Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Leslie Carroll Page A
Authors: Leslie Carroll
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seventeenth-century France. The pearls Louis specified to be set aside for Athénaïs were larger than those owned by the queen.
Typical of all maîtresses en titre , Madame de Montespan used her position to further her family’s interests. Her father was made governor of Paris and the Île-de-France, and her morbidly obese brother, the marquis de Vivonne, was made Captain General of His Majesty’s Galleys in charge of the Mediterranean Fleet; vice admiral of the Levant; viceroy of Sicily; and governor of Brie and Champagne, an amusing sinecure for a gourmand. In every one of his offices, Vivonne, who was embarrassed about being the recipient of nepotism, served the crown with distinction.
Although he didn’t shower Athénaïs with jewels, Louis made up for it with real estate. In 1665 he purchased an estate at Clagny and hired the same architect and landscaper who were redoing Versailles, Jules-Hardouin Mansart and André Le Nôtre. Clagny took twelve hundred men and more than two million livres to build. It was so opulent, even the queen wished to see it. More than a century before Marie Antoinette’s hameau de la reine at the Petit Trianon, Madame de Montespan had a working farm designed with faux rusticity.
In 1670, the blue-and-white-tiled Porcelain Trianon near Versailles was completed. The boudoir, named the Chambre des Amours, boasted an enormous mirrored bed festooned with silver and gold lace, tasseled fringe, gold-and-silver braid, a gilded canopy, and flounced curtains. The Sun King delighted in abundance and excess and found Athénaïs’s ripe sensuality, even during her numerous pregnancies, to be exceptionally erotic.
The grandly theatrical style known as Baroque was the order of the day, but Athénaïs’s taste was not only excessive; it was downright eccentric. She kept barnyard animals, including pigs and goats, in her rooms at the royal châteaux. To amuse Louis, she owned a silver-filigreed carriage designed to be pulled by white mice, and a full-size one that would be drawn by the pet bears she kept in the menagerie at Versailles.
It was around this time that Primi Visconti, an Italian count who chronicled the Sun King’s reign, bestowed upon Athénaïs the nickname “the real queen of France.” Foreign ambassadors gave her presents when they came to court as though she were le Roi Soleil ’s “second wife.” And the duc de Saint-Simon described her salon as “the center of court life—the center of pleasures, of fortunes, of hopes, the terror of ministers.”
Royal mistresses were often surmised to be the powers behind the throne, but in many cases their influence was far less than envious courtiers and ministers believed. Such was the case with Athénaïs, who astutely realized that her role was to amuse the king rather than advise him. Madame de Caylus was of the opinion that she “had an ambition to govern and made her authority felt,” but in truth, Louis never permitted his mistresses to have any such sway. “[T]ime given up to love affairs must never be allowed to prejudice affairs of state,” he wrote in his memoirs. “And if we yield our heart, we must never yield our mind or will. We must maintain a rigorous distinction between a lover’s tenderness and a sovereign’s resolution…and we must make sure that the beauty who is the source of our delight never takes the liberty of interfering in political affairs.”
Madame de Montespan’s networking consisted of arranging brilliant matches for the légitimés , and creating a coterie of supporters among the courtiers so that people would look to her for favors.
But pride goeth before a fall, as the old adage goes, and in 1675, Athénaïs discovered that she had some powerful enemies at court. On April 11, when she went to make her Easter confession, not only did the priest, Père Lécuyer, deny her the sacrament, but he lambasted her through the grille. “Is that the Mme. de Montespan who scandalizes the whole of
Typical of all maîtresses en titre , Madame de Montespan used her position to further her family’s interests. Her father was made governor of Paris and the Île-de-France, and her morbidly obese brother, the marquis de Vivonne, was made Captain General of His Majesty’s Galleys in charge of the Mediterranean Fleet; vice admiral of the Levant; viceroy of Sicily; and governor of Brie and Champagne, an amusing sinecure for a gourmand. In every one of his offices, Vivonne, who was embarrassed about being the recipient of nepotism, served the crown with distinction.
Although he didn’t shower Athénaïs with jewels, Louis made up for it with real estate. In 1665 he purchased an estate at Clagny and hired the same architect and landscaper who were redoing Versailles, Jules-Hardouin Mansart and André Le Nôtre. Clagny took twelve hundred men and more than two million livres to build. It was so opulent, even the queen wished to see it. More than a century before Marie Antoinette’s hameau de la reine at the Petit Trianon, Madame de Montespan had a working farm designed with faux rusticity.
In 1670, the blue-and-white-tiled Porcelain Trianon near Versailles was completed. The boudoir, named the Chambre des Amours, boasted an enormous mirrored bed festooned with silver and gold lace, tasseled fringe, gold-and-silver braid, a gilded canopy, and flounced curtains. The Sun King delighted in abundance and excess and found Athénaïs’s ripe sensuality, even during her numerous pregnancies, to be exceptionally erotic.
The grandly theatrical style known as Baroque was the order of the day, but Athénaïs’s taste was not only excessive; it was downright eccentric. She kept barnyard animals, including pigs and goats, in her rooms at the royal châteaux. To amuse Louis, she owned a silver-filigreed carriage designed to be pulled by white mice, and a full-size one that would be drawn by the pet bears she kept in the menagerie at Versailles.
It was around this time that Primi Visconti, an Italian count who chronicled the Sun King’s reign, bestowed upon Athénaïs the nickname “the real queen of France.” Foreign ambassadors gave her presents when they came to court as though she were le Roi Soleil ’s “second wife.” And the duc de Saint-Simon described her salon as “the center of court life—the center of pleasures, of fortunes, of hopes, the terror of ministers.”
Royal mistresses were often surmised to be the powers behind the throne, but in many cases their influence was far less than envious courtiers and ministers believed. Such was the case with Athénaïs, who astutely realized that her role was to amuse the king rather than advise him. Madame de Caylus was of the opinion that she “had an ambition to govern and made her authority felt,” but in truth, Louis never permitted his mistresses to have any such sway. “[T]ime given up to love affairs must never be allowed to prejudice affairs of state,” he wrote in his memoirs. “And if we yield our heart, we must never yield our mind or will. We must maintain a rigorous distinction between a lover’s tenderness and a sovereign’s resolution…and we must make sure that the beauty who is the source of our delight never takes the liberty of interfering in political affairs.”
Madame de Montespan’s networking consisted of arranging brilliant matches for the légitimés , and creating a coterie of supporters among the courtiers so that people would look to her for favors.
But pride goeth before a fall, as the old adage goes, and in 1675, Athénaïs discovered that she had some powerful enemies at court. On April 11, when she went to make her Easter confession, not only did the priest, Père Lécuyer, deny her the sacrament, but he lambasted her through the grille. “Is that the Mme. de Montespan who scandalizes the whole of
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