salon from bawdy to elegant. In time she would work the same magic with the libidinous king of France.

Eight years later, on October 6, 1660, Paul Scarron died, and his
widow emerged with an utter dislike, if not a dread, of sex. Much later, she would refer to herself in a letter to her younger brother Charles as “a woman who has never been married,” leading one to conclude that her union with Scarron was never consummated in any traditional sense.

Until he’d written a scathing satire against her cohort Cardinal Mazarin, Scarron had been the Honorable Invalid to the Queen, the recipient of a five-hundred-livre annual royal pension. As his widow, Françoise applied to get his pension reinstated.

But Anne of Austria claimed to have forgotten the amount, and a quick-thinking courtier advised Her Majesty that it had been two thousand livres. Consequently, and quite serendipitously, Madame Scarron ended up with a comfortable income.

After Athénaïs de Montespan bore the king their first child together, Françoise was approached by a mutual friend, Bonne de Pons. A discreet and modest woman was needed to care for the increasing number of royal bastards, and Françoise filled the job description to perfection. The widow Scarron hesitated. She did not approve of her old pal’s doubly adulterous liaison and had no desire to condone it by agreeing to be the secret nanny of her illegitimate children. Françoise discussed the job offer with her confessor, who equivocated: If the children were merely the offspring of the king’s whore, then he agreed that even though Françoise needed the salary, she should decline the employment. But if the father of Athénaïs’s kids was the king, then she would be passing up the opportunity to raise and influence them. Afer all, if her
sovereign
needed her, then she could justify accepting the gig. However, if this was indeed the case, her confessor recommended that Madame Scarron insist Louis XIV himself make the offer of employment.

The king sardonically nicknamed her
votre belle esprit
—“learned lady.” It was only as he came to know her by visiting his children with increasing frequency that his opinion began to soften. “The King did not like me at first. For a long time he had an aversion for me. He was afraid of me as a pedant, thinking that I was austere and cared only for things sublime,” she confessed many years later.

Françoise was compelled to shuttle between the house in the Marais district where she secretly cared for the royal bastards of
Louis and Athénaïs and her own home in the same neighborhood. Madame Scarron remained socially ambitious, enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere of the salons, and hoped not to have to abandon her lifestyle entirely, forced to remain hidden from view with precious little adult companionship or stimulating conversation. Taking the act of suffering for her job to an extreme, she had herself bled before any event where she might be questioned about her activities because she had a tendency to blush when she lied.

Madame Scarron was a born teacher and took delight in shaping the minds of the young, whether the subject was religion, manners, or culture. But in an age that didn’t sentimentalize a woman’s relationships with children (whether they were her own or in her care), Françoise was an exception. Despite the fact that, as she once sorrowfully admitted, her own mother never kissed her when she was a girl, she loved all children, although she never bore any of her own. She grew especially fond of the king’s first son by Athénaïs, the crippled duc du Maine. He in turn considered her his true
maman
, for she was the woman who raised him, taking him from Antwerp to the Pyrenees in search of cures for his gamey leg and twisted spine.

After Madame de Montespan gave birth to the king’s third child in 1672, Louis purchased an unprepossessing house for his children at 25 rue de Vaugirard on the Rive Gauche, near the Palais de Luxembourg, across the river from the prying eyes of the courtiers who frequented the salons of the Marais. There Madame Scarron, visited by only a few trustworthy friends, looked after the expanding passel of royal bastards, augmented by a couple of other children, one of whom was her own relation, in order to stave off the whiff of scandal. The king himself, in disguise, would pop in unannounced, and become utterly charmed to find his children’s nanny with one kid on her knee, another in her lap, one in a cradle, and one hanging lovingly about her, while she read aloud to them. Over time, his opinion of the governess changed. “She knows how to love…one would be very happy to be loved by her,” he mused one day.