Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (9 page)

Most historians believe that he and Athénaïs became lovers during
this military campaign. The story, though it may be apocryphal, goes like this: Athénaïs was staying at the home of friends. Louis disguised himself in the livery of her hostess’s servants and surprised Madame de Montespan in her bath—but the king was allegedly more dumbstruck by the sight of the voluptuous marquise than she was by his intrusion. He stood rooted to the floor, transfixed by her beauty. It fell to her to dispel the tension, which she purportedly did by dropping her towel.

A new age was about to dawn. Their royal romance would span the most successful and dazzling years of the Sun King’s reign, earning the era the nickname
l’Âge Montespan
.

People at court began to notice a change in the winds when the guard at the door to the king’s apartments was removed, and it was remarked that Louis seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time in there. Athénaïs started to neglect her customary responsibilities as lady-in-waiting to Her Majesty, and her roommate was suddenly making herself scarce in advance of the visits the marquise would receive from Louis—in disguise. When the queen inquired what was keeping him from her bed till four a.m., he muttered something about being busy with military dispatches. It was all quite risky, in addition to being risqué. Louis’ new liaison was being conducted right under his wife’s nose, as well as that of Louise, who still held the position of
maîtresse en titre
.

After the sovereign returned to Paris from the battlefield, courtiers had noticed his swagger; he’d grown more confident around women. Athénaïs had changed, too. She was no longer just another very pretty woman at court who was also smart and pious. Her glorious conquest had hardened her, as though inside and out she had been coated with a veneer of shellac. Victorious in love, she became imperious, capricious, and coquettish. Or were people seeing only what they wanted to see, attributing a different color to her usual behavior, now that she was in the throes of a royal romance? Was it Athénaïs who had changed, or the courtiers’ point of view?

Perhaps they condemned her for being brazen about her royal liaison, rather than diffident, like the “violet” Louise de La Vallière. Madame de Montespan was not embarrassed about her doubly adulterous affair, and she enthusiastically enjoyed sex in an era when
women typically considered “
commerce
”—intercourse—to be anything from an inconvenience to an annoyance to an outright burden. And Louis was a man of large appetites. He had a libido like JFK and “needed” to make love to Athénaïs three times a day, so hot and impatient for her that often he began to disrobe before her attendants had quit the room. Her ardor equaled his, and in this, as well as in their massive egos and desire for public acknowledgment of their grandeur, they were perfectly matched.

The foundation of their love was clearly physical. And they were both sensualists, sharing a passion for spicy food, heady perfumes (particularly jasmine), and tactile textiles.

Soon, the marquise found herself criticized for turning the king libertine, but he had been raising petticoats with impunity long before their liaison began. It was true, however, that he seemed in thrall to her. “Her tears moved him, not because she was pained, but because he found her beautiful in tears,” it was said. What made Athénaïs different was that she took the time to study her royal lover’s amatory habits as well as his preferences outside the boudoir, and assiduously strove to please and excite him.

And yet, as heady as the first flush of the love affair was, the king was still sleeping with Louise de La Vallière. Madame de Montespan had much to consider. Was she just an entertaining diversion during Louise’s pregnancy? Could she maintain the monarch’s affection for the long haul? And what would be the ultimate fate of her rival? Louise, still
maîtresse en titre
, bore her fourth royal bastard during the autumn of 1667, and, as with her three previous children, this infant (a boy who was immediately made comte de Vermandois) was smuggled out of the court on the day of his birth.

In July of 1668, Louis hosted a Grand Divertissement, an opulent outdoor spectacle, ostensibly to celebrate a peace treaty, but in truth intended to impress Athénaïs. The hedonistic theme of the event, hardly martial, was
Les Fêtes de l’Amour et Bacchus
. Louise was seated beside the king as
maîtresse declarée
, and the queen hosted her own table. But Louis had eyes only for Athénaïs, who was laughing up a storm with her friends, including Françoise Scarron, the attractive, intellectual widow of a poet and playwright as famous for his crippled form as for his satirical wit.

The pyrotechnics at the Grand Divertissement—the waterfalls and fireworks, cascades, and candles—demonstrated Louis’ dominance of the elements. As three thousand guests danced the night away, dazzled by the aura and brightness of the handsome young king, the monarchy was being mythologized. The sun was his emblem, and he adopted the god of light and music, the healer and the civilizer, as his avatar. Although dreary Marie-Thérèse was the crowned queen of France, it was glittering Athena, as ambitious for power and splendor as her lover, who would truly reign beside her gleaming Apollo.

At the time, however, adultery was a criminal offense in France. A guilty woman could be immured in a convent for life—although a man suffered no similar punishment. It was simply assumed he would literally go to hell. The king’s other mistresses had all been unwed, and when His Majesty was the only cheater in the relationship, most people, even among the clergy (several of whom also had female lovers), tiptoed around the subject. But Louis’ liaison with Madame de Montespan created a scandal not merely because he already had a
maîtresse en titre,
but because Athénaïs was married as well. A double adultery was a sin of considerable magnitude, indefensible even for a king.

Two key players who remained unaware of this new romance were the queen and the marquis de Montespan, who in 1667 was off fighting near the Spanish border while his wife was pleasuring the king at another battlefront in Flanders. His Majesty dispatched a notice that vastly overpraised the marquis’ modest military efforts, but Louis-Henri’s sizable vanity didn’t permit him to think anything unusual was amiss. “The king claims to be very satisfied with the bravery and bearing which you have shown in this encounter and His Majesty will give proof of this when he has occasion,” de Montespan was informed. To celebrate whatever this good fortune might be, the marquis disguised himself as one of his own cavalrymen and kidnapped a local serving girl. Her family eventually located her and demanded that the bailiff imprison her for her own safety, whereupon de Montespan provoked a fight with the bailiff. He left the wench in the frontier town of Perpignan with twenty pistoles as a parting gift and returned to Paris and his old habits, once again borrowing a good deal of money. He was surprised to find that his wife had moved
across the Seine to lodgings on the Right Bank, but Athénaïs quickly explained that the new digs were closer to the queen and a shorter commute to work.

In debt now to the tune of forty-eight thousand livres, the marquis rejoined his regiment so he could remain a step ahead of his creditors. He left Athénaïs with a power of attorney over his affairs and didn’t return until the end of the summer.

Meanwhile, Louise de La Vallière was playing the “beard” in the king’s affair with Athénaïs, for as far as the queen knew,
she
was still his
maîtresse declarée
, and the marquise de Montespan no more than another witty lady-in-waiting. At first the scenario had been humiliating for Louise, because the sovereign had to pass through her rooms at Versailles to reach those of Athénaïs. But by this time Louis had long since tired of Louise and rarely made love to her anymore—which makes one wonder how both inamoratas felt about the whole arrangement. In 1667, the king made Louise duchesse de Vaujours as a consolation prize. Meanwhile, His Majesty’s grand passion, whom he supposedly made love to three times a day, had to remain clandestine.

In September 1668, Athénaïs realized she was pregnant. Obviously it was not her husband’s child, as the marquis had been away at war for far too many months for the conception to be fudged. However, Louis-Henri could still legally claim the child as his own, ruining its opportunities for a life of great wealth and privilege. Athénaïs panicked. The marquis knew nothing yet. She
almost
considered sequestering herself and begging Louise, of all people, to pretend the baby was
hers
.

If ever there was a time to make the proverbial pitcher of lemonade out of a bag of lemons it was now, and the oh-so-fashionable Athénaïs was the perfect woman to do it. After all, she had already popularized her Hurluberlu hairstyle with every woman at court. She invented a loose-fitting chiffon gown called a
battante
, a style ironically dubbed
l’Innocente
. Soon all the ladies were dressing
à l’Innocente
.

Louis anonymously rented a house near the Tuileries for her lying-in, but insisted on being present at the birth. Legend has it that the accoucheur, or male midwife, was compelled to perform his duty
blindfolded the entire time. When he insisted on something to eat, followed by a glass of wine to wash it down before commencing, he demanded it be fetched by the young man (unbeknownst to him, his sovereign in disguise) who was hovering by the bedcurtains, ordering the anxious father-to-be about as though he were a lackey. “Have patience; I can’t do everything at once,” muttered the agitated monarch, clearly unused to waiting on anyone.

The arrangement was such a clandestine one, it’s possible that the gender of Athénaïs’s infant was not formally recorded (historians presume the baby to have been a girl, Louise-Françoise, who died at the age of three; Athénaïs would give her second daughter by the king the same name). Nor were the proud parents permitted the luxury of cooing over their illicit bundle of joy. The baby was probably spirited away by Mademoiselle des Oeillets, one of the marquise’s maids.

Nevertheless, the news of the royal romance was eventually leaked. Athénaïs’s father, the rakish duc de Mortemart, was delighted by it, as was, rather shockingly, her father-in-law, who exclaimed, “Praise the Lord! Here is Fortune knocking on my door at last!”

His son, however, wasn’t about to take his wife’s lying-in lying down. Although the older Montespan took the pragmatic view, he wasn’t the one being cuckolded by the king. The marquis made an embarrassing nuisance of himself by rampaging all over Paris, loudly denouncing His Majesty as another King David (a biblical reference to his adulterous affair with Bathsheba) and a vile seducer. Evidently Montespan’s own kidnapping of lowly serving wenches near the Spanish border didn’t count.

To the marquis’ astonishment, his tirades were scoffed at. Among the French aristocracy of the seventeenth century, marriages were made purely for financial gain, adulterous affairs were de rigueur, and spouses who were in love with each other were mocked for their sentimentality. Most people wondered why he didn’t behave like the traditional
mari complaisant
, and just put up and shut up, taking his wife’s infidelity to the bank like every other husband anointed by the king with a set of cuckold’s horns. Who knows—he could end up with a dukedom and wealth beyond his imagination. He was deeply in debt; he certainly could have used the bailout. To be fair, at the time the marquis was making a nuisance of himself, the public didn’t
know Athénaïs was carrying the king’s bastard. But Montespan didn’t want a dukedom. Besides, the title would benefit his wife even more. It would grant her the “right of the
tabouret
,” permission to sit upon a stool in the sovereign’s presence, when lesser mortals, and nobles, had to stand. So he was determined to punish her by refusing any offer of a dukedom for the rest of his life, and no matter how powerful Athénaïs became at court, Versailles’ rigid etiquette would deny her a privilege that even poor discarded Louise de La Vallière enjoyed.

Not only did the marquis de Montespan perversely trumpet his cuckoldry; he wanted all of France to know about it, which he achieved by ostentatiously affixing a pair of stag antlers to his coach.

Things progressed from the merely embarrassing to the genuinely frightening when the marquis began to stalk his wife. She had sought refuge in the home of Julie de Montausier, whose elderly mother was a celebrated hostess of one of Paris’s poshest salons. After Louis-Henri finally located Athénaïs, he went berserk. On more than one occasion he broke into the marquise’s bedroom at night and ransacked it; at other times he would lie in wait for her there and beat her up. Then he would boast of his intentions to visit the skankiest brothels in Paris, with the near-certainty of contracting syphilis, which he would pass on to the king by raping Athénaïs and transmitting the disease to her. One night the marquis de Montespan broke down the door and assaulted Athénaïs. Screaming for help, she clung to Julie de Montausier. Fortunately, the servants rushed in and were able to prevent her violation.

Surprisingly, the ostensibly omnipotent king was legally powerless to intervene in what was considered a domestic dispute between spouses. There was no law against a man beating, or abducting, or even raping his own wife. It was a delicate predicament for Louis. He could assign a team of bodyguards to protect his paramour, but he had to tread cautiously so as not to alert the queen to his love affair.

Athénaïs’s royal romance sent the marquis de Montespan over the edge, but his embarrassing—and violent—behavior was hardly the way to regain her affection and fidelity. The glue that at first cemented their marriage was sexual attraction, but the relationship quickly soured when he revealed himself to be an inveterate gambler
and wastrel, squandering her dowry, and philandering with various women of low birth.

Finally, for Athénaïs’s safety, her lover did something that
was
within his power: He issued a
lettre de cachet
, a notice of imprisonment without trial at the king’s behest. Traditionally, the monarch did not need to specify a reason for issuing a
lettre de cachet
, but this time Louis enlightened his prisoner. Behaving as though Montespan had merely leveled a professional complaint against the crown, the king sentenced the marquis because he had dared to challenge His Majesty’s choice of the duc de Montausier as the dauphin’s governor or tutor.