Let me now speak of the amours of the King in which were even more fatal
to the state than his building mania. Their scandal filled all Europe;
stupefied France, shook the state, and without doubt drew upon the King
those maledictions under the weight of which he was pushed so near the
very edge of the precipice, and had the misfortune of seeing his
legitimate posterity within an ace of extinction in France. These are
evils which became veritable catastrophes and which will be long felt.
Louis XIV., in his youth more made for love than any of his subjects--
being tired of gathering passing sweets, fixed himself at last upon La
Valliere. The progress and the result of his love are well known.
Madame de Montespan was she whose rare beauty touched him next, even
during the reign of Madame de La Valliere. She soon perceived it, and
vainly pressed her husband to carry her away into Guienne. With foolish
confidence he refused to listen to her. She spoke to him more in
earnest. In vain. At last the King was listened to, and carried her off
from her husband, with that frightful hubbub which resounded with horror
among all nations, and which gave to the world the new spectacle of two
mistresses at once! The King took them to the frontiers, to the camps,
to the armies, both of them in the Queen's coach. The people ran from
all parts to look at the three queens; and asked one another in their
simplicity if they had seen them. In the end, Madame de Montespan
triumphed, and disposed of the master and his Court with an eclat that
knew no veil; and in order that nothing should be wanting to complete the
licence of this life, M. de Montespan was sent to the Bastille; then
banished to Guienne, and his wife was appointed superintendent of the
Queen's household.
The accouchements of Madame de Montespan were public. Her circle became
the centre of the Court, of the amusements, of the hopes and of the fears
of ministers and the generals, and the humiliation of all France. It was
also the centre of wit, and of a kind so peculiar, so delicate, and so
subtle, but always so natural and so agreeable, that it made itself
distinguished by its special character.
Madame de Montespan was cross, capricious, ill-tempered, and of a
haughtiness in everything which, readied to the clouds, and from the
effects of which nobody, not even the King, was exempt. The courtiers
avoided passing under her windows, above all when the King was with her.
They used to say it was equivalent to being put to the sword, and this
phrase became proverbial at the Court. It is true that she spared
nobody, often without other design than to divert the King; and as she
had infinite wit and sharp pleasantry, nothing was more dangerous than
the ridicule she, better than anybody, could cast on all. With that she
loved her family and her relatives, and did not fail to serve people for
whom she conceived friendship. The Queen endured with difficulty her
haughtiness--very different from the respect and measure with which she
had been treated by the Duchesse de la Valliere, whom she always loved;
whereas of Madame de Montespan she would say, "That strumpet will cause
my death." The retirement, the austere penitence, and the pious end of
Madame de Montespan have been already described.
During her reign she did not fail to have causes for jealousy. There was
Mademoiselle de Fontange, who pleased the King sufficiently to become his
mistress. But she had no intellect, and without that it was impossible
to maintain supremacy over the King. Her early death quickly put an end
to this amour. Then there was Madame de Soubise, who, by the infamous
connivance of her husband, prostituted herself to the King, and thus
secured all sorts of advantages for that husband, for herself, and for
her children. The love of the King for her continued until her death,
although for many years before that he had ceased to see her in private.
Then there was the beautiful Ludre, demoiselle of Lorraine, and maid of
honour to Madame, who was openly loved for a moment. But this amour was
a flash of lightning, and Madame de Montespan remained triumphant.
Let us now pass to another kind of amour which astonished all the world
as much as the other had scandalised it, and which the King carried with
him to the tomb. Who does not already recognise the celebrated Francoise
d'Aubigne, Marquise de Maintenon, whose permanent reign did not last less
than thirty-two years?
Born in the American islands, where her father, perhaps a gentleman, had
gone to seek his bread, and where he was stifled by obscurity, she
returned alone and at haphazard into France. She landed at La Rochelle,
and was received in pity by Madame de Neuillant, mother of the Marechale
Duchesse de Navailles, and was reduced by that avaricious old woman to
keep the keys of her granary, and to see the hay measured out to her
horses, as I have already related elsewhere. She came afterwards to
Paris, young, clever, witty, and beautiful, without friends and without
money; and by lucky chance made acquaintance with the famous Scarron. He
found her amiable; his friends perhaps still more so. Marriage with this
joyous and learned cripple appeared to her the greatest and most
unlooked-for good fortune; and folks who were, perhaps, more in want of a
wife than he, persuaded him to marry her, and thus raise this charming
unfortunate from her misery.
The marriage being brought about, the new spouse pleased the company
which went to Scarron's house. It was the fashion to go there: people of
the Court and of the city, the best and most distinguished went. Scarron
was not in a state to leave his house, but the charm of his genius, of
his knowledge, of his imagination, of that incomparable and ever fresh
gaiety which he showed in the midst of his afflictions, that rare
fecundity, and that humour, tempered by so much good taste that is still
admired in his writings, drew everybody there.
Madame Scarron made at home all sorts of acquaintances, which, however,
at the death of her husband, did not keep her from being reduced to the
charity of the parish of Saint-Eustace. She took a chamber for herself
and for a servant, where she lived in a very pinched manner. Her
personal charms by degrees improved her condition. Villars, father of
the Marechal; Beuvron, father of D'Harcourt; the three Villarceaux, and
many others kept her.
This set her afloat again, and, step by step, introduced her to the Hotel
d'Albret, and thence to the Hotel de Richelieu, and elsewhere; so she
passed from one house to the other. In these houses Madame Scarron was
far from being on the footing of the rest of the company. She was more
like a servant than a guest. She was completely at the beck and call of
her hosts; now to ask for firewood; now if a meal was nearly ready;
another time if the coach of so-and-so or such a one had returned; and so
on, with a thousand little commissions which the use of bells, introduced
a long time after, differently disposes of.
It was in these houses, principally in the Hotel de Richelieu, much more
still in the Hotel d'Albret, where the Marechal d'Albret lived in great
state, that Madame Scarron made the majority of her acquaintances. The
Marechal was cousin-german of M. de Montespan, very intimate with him,
and with Madame de Montespan. When she became the King's mistress he
became her counsellor, and abandoned her husband.
To the intimacy between the Marechal d'Albret and Madame de Montespan,
Madame de Maintenon owed the good fortune she met with fourteen or
fifteen years later. Madame de Montespan continually visited the Hotel
d'Albret, and was much impressed with Madame Scarron. She conceived a
friendship for the obliging widow, and when she had her first children by
the King--M. du Maine and Madame la Duchesse, whom the King wished to
conceal--she proposed that they should be confided to Madame Scarron. A
house in the Marais was accordingly given to her, to lodge in with them,
and the means to bring them up, but in the utmost secrecy. Afterwards,
these children were taken to Madame de Montespan, then shown to the King,
and then by degrees drawn from secrecy and avowed. Their governess,
being established with them at the Court, more and more pleased Madame de
Montespan, who several times made the King give presents to her. He, on
the other hand, could not endure her; what he gave to her, always little,
was by excess of complaisance and with a regret that he did not hide.
The estate of Maintenon being for sale, Madame de Montespan did not let
the King rest until she had drawn from him enough to buy it for Madame
Scarron, who thenceforth assumed its name. She obtained enough also for
the repair of the chateau, and then attacked the King for means to
arrange the garden, which the former owners had allowed to go to ruin.
It was at the toilette of Madame de Montespan that these demands were
made. The captain of the guards alone followed the King there. M. le
Marechal de Lorges, the truest man that ever lived, held that post then,
and he has often related to me the scene he witnessed. The King at first
turned a deaf ear to the request of Madame de Montespan, and then
refused. Annoyed that she still insisted, he said he had already done
more than enough for this creature; that he could not understand the
fancy of Madame de Montespan for her, and her obstinacy in keeping her
after he had begged her so many times to dismiss her; that he admitted
Madame Scarron was insupportable to him, and provided he never saw her
more and never heard speak of her, he would open his purse again; though,
to say truth, he had already given too much to a creature of this kind!
Never did M. le Marechel de Lorges forget these words; and he has always
repeated them to me and others precisely as they are given here, so
struck was he with them, and much more after all that he saw since, so
astonishing and so contradictory. Madame de Montespan stopped short,
very much troubled by having too far pressed the King.
M. du Maine was extremely lame; this was caused, it was said, by a fall
he had from his nurse's arms. Nothing done for him succeeded; the
resolution was then taken to send him to various practicians in Flanders,
and elsewhere in the realm, then to the waters, among others to Bareges.
The letters that the governess wrote to Madame de Montespan, giving an
account of these journeys, were shown to the King. He thought them well
written, relished them, and the last ones made his aversion for the
writer diminish.
The ill-humour of Madame de Montespan finished the work. She had a good
deal of that quality, and had become accustomed to give it full swing.
The King was the object of it more frequently than anybody; he was still
amorous; but her ill-humour pained him. Madame de Maintenon reproached
Madame de Montespan for this, and thus advanced herself in the King's
favour. The King, by degrees, grew accustomed to speak sometimes to
Madame de Maintenon; to unbosom to her what he wished her to say to
Madame de Montespan; at last to relate to her the chagrin this latter
caused him, and to consult her thereupon.
Admitted thus into the intimate confidence of the lover and the mistress,
and this by the King's own doing, the adroit waiting-woman knew how to
cultivate it, and profited so well by her industry that by degrees she
supplanted Madame de Montespan, who perceived, too late, that her friend
had become necessary to the King. Arrived at this point, Madame de
Maintenon made, in her turn, complaints to the King of all she had to
suffer, from a mistress who spared even him so little; and by dint of
these mutual complaints about Madame de Montespan, Madame de Maintenon at
last took her place, and knew well how to keep it.
Fortune, I dare not say Providence, which was preparing for the
haughtiest of kings, humiliation the most profound, the most-public, the
most durable, the most unheard-of, strengthened more and more his taste
for this woman, so adroit and expert at her trade; while the continued
ill-humour and jealousy of Madame de Montespan rendered the new union
still more solid. It was this that Madame de Sevigne so prettily paints,
enigmatically, in her letters to Madame de Grignan, in which she
sometimes talks of these Court movements; for Madame de Maintenon had
been in Paris in the society of Madame de Sevigne, of Madame de Coulange,
of Madame de La Fayette, and had begun to make them feel her importance.
Charming touches are to be seen in the same style upon the favour, veiled
but brilliant enjoyed by Madame de Soubise.
It was while the King was in the midst of his partiality for Madame de
Maintenon that the Queen died. It was at the same time, too, that the
ill-humour of Madame de Montespan became more and more insupportable.
This imperious beauty, accustomed to domineer and to be adored, could not
struggle against the despair, which the prospect of her fall caused her.
What carried her beyond all bounds, was that she could no longer disguise
from herself, that she had an abject rival whom she had supported, who
owed everything to her; whom she had so much liked that she had several
times refused to dismiss her when pressed to do so by the King; a rival,
too, so beneath her in beauty, and older by several years; to feel that
it was this lady's-maid, not to say this servant, that the King most
frequently went to see; that he sought only her; that he could not
dissimulate his uneasiness if he did not find her; that he quitted all
for her; in fine, that at all moments she (Madame de Montespan) needed
the intervention of Madame de Maintenon, in order to attract the King to
reconcile her with him, or to obtain the favours she asked for. It was
then, in times so propitious to the enchantress, that the King became
free by the death of the Queen.
He passed the first few days at Saint-Cloud, at Monsieur's, whence he
went to Fontainebleau, where he spent all the autumn. It was there that
his liking, stimulated by absence, made him find that absence
insupportable. Upon his return it is pretended--for we must distinguish
the certain from that which is not so--it is pretended, I say, that the
King spoke more freely to Madame de Maintenon, and that she; venturing to
put forth her strength, intrenched herself behind devotion and prudery;
that the King did not cease, that she preached to him and made him afraid
of the devil, and that she balanced his love against his conscience with
so much art, that she succeeded in becoming what our eyes have seen her,
but what posterity will never believe she was.
But what is very certain and very true, is, that some time after the
return of the King from Fontainebleau, and in the midst of the winter
that followed the death of the Queen (posterity will with difficulty
believe it, although perfectly true and proved), Pere de la Chaise,
confessor of the King, said mass at the dead of night in one of the
King's cabinets at Versailles. Bontems, governor of Versailles, chief
valet on duty, and the most confidential of the four, was present at this
mass, at which the monarch and La Maintenon were married in presence of
Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, as diocesan, of Louvois (both of whom drew
from the King a promise that he would never declare this marriage), and
of Montchevreuil. This last was a relative and friend of Villarceaux, to
whom during the summer he lent his house at Montchevreuil, remaining
there himself, however, with his wife; and in that house Villarceaux kept
Madame Scarron, paying all the expenses because his relative was poor,
and because he (Villarceaux) was ashamed to take her to his own home, to
live in concubinage with her in the presence of his wife whose patience
and virtue he respected.
The satiety of the honeymoon, usually so fatal, and especially the
honeymoon of such marriages, only consolidated the favour of Madame de
Maintenon. Soon after, she astonished everybody by the apartments given
to her at Versailles, at the top of the grand staircase facing those of
the King and on the same floor. From that moment the King always passed
some hours with her every day of his life; wherever she might be she was
always lodged near him, and on the same floor if possible.
What manner of person she was,--this incredible enchantress,--and how she
governed all-powerfully for more than thirty years, it behoves me now to
explain!