Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (16 page)

And yet, Madame de Maintenon was never heard to complain. She remained the epitome of tact and discretion, two of the reasons Louis loved her. Instead, she spoke with gratitude at what she referred to as her elevation. “I am so glorified in this world for the good intentions God has given me that I am fearful of being humiliated and confounded in the next,” she wrote to Madame de Brinon, her headmistress at Saint-Cyr.

According to the duc de Saint-Simon, “Some time after the King’s return from Fontainebleau, in the middle of the winter which followed the queen’s death, a thing took place which posterity will have difficulty in believing, yet which is perfectly true and proven. The Monarch and la Maintenon were married in the presence of Harlay Archbishop of Paris, as Diocesan, and of Louvois, both of whom had, it is said, extracted an oath from the King that he would never make it public.”

For the rest of her life Madame de Maintenon refused to confirm that she had ever married the king of France. But most historians believe that the secret wedding ceremony took place in the middle of the night of October 9–10, officiated by the archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon, the king’s confessor Père La Chaise, as curate of Versailles, or both men. One source suggests that the clerics wore green vestments, which would date the wedding to a weekday between Pentecost and the first Sunday in Advent. The only
additional witnesses to the ceremony may have been Louis’
valet de chambre
; Madame de Maintenon’s relative the marquis de Montchevreuil; and the war minister, the marquis de Louvois, who had done everything in his power to persuade the king from the “indignity” of marrying Françoise—and she knew it.

According to Louis’ sister-in-law Liselotte, the Princess Palatine, addressed by her formal title, Madame, most people at court believed that Françoise had married the king, although in the absence of an official announcement Liselotte didn’t award the assumption much credence. With her cynic’s eye and famous German bluntness (she detested la Maintenon and frequently referred to her as
die alte Zott
—“the old trollop”—as well as
la vieille sorcière
—the old witch—and
ordure
—shit), she offered a left-handed compliment about the royal romance. “If they were married their love would hardly be as strong as it is. But perhaps secrecy adds a spice not enjoyed by people in official wedlock.” And yet Madame conceded that His Majesty had never felt “such passion for any mistress as he does for this one,” which almost strains credulity, as Louis’ lust for the marquise de Montespan was so intense that he was known to make love to her three times a day during the height of
their
romance.

The Sun King’s subjects found his new love match a big yawn. It lacked the cachet of a grand political alliance and the excitement that a new foreign bride would bring to the kingdom, or the sex appeal of another extramarital affair with a glamorous beauty such as Athénaïs de Montespan. Few could understand what Louis saw in Madame de Maintenon, a middle-aged prude three years his senior. An unflattering ditty made the rounds soon after it was apparent that they were a couple, referring to his sin of concubinage with the sexy Madame de Montespan, adding snarkily that with the frigid Maintenon, Louis was doing his “penance.”

In 1684, Madame de Sevigné wrote to her daughter, “The situation of Madame de Maintenon is unique in the world. Never has there been such a one and never will be again.”

Two years later, in 1686, the subject of did-they-or-didn’t-they still held the public interest. And yet a bawdy ditty feigning disinterest in the matter compared Madame de Maintenon both to the virtuous Roman wife Lucrece and to the notorious French courtesan, their
contemporary Ninon de Lenclos (with whom it was inventively rumored that during her late teens or early twenties Maintenon had engaged in a lesbian tryst).

Although nothing was ever stated aloud, there were a number of big hints that Louis and Françoise had made their liaison legal. For starters, she retained her virtue with the Catholic Church and the pope; although she and the king were both widowed, neither was accused of living in sin. Regardless of whether Louis’ subjects were kept in the dark, if the king of France had entered into a morganatic marriage, His Holiness would have had to have been informed. Historian Antonia Fraser believes that the pontiff knew of the union by 1685. If Madame de Maintenon had merely remained Louis’ mistress, the papacy would hardly have been as respectful of them. Another clue to the legality of their relationship is that by 1692, Madame de Maintenon was visiting closed convents, the sole prerogative of the queen of France. Soldiers, too, relied upon her, writing from the front to the “Protectress of the Realm,” for her aid in securing warm clothes—as well as their salaries. Throughout the 1690s, she never appeared at the great state functions, although she sat in the queen’s place at daily Mass and received the dauphin and the princes of the blood seated in an armchair while they remained standing in her presence. The king conversed with her bareheaded, a mark of tremendous respect. In fact, it became the subject of an international scandal during an extravagant spectacle he staged in 1698 at Compiègne, ostensibly to induct his oldest grandson, the sixteen-year-old duc de Bourgogne, into the arts of war. Louis spoke to no one but Madame de Maintenon, casually resting his chapeau on the roof of her glass-enclosed sedan chair while he leaned down to address her in the presence of thousands of spectators.

According to her confessor, God had placed “the salvation of a great king” in her hands. “You are his refuge, remember that your room is the domestic Church where the king retires.” But Madame de Maintenon was not quite the zealous religious influence on the king that her detractors, such as the king’s sister-in-law, Liselotte, and the duc de Saint-Simon, depict. By the death of the queen in 1683, the middle-aged Louis was no longer the libidinous lothario of earlier years. The marquise de Maintenon’s sobriety had tamed him
to an extent, but age and illness slowed him down as well. In 1686, he had a painful boil on his thigh cauterized, suffered a horrific case of gout in his left foot, and was operated on for an anal fistula.

That same year, Madame de Maintenon embarked upon her greatest legacy. She married her piety, her love of children, and her passion for teaching by inaugurating the Foundation of Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr, a school for the free education of the daughters of impoverished gentry. Saint-Cyr accepted girls from grade school through twenty, separated into four divisions by age. It began as an academy where the arts and humanities were combined with religious instruction and pragmatic lessons in the womanly arts. However, over time, after criticism that her girls were becoming too vain and worldly for their own good by performing in plays and falling in love with the sound of applause, Saint-Cyr morphed into the sort of rigid convent school that Françoise had herself detested as a child.

Having married well into their forties, Madame de Maintenon and Louis had no children of their own, but they treated the king’s grandniece Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy as if she were their darling pet. Marie-Adélaïde came to the Bourbon court just shy of her eleventh birthday, and wed Louis’ eldest grandson, the duc de Bourgogne, at the age of twelve. She was dandled on the Sun King’s knee, educated at Saint-Cyr, and essentially could do no wrong, eventually becoming spoiled to the point of dissipation, a star that burned white-hot and flamed out before she reached the age of thirty.

The monarch and marquise had one major dispute throughout the course of their lengthy relationship. As Saint-Cyr began to metamorphose from finishing school to convent in terms of its outlook and curriculum, Madame de Maintenon had hired a headmistress who was a follower of François Fénelon, a theologian perceived as fanatical. The marquise herself became something of an adherent to Fénelon’s ecstatic religious “Quietist” beliefs and persuaded the king to engage him as tutor to the duc de Bourgogne. For two years she managed to keep it from Louis that through Fénelon, the radical beliefs of Quietism had pervaded not only Saint-Cyr but the court.

When the sovereign discovered Madame de Maintenon’s betrayal, he froze her out of his life for two years, refusing to visit her rooms
or even to speak to her. On the occasions when their eyes met, she received a glower of rage for daring to poison the mind of the future king of France by introducing a heretic into their midst. Luckily, the hotheaded little duc had no interest in his governor’s sermonizing, and so Fénelon’s extremism made no dent. But the marquise lived every day in fear of banishment, and after the popular Bishop Bossuet published a treatise mocking Fénelon and his adherents, Françoise became so devastated by the courtiers’ snickering reaction that she fell gravely ill.

Witness to her deterioration, one of the court priests, Godet Desmarets, implored Louis to pardon the marquise; his cruelty was genuinely killing her. “Give back your confidence to this admirable companion, full of God’s grace, of tenderness and devotion to Your Majesty. I know her heart to the core and will guarantee that it is impossible to love more tenderly or respectfully than she loves you. She would never have deceived you had she not herself been deceived.”

The king was ultimately moved by Desmarets’ letter and immediately went to Françoise’s rooms, where he found her weeping. “
Eh, bien
, Madame, must we see you die over this affair?” he said.

And that was it. She was forgiven.

Although Madame de Maintenon viewed the stewardship of Saint-Cyr as a full-time vocation, she remained the sovereign’s chief confidante. “When the King returns from hunting, he comes to my room; the door is shut and nobody is allowed to enter,” she told her dear friend Madame de Glapion. The marquise “listened to all his cares and woes,” and was literally the shoulder that Louis secretly wept upon.

But well into her seventies, she told her confessor that her greatest affliction was the king’s
pénibles
—burdensome—sexual demands, an aspect of her wifely duties that had not ceased with old age. Madame de Maintenon had always described her visits to the royal bed as “slavery and martyrdom,” enduring them as stoically as she did her severe bouts of rheumatism, accepting the king’s insistence on throwing all the windows wide-open, even in the dead of winter.

But after listening to her kvetch about the septuagenarian Louis’ sexual demands, the cleric reminded Françoise of her conjugal
obligations. “It is at the same time an act of patience, of submission, of justice and of charity.”

She never got much rest out of bed, either. Back in 1691, she had written to her confessor, “Pray God to give me strength to support the pleasures of the court.” And at the age of sixty-nine in 1704, ailing with rheumatic aches and pains, she couldn’t go to sleep when she wanted to, because at the French court the sovereigns conducted not only their toilettes but affairs of state from their bedchambers, and her rooms were always crowded with men on official business. That November she described herself as “sick and old,” and the following May, still ailing (and unaware that she’d have another fourteen years to live), she wrote, “The life we live here [at court] kills me. I am no longer made for this world.”

After the death of Louis’ beloved twenty-six-year-old grandniece, the dissipated Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, who was dauphine of France when she succumbed to measles in 1712, the king spent increasingly more time with Madame de Maintenon. He dined with her each midday and remained in her rooms all afternoon, returning again for the evening concerts organized to distract him from his grief and stress. As the years progressed he had become so dependent upon her that he could not bear to forgo her companionship for even a day, but his peripatetic lifestyle was hard on her. At the age of seventy-seven, her body racked with painful rheumatism, she was still jouncing about in coaches,
chaise-à-porteurs
(sedan chairs), and barges as she traveled from one royal château to another.

Her secretary, Mademoiselle d’Aumale, observed, “I have seen her sometimes, weary, unhappy, anxious and suffering, entertain the King for three or four hours and when he left her room at ten o’clock at night and they drew the curtains of her bed, she said to me, ‘I am dead of exhaustion.’”

In 1714, Madame de Maintenon crowed over the remarkable physical prowess of her elderly royal spouse. “The King’s health is a miracle every day renewed. Yesterday he fired thirty-four shots and killed thirty-two pheasants. Strength, eyesight, skill, nothing is diminished.”

But she could hardly say the same for herself. “My sight is nearly gone, my hearing still worse. No one understands what I say because
my pronunciation has gone with my teeth; my memory begins to fail; I no longer remember names and confuse them all the time.”

The following year, however, the king’s much-vaunted health began to suffer. He never recovered from the strain of the multiyear War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) or the grief of the sudden loss of all of his heirs but one (the toddler who would reign as Louis XV) from a measles epidemic. He spent many afternoons in Françoise’s rooms weeping uncontrollably. By then he was able to enjoy his favorite pastime of hunting only from a wheelchair. He had very few teeth left; part of his jaw had been removed years earlier. Even his hearty appetite had dwindled. On August 9, what his physicians mistook for sciatica turned out to be gangrene.

During the summer of 1715, aware that he was dying, Louis XIV began putting his life in order. His demise took on a somber, elegiac quality, “the saddest and most poignant spectacle that one could witness in this life,” his sister-in-law, Liselotte, observed. On the day after it was confirmed that his leg had become gangrenous he shared the first of four farewells with Madame de Maintenon. They jested of her three years’ seniority, as the king remarked that his only regret was in leaving her but that odds were they’d meet again fairly soon. The marquise returned to Saint-Cyr, but was called back when the king’s health took a turn for the worse. “[H]e asked me to forgive him for not having been kind enough to me and that he had not made me happy, but that he had always loved and esteemed me. He wept, and then asked if anyone was in the room. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘But even if they saw me weep no one would be surprised.’ I went away that I might not agitate him.”