The queen was devastated to learn that her husband had taken a mistress. “That young girl with the diamond earrings,” Marie-Thérèse said acidly one day in Spanish to a court lady, “is the one the King’s in love with.”24
Compared to other royal mistresses, sweet Louise de La Vallière did not deserve to become the target of the queen’s venom-spitting rage. Ashamed before God for her adultery, humiliated before the queen for tender stolen moments with her husband, Louise treated Marie-Thérèse with humility and respect. But the queen pointedly snubbed her at every opportunity.
Though realizing her husband had a mistress, Marie-Thérèse remained extremely naïve. The king’s cousin Anne-Marie de Montpensier wrote, “One day at table she told me that the King had not come to bed until four o’clock in the morning. In answer to her questions, he had told her that he had been busy till then reading letters and writing his replies. When the Queen asked him whether he could not find another hour for that work, he turned his head away from her, lest she see him laugh. Lest she see me doing likewise, I kept my eyes down, fastened on my plate.”25
Marie-Thérèse was always the last to know that her husband had taken a new mistress. She had thought Louis was still in love with his sister-in-law Henrietta when he had, in fact, become involved with Louise de La Vallière. Now, seven years later, still spewing her poison at Louise, the queen did not notice that the tornado had changed course and was heading in an entirely different direction. For Louis, now a dashing thirty, no longer wanted a sweet and modest mistress. He was ready for the hard, glittering Athénaïs de Montespan, Louise’s best friend and the queen’s lady-in-waiting.
Madame de Montespan had frequently raged to the queen against the effrontery of Louise de La Vallière, swearing she would rather die than play such a role. Suddenly it was Madame de Montespan who was the king’s new favorite, while Louise retained an uncomfortable place on the sidelines, neither in nor out of the game. The queen’s ignorance of this momentous shift became a court joke, but someone eventually informed her of it.
Madame de Caylus wrote, “She had loved Madame de Montespan because she had believed her to be a respectable woman, loyal to her duties and her husband. Thus Her Majesty’s surprise equaled her sorrow when she later found her to be unlike what she had imagined. The Queen’s distress was made no easier by Madame de Montespan’s lack of consideration…. Of all the King’s mistresses, Madame de Montespan is the one who caused Her Majesty the greatest anguish; not only because that particular passion between Madame de Montespan and the King raged for so long, not only because she took such few pains to spare pain to the Queen but, above all, because it was pain inflicted by a woman whom the Queen had trusted and vouchsafed a special friendship.”26
While Louise de La Vallière had always treated the queen with deference, Madame de Montespan tried to upstage and insult her at every turn. As lady-in-waiting to the queen, instead of meekly assisting her, the king’s mistress often chastised her for taking too long getting dressed. Marie-Thérèse, rarely complaining to her husband, often lamented to her friends, “That whore will be the death of me!”27 and “That slut will kill me yet!”28
In 1670 the king, anxious to take Madame de Montespan on a military campaign, needed to drag both the queen along as chaperone to avoid scandal and Louise to confuse the public about his relationship with Madame de Montespan. As the duc de Saint-Simon reported, “He paraded the two of them in the carriage with the Queen, along the frontier, at the encampments…. Crowds came running everywhere along the route, pointing at the carriage and naively calling to one another to come and see the three Queens!”29
In 1671 the poor queen found herself on another journey stuffed into a carriage with her husband and his two mistresses. One night, seven exalted travelers found themselves obliged to stay in the same room with one bed. Marie-Thérèse was given the bed, while the other six—the king, his brother and sister-in-law, his cousin Anne-Marie, Louise de La Vallière, and Athénaïs de Montespan, slept on mattresses on the floor. The flabbergasted queen cried out in her throaty Spanish accent, “What? All of us here together?” To which her husband retorted, “If you leave your bed curtains open, you can keep an eye on us all!”30
Marie-Thérèse often waited up quite late for her husband, who, out of courtesy to her, never failed to come to her bed, even if the sun was rising. When he finally did come, still warm from his mistress’s embrace, his wife greeted him with a smile. She was grateful that the king showed the court his respect for her so clearly. As one courtier remarked, “The King renders her the full honors of her position. He eats and sleeps with her…converses with her as gallantly as if there were no mistresses in his life…and fulfills his connubial duties…. He usually has commerce with her about twice a month.”31
At some point the queen stopped resisting the tide of beautiful nubile women rushing toward her husband. Perhaps time healed the first, ragged wounds into thick, strong scars. She even took to wearing Madame de Montespan’s signature hairstyle—curls on the brow and each side of the head to just below the ear, and a braid coiled on the back of the head, entwined with ribbons and pearls. One day, noticing they were both wearing the same coiffeur, the queen explained, “I’ve cut my hair like this because the King likes it, not to steal your hair style.”32
“Better she than another”
In 1725 fifteen-year-old Louis XV married a dowdy twenty-two-year-old Polish princess for her family’s proven fertility. Boring, religious, and intellectually limited, Marie Leczinska was called one of the two dullest queens in Europe by her own father, the other dull queen being his wife. Marie preferred to pray away her mornings in church, and wile away her afternoons in needlework and cards. Like all eighteenth-century ladies, she had studied music and painting. But her paintings never rose above the level of childish cartoons, and nothing horrified her ladies-in-waiting more than the queen’s announcement that she would play the piano for them.
Marie was adrift in the dazzling French court, which boasted the most attractive, witty, and sophisticated men and women in Europe. She did, however, fulfill her promise of fecundity, launching no fewer than ten royal children into the world in as many years. Her frequent lament was, “What, always in bed, always pregnant, always giving birth!”33
For eight years, Louis was a royal anomaly in terms of his punctilious fidelity to his wife. The promising lad grew into an extremely handsome man, with a well-formed physique, strong jaw, high cheekbones, and aquiline nose. Marie must have been pleased that despite her dullness and Louis’s brilliance, Louis rarely looked at other women. She was devastated when Louis took one of her ladies-in-waiting, Madame de Mailly, as his mistress. Madame de Mailly was plain, kind, and content to walk around Versailles in torn petticoats rather than ask her royal lover for money. The king’s next two mistresses—both sisters of his first—were not so generous. Insolent and grasping, they went out of their way to insult the queen publicly, to flaunt their beauty against her plainness, their wit against her dullness. His third mistress, Madame de Châteauroux, even had holes bored into the walls of the queen’s apartments so that her friends could spy for her. When the king chose a new mistress, a Parisian bourgeoise rather than a haughty noblewoman, Marie must have hoped for better treatment.
To take up the position of maîtresse-en-titre and live at Versailles, Louis’s mistress had to be given a title and officially presented at court. The title was easy—the king granted twenty-four-year-old Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etioles the marquessate of Pompadour. But the presentation was nerve-racking. The freshly minted marchioness had to be presented to the king and queen in two separate chambers before the eyes of the entire court. The candidate could not afford to make the least mistake. Her presentation involved walking forward in an enormous skirt extending three feet on either side and weighing more than forty pounds. She would curtsy to the monarchs, listening to the few words they deigned to say, then walk backward, curtsying, all the while kicking her long train out of her way. The entire procedure needed to appear effortless. Tripping over the train or, heaven forbid, falling, would ensure a lifetime of ridicule at court.