The Rochechouart-Mortemarts of Lussac in Poitou were of ancient lineage and proud of it, the two grand families having been joined together by marriage in the thirteenth century.7 Gabrielle Marquise de Thianges, Athénaïs's clever elder sister, was known to tease the King on the subject: the Bourbons, with their Médicis merchant blood, were really a great deal less distinguished … In the meantime her love of opera and the theatre made Gabrielle intelligent company for the King, someone with whom he could enjoy readings by Racine and Boileau. Perhaps the cleverest sister of all was the third, Marie-Madeleine, who was obliged to discover she had a religious vocation by their father (he was having a problem paying dowries for so many daughters). She subsequently ran the convent of Fontevrault, where with her strong character and her remarkable learning – Latin, Greek and Hebrew were among her accomplishments – Marie-Madeleine was considered ‘the pearl of abbesses'. Louis liked her company too. A fourth daughter Marie-Christine really did discover her vocation; she spent her life as a nun at Chaillot, in a state of greater contentment no doubt, if less excitement, than her elder sisters.8
Then there was the single brother Louis-Victor Marquis de Vivonne before he inherited his father's title of Duc de Mortemart. Vivonne, two years older than the King, had been one of his Children of Honour, just as the Duc had been a boyhood companion of Louis XIII. Vivonne was so fat so young that he became the butt of the royal sense of humour. ‘Vivonne' – to use his surname alone was an extremely familiar form of address – ‘you get fatter every time I look at you,' said the King. ‘Ah, Sire,' replied Vivonne, ‘what a slander. There's no day when I don't walk four times round my cousin Aumale' (notoriously the fattest man at court). But Vivonne, bulky as he might be, was an intelligent man and a good soldier: one of his annoyances about his sister's rise to favour was that his career advancement might be attributed to it instead of to the talents on which he prided himself.9
The close royal connections of the Rochechouart-Mortemarts concealed the fact that their parents' marriage was not only unhappy – like so many arranged marriages of the time – but also upsettingly scandalous. One can see in the character of the father of Athénaïs all the unashamed sensuality which she would later make her own. The Duc de Mortemart was a hedonist to whom all pleasures were welcome: music and literature, food and drink, hunting – and of course sex. Diane de Grandseigne, the Duchesse de Mortemart, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne; a wise woman who loved music and the arts, she was also renowned for her piety and virtue. Instead of staying yoked in a marriage of convenience (which had bred five children), the Duc lived quite openly with his mistress, Marie Tambonneau, the wife of the head of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, in a way that flouted the conventions, loose as they were. Eventually the Duchesse retired to Poitou.
It is easy to look on Athénaïs as echoing the career of her father as a sensualist. But the profound embedded influence of her mother should not be forgotten, a woman who made an exceptionally holy death in 1664, surrounded by monks and priests. A pious mother was something she had in common with Louis XIV, and in fact the two women, the late Queen and the Duchesse de Mortemart, had been close friends. As a girl Athénaïs showed remarkable religious devotion, and as a young adult was noted for taking Communion once a week – that badge of virtue.
Yet for all her beauty, her intelligence and her vitality, which surely entitled her to a high position, there was something disappointed about Athénaïs at the moment she caught the King's eye – or perhaps, as we shall see, deliberately rolled her own magnetically large blue eyes in his direction. She was already twenty-two when a betrothal was arranged with Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoïlle. For Athénaïs and her sisters were not heiresses whose fortune made them objects of desire, despite their vaunted noble blood, and, as has been noted, the cheaper solution of religion had to be chosen for two of them.
Then the betrothal went wrong in a startling fashion. Her fiancé got involved as the second in a duel in which the Marquis d'Antin was killed, and he had to flee France.* The man left to pick up the pieces of this broken romance was Louis-Henri de Gondrin de Pardaillan, Marquis de Montespan, brother of the dead d'Antin, who paid Athénaïs a visit of condolence. As a result of his visit, this rearranged bridal couple were married at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on the eve of Lent 1663. Athénaïs said later in her amusing way that she had forgotten to bring the proper cushions for them to kneel on, and on sending in a hurry to the family home received some dog cushions from the porter …
Certainly the dog cushions brought no luck to a marriage which was clearly difficult from the first for two reasons. The first of these was debt: the young couple did not really have the wherewithal to meet the considerable expenses in terms of dress and entertainment of an aspiring court lady. The second, probably not unconnected to this comparative poverty, was the prickly character of the new husband. Good-looking in a saturnine way, Montespan was a Gascon, a traditionally proud and touchy race, the poorer the prouder.* Where religion was concerned, he had Jansenist connections: his uncle Henri de Pardaillan, Archbishop of Sens, was a man of rigid piety with suspected Jansenist sympathies. This explained the fact that there were no royal signatures to the marriage contract, a favour which would normally have been bestowed on the daughter of the Duc and Duchesse de Mortemart.
Under these circumstances, there was not much for Montespan at court: his own character if not Jansenist was certainly unbending. For Athénaïs, from the first, the court had a great deal to offer. And as time would show, she was far from being the kind of woman derided by Madeleine de Scudéry in Sapho: someone who believed she was put on earth only to sleep, get pregnant, look beautiful and talk ‘foolishness'. Nor for that matter was she the type described by a Father Garasse in La Doctrine Curieuse for whom the choice was the distaff, the mirror or the needle (for men, it was book, sword or plough). Athénaïs had an irrepressible life force.10
Her first child Christine was born on 17 November 1663 and a son, Louis-Antoine, Marquis d'Antin (his dead uncle's title), the following September when the marriage was scarcely eighteen months old. Already Athénaïs was showing herself a goddess of fertility, yet child-bearing did not deter her. Two weeks after the birth of Christine, Athénaïs was dancing in a Court Ballet, just as she had danced immediately after her wedding. Then she enjoyed the sophisticated circles of the Hotel d'Albret, where clever women such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette discoursed with clever men at their feet – here was galanterie in its purest sense.11 Athénaïs formed friendships there: one of her friends was a young widow in struggling circumstances, Françoise Scarron, whose propriety, intelligence and moderation made her an agreeable member of any circle, if never the centre of it.
It was debt which caused the Marquis de Montespan to break away from the unsatisfactory court life and, along with his brother-in-law Vivonne, set off for a military career in the south.12 The measure of the Montespan poverty can be seen in the fact that the couple found it very difficult to raise the money for the equipment needed (officers paid for their own uniforms, horses and so forth) and in 1667 Montespan sold his wife's diamond earrings. In the end Montespan was able to depart, leaving Athénaïs the reigning beauty of the court, alone with two small children. It was at this point that she may have looked round at her limited opportunities as the aristocratic wife of a poor man, and seen that there was one magnificent opening: to become the mistress of the King.
Louise de La Vallière was clearly falling from favour, and in any case was once more pregnant. In disappointment at what piety and virtue had brought her, it seems that Athénaïs decided to take her destiny in her own hands. Why not? She was old enough to know her own mind. She was not a royal parcel like Marie-Thérèse or a timid virgin like Louise. It was a brilliant solution to a life that Athénaïs did not feel was quite brilliant enough (she may not have anticipated exactly how brilliant – or how notorious – her new life was going to be).
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p; The evidence is a story of the King being overheard saying to Monsieur: ‘She does what she can but I myself am not interested.' Possibly he instinctively ducked away from a woman who however beautiful was clearly not submissive. By November 1666 the report from the Duc d'Enghien quoted earlier showed that he had changed his mind. Somewhere between November 1666 and July 1667 Louis XIV seduced the Marquise de Montespan. Or was it the other way round? Either way, the great sexual adventure of his life was about to begin.
One of the maxims of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld which was peculiarly appropriate to Louis XIV in 1667 was his reflection on the human heart where ‘new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.13 But it was not only the passion for Athénaïs which was beginning to consume Louis. There was also the question of his personal glory: something to be established in the suitably glorious sphere of war. Gloire was an important word of the time, not only for the King, although he might seem to incarnate the general glory of France. Sometimes it could be equated with ambition, as Madame de Castries, daughter-in-law of Vivonne, was described as glorieuse for her husband. Generally it meant personal honour. Young girls at Saint-Cyr would be told to treasure their ‘bonne gloire', which meant never doing base things. In a king however, and above all for Louis XIV, glory meant military glory. Years later he would declare that ‘the passion for glory was definitely the leading passion of my soul'; he was talking the language of Corneille's military leader Le Cid, which had been impressed on him in youth.14 At the same time there was the glamour of possessing the most blatantly beautiful mistress: this was another kind of glory in the eyes of the world, including foreign ambassadors. The new Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, started in 1662 (following a fire), was centred by the artist Charles Le Brun on the device of the sun, symbolising the reputation of the young King;15 in the same way the gorgeous Athénaïs symbolised the richness of his private life. Both contributed to the gloire of Louis XIV.
When Louis XIV set out in the direction of Flanders on a military campaign in May 1667, he could fairly be said to be combining two new passions: he was commanding (if not leading) his troops and he was also accompanied by Madame de Montespan. The declaration of war on England the previous year in support of the Dutch had not, to the great relief of Charles II's government, been followed by the use of French troops in this cause. Henriette-Anne, sister of one King, sister-in-law of the other, was coming into her own as a discreet intermediary. Both men saw that under the guise of affectionate familial correspondence, messages could be given and received. Both men trusted her and indeed, in the years which followed as Henriette-Anne developed her role, her loyalties were probably about evenly divided. She adored her brother Charles and at the same time she loved and honoured Louis, her King.
Louis now came clean about his real intentions. With the aid of useful legal advice about the Law of Brabant which favoured Marie-Thérèse's succession to certain properties in the Spanish Netherlands (as the child of the first marriage), he established a war-centre at Compiègne. From here Turenne was to push with the French army against Spanish-ruled Flemish fortresses that were ill-prepared to defend themselves in the so-called War of Devolution. This was realpolitik in the seventeenth-century world: Louis and his ministers equated both branches of the Habsburg family, Spain and Austria, as one, and convinced themselves of the danger of encirclement. Only a really satisfactory defensive border would do. The scenes on the way to Compiègne, and at the court established there, had however something of the pageant about them.
There were tents of silk and damask – Louis had one tent of Chinese silk – hung with rich embroideries. A tent would contain three rooms and a sleeping-room: ‘the most handsome and pretentious suites that anyone could ever see’. And there were the ladies. Of course women always went to war: cooks and prostitutes and on this occasion courtiers. This was not just the whim of Louis XIV. Turenne was generally followed by a great train of ladies, including their vast wardrobes and mules to carry them all. It has been seen that Anne of Austria had taken her son on campaigns when he was quite small. But where the Sun King ruled things tended to be carried out on a larger-than-life scale – including the presence of women. Marie-Thérèse was there, playing an important symbolic role when she was introduced to her future subjects as the Spanish heiress. Athénaïs was there, her pretext the fact that she was lady-in-waiting to Marie-Thérèse. Henriette-Anne was also there. One observer compared the style of it all to ‘the magnificence of Solomon and the grandeur of the King of Persia.16
When the King advanced to the front, he returned after a short while to Compiegne, ostensibly to see his wife, actually, as everyone perfectly well knew, to see the woman with whom he was now besotted. It is sometimes suggested that the pair first slept together in Flanders. The logistics of this seem dubious compared with the endless possibilities of the royal palaces beforehand. Life at Compiegne was in essence camping, although magnificent camping.
Two actions now focused universal attention on the rivalry of the ladies in Louis XIV's life. The first of these was the King's step, unprecedented in this reign, of creating Louise a duchess and bestowing upon her land in the Touraine and Anjou. Furthermore he legitimised six-month-old Marie-Anne – ‘our natural daughter' – and designated her Mademoiselle de Blois, a semi-royal title. The letters patent which were duly registered by the Parlement were lavish in their praise for ‘our dear and well beloved and most trusty’ Louise, Duchesse de La Vallière; her ‘infinity of rare perfections’ were stressed, which had long aroused ‘a most singular affection’ in the King's heart and were now to be publicly expressed by a title and an income derived from properties. There was mention of Louise's descent from ‘a noble and ancient house’, conspicuous for its zeal in the service of the state, while emphasis was placed on the modesty which had made her oppose such material endowments. Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Blois as she had become, was declared to be the future heiress of Louise's lands, together with any other descendants ‘whom we have declared legitimate’ (Louise was of course expecting her fourth child at this point).17
Legitimisation was a fully acknowledged process at this point: the term used – légitimer– indicated that such persons, despite their irregular status at birth, had subsequently been made legitimate. Furetière in his Dictionnaire devoted five long entries to the subject, of which the main thrust was that legitimisation was to be used for children, born out of wedlock, whose parents subsequently married. This was hardly the case here. The King was a married man, even if Louise was not a married woman, and he had undoubtedly been married to another woman at the time of Marie-Anne's birth. However, Furetière, writing towards the end of Louis's reign, had to recognise the reality of what had taken place over the last thirty years: therefore he pronounced that the King was even able to legitimise adulterine children, and thus ‘efface the turpitude of adultery’, since he was master of the civil state.18 Yet no action taken by Louis would arouse more criticism from the devout on one hand, the snobs of the French court on the other. This was because the legitimés also became princes and princesses – who might outrank honest courtiers born in holy wedlock.
Louis, in his memoirs written for the Dauphin, justified this advancement of his mistress and her child as being a decision taken on the eve of war: since he had no intention of avoiding danger, ‘I thought it was only just to assure this child of the honour of her birth,’ while giving the mother an establishment which matched ‘the affection I had had for her for six years’. The court, on the other hand, saw the whole thing as a golden farewell: Louise was now expected to accept gracefully that her reign, such as it was, was over. Advantage was taken of her pregnancy to dispatch her to Versailles while the court went to war. In the course of a long reflective letter to a confidante Louise wrote sadly that of all the King's great qualities it was ‘his crown’ which had attracted her the least.19 It was the old song, her passion for the man not the monarch. But it no
longer resonated as it had once done, in view of ‘the rise of another’, in La Rochefoucauld's phrase.
But Louise was not finished yet. The second even more dramatic action which focused the attention of the court on the current rivalry was taken by herself. Louise's nickname in the witty Sévigné circle might be ‘The Dew' – Athénaïs was ‘The Torrent’ – but The Dew was certainly capable of impetuous gestures, as her precipitate flight to Chaillot had demonstrated three years earlier. Now Queen Marie-Thérèse was spending the night at La Fére, on her way from Compiégne to join the King at Avesnes according to his orders, when a piece of startling news was brought to her. The equipage of the new Duchesse de La Vallière was on its way. There was general consternation. There was also disgust, some of which had a hypocritical ring as the Queen's ladies, including Athénaïs, denounced Louise for reducing Marie-Thérèse to violent bouts of weeping.
The next morning the Duchesse swept a low curtsy to the Queen, according to protocol. Marie-Thérèse did not even acknowledge her presence. Nor was any food provided for her, until the maître d'hôtel took pity on the starving Louise and served her privately. When all the ladies gathered round the Queen resumed their places in the carriage and travelled on to their rendezvous with the King, the conversation never left the subject. What effrontery to present herself to Her Majesty without being sent for! Thus Athénaïs. She was echoed by the others. Athénaïs even went further, with her own brand of effrontery: ‘God save me from being the mistress of the King! But if I was, I should feel thoroughly ashamed in front of the Queen.’