Secretum

Madame de Maintenon

It was the fourth time that I had come across that name. Was she not the lady whom the Most Christian King had secretly married, as Atto Melani had told me? She was. I looked once more at the portrait: the face was absolutely anonymous, contrasting oddly with the vivacity and aristocratic grace of the other royal favourites depicted beside her. I returned to the third floor.

'Madame de Maintenon,' I murmured. 'How could the King of France have married her? I mean, after all those fascinating women…'

'You saw her portrait down below? Incredible, eh?' commented Atto as he grasped the knife I held out to him. 'The King married her one October night seventeen years ago, just two months after the death of Queen Maria Teresa.'Secretly,' I repeated. 'You told me that a few days ago, the first time we visited the Vessel. However, I fear that I did not fully grasp your meaning. Is she some kind of a wife but not the Queen? I seem already to have heard of this kind of royal marriage in which the king's wife does not reign beside him and her children have no right of succession to the throne…'

'No, that is a morganatic marriage: you are not on the right track. Madame de Maintenon is, more modestly, an 'undeclared' wife, in other words, an unofficial one. Everyone at court knows of the marriage, and the King is happy with that. He simply wants it never to be mentioned. Tamquam non esset, as though it did not exist.'

'But who was she before?' I persisted, recalling that the Abbot had described her as 'socially unpresentable'.

'A governess who, as I said, had as a child begged for alms,' he said to me, raising his eyebrows and looking at me with a little smile while, having slipped the blade into the crack, he tried to open the lock.

Francoise d'Aubigne, later invested by the King with the title Madame de Maintenon, Abbot Melani continued, had for ten years been the governess of the many children Madame de Montespan bore the Most Christian King. There was not a drop of noble blood in her veins. She was an orphan of the humblest birth, born in a porter's lodge where her mother, the wife of a Huguenot whose life was spent passing from one prison to another, had been granted lodgings out of pity. She had spent her childhood with her two brothers dressed in rags, begging for a bowl of soup at the gates of convents. Fortune so arranged matters that, at the height of the Fronde, she met an old cripple, Scarron, an unseemly satirical poet who was fashionable in those days of barricades. Scarron, confined to a wheelchair, was not capable of looking after himself and was a dreadful sight to see. Unceremoniously, he asked the sixteen-year-old to be his nurse, in exchange for which he would marry her. She accepted without thinking twice.

After the fires of the Fronde, however, Scarron fell on hard times. He was reduced to writing eulogies on commission for various personages. His young and fresh little wife served as a lark's mirror. She attracted potential patrons, allowing them to entertain hopes, but without (it seems) giving in to their entreaties. In exchange, he fed and instructed her. When he died, she was barely twenty-five years old. She inherited only a mountain of debts. After selling her few pieces of furniture, the young widow was left on the street. But she had gained something. Now she had to her credit the art of coquetry, and the education necessary to tell tales to some rich protector who might save her from indigence.

Proof of this was her friendship with Ninon de 1'Enclos, an influential bawd to high society,' sneered the Abbot, 'from whom she inherited a pair of fiery lovers, thanks to whom she came to the attention of Athenais de Montespan.'

The latter had just borne the King her first child, a daughter. Having to bring her up in great secrecy, she offered Frangoise a post as governess. Subsequently, more children followed and, after a few years, a stroke of luck: the bastards were made legitimate. By the will of the King, Madame de Montespan moved to court with all her baggage and all her children; needless to say, governess included.

'She then proved sly enough to pass herself off as a very pious lady, even a zealot,' commented Atto bitterly. 'A fine piece of effrontery when one considers that a few years earlier Madame de Montespan had unleashed her on Louise de la Valliere to dissuade her from becoming a Carmelite, trying to scare her with the life of privations into which she would be entering.'

'But she could surely not hope to please the King in a saint's guise!'

'She was far-sighted. For years, the clergy and zealots at court had been grumbling about la Montespan and the King's excesses. She became their mouthpiece, working in the shadows. For years, she had been living side by side with AthenaTs: the classic serpent in one's bosom. When the Affair of the Poisons culminated, her time came. Madame de Montespan was by now ruined and the King had undergone a sudden awakening.'

'Do you mean that the King converted to a more sober life?' Not exactly,' Atto hesitated. 'In fact, the King's conduct was never so libertine as at the time when the Affair of the Poisons concluded, almost as though he hoped thus to exorcise his fears. He would move from one strange woman to the next, a different one every night, all of them, it was rumoured, very young. It was then that he suffered another grievous blow, too soon after the previous one. His most recent favourite, the beautiful Angelique de Fontanges, gave birth to a stillborn child and herself died very soon after that, suffocated by a flood of blood from a horrible pain in the chest. She was only twenty: she could have been his daughter.'

The King's health reeled under all these blows. What was more, in those years, he was suffering from continual boils in the loins after a fall from horseback, which were removed with red- hot irons, so that he was constrained to promenade along the avenues of Versailles on an armchair with wooden wheels. He felt surrounded by hostile forces: first betrayal and now death, along with his own illness, cried out to him that he was dramatically alone.

'In the midst of all those poisoners and shrews, whom was he to trust? He desperately needed someone. But he had had enough of beautiful favourites. In middle age, they had proved too dangerous a game.'

Meanwhile, we had opened the chest of drawers, only to find that it contained nothing whatever. We threw open all the windows to let in some clean air and the sweet sounds of the Roman afternoon. We sat briefly on a windowsill facing west. The soft and gentle foliage of the tallest trees was spread out below us. I again turned my eyes to the servants' quarters: after Abbot Melani's narration, they no longer seemed so squalid to me. Like the face of Madame de Maintenon, they were extremely plain, which was precisely why they showed more signs of wear and tear. But the absence of pomp and splendour gave the visitor's soul a rest from sentiments of emotion and wonderment, inspiring instead peace and familiarity. Francoise de Maintenon, continued Atto, had in the meantime become a true mother to the royal bastards and that gave the King an unparalleled feeling of security. She was the only one, in those restricted court circles, of such ordinary origins that she could not aspire even to the role of official favourite, as the latter must always be chosen from among the families of the best nobility. Her conversation, too, was pleasant, without being brilliant. The King, in other words, felt himself in no way either attracted or threatened, which pleased him greatly. Thus, he took to enjoying ever more frequently a few hours chatting with her, talking of the children and about other subjects, none of which were ever too demanding. He could relax with this governess, who did not physically excite him in the least, while neither did she displease him.

'Frangoise, in other words,' Abbot Melani summed up, 'gave him peace without taking up any room in his soul. His senses were tired; his spirit, mistrustful. What was more, when he became a widower, he was horrified by the idea of being pressed on all sides to remarry and give France a new Queen. He had already been subjected to one forced marriage. So he decided that the time had come to take his revenge: as I told you, he imposed that tramp of an ex-prostitute on the same kingdom that had imposed Maria Teresa on him and taken Maria from him. And he took no little pleasure in the scandal to which his choice gave rise at court; his minister, Louvois, even threw himself at his feet, begging him not to marry her.'

We came down from the windowsill on which we had been sitting and continued our search.

'But this time too, a nasty surprise awaited the Most Christian King. His spouse was far less placid than he had thought…'

'What do you mean?'

'A few years ago, the King discovered that Madame de Maintenon had for years been passing information, obtained in confidence from himself, to her own private circle of priests, bishops and miscellaneous devots, of whom a number were even suspected of heresy. The purpose of all this: the King's 'conversion'; or, to put it more clearly, the infiltration of the clergy into government.'

I was left open-mouthed. Of course, I reflected, one could hardly say that the King of France had been fortunate with women: first Madame de Montespan with her black masses, and now this Madame de Maintenon,