But Henri was destined never to see his Charlotte again. On May 14, 1610, while sitting in his carriage with his counselors, Henri was stabbed in the chest by the madman Ravaillac and died moments later. Charlotte quickly returned to her husband with her tail between her legs and through abject self-abasement made amends with Henri’s widow, Queen Marie, the new queen regent and now the most powerful person in France.
Some sixty years later, Henri’s grandson, Louis XIV, also suffered the recriminations of a defiant husband. Athénaïs de Mortemart, who had been angling in vain for the position of Louis XIV’s mistress, gave up the chase and married the marquis de Montespan in 1663. It was not an advantageous match for the bride, who was already the daughter of a marquis far wealthier than her husband. Dark and dashing, the marquis de Montespan’s finer qualities were unaccompanied by good breeding or common sense. Soon after the wedding he spent his small fortune—and his wife’s dowry—and ran headlong into debt.
The marquis was a soldier, enjoying to the full a seventeenth-century soldier’s perquisites—looting, raping, and burning. He was on campaign months at a time, rarely going long periods without getting himself into scrapes. On one occasion he seduced a girl, dressed her in a man’s uniform, and assigned her a position in the cavalry—until her family showed up with the local bailiff. Despite his long absences, his wife gave him two children in rapid succession, a girl in 1664 and a boy the following year. She quickly dumped both children on her husband’s relatives so she could devote herself fully to the pleasures of court.
In 1666 her swashbuckler husband departed on a long campaign in the south of France. By this time, the marquis’s garish charms must have worn thin on his polished wife. By 1667 she had succeeded in becoming the king’s maîtresse-en-titre.
Though the marquis must surely have heard of his wife’s exalted position as king’s mistress, he at first made no noise about it. Perhaps he was eager to see what financial rewards and honors would come his way. When he returned to Versailles in 1668, he found his wife pregnant by the king. Worse, Madame de Montespan had, as one courtier put it, “in acquiring a taste for the King’s caresses, developed a distaste for her husband’s.”23
The marquis reacted like the madman which he was commonly thought to be. He ranted and raved to anyone who would listen about the immorality of the king’s affair with his wife—though many thought this newfound piety odd in a man known to have stormed convents to deflower girls. Some court ladies were so shocked at his language that they took to their beds with the vapors. He once entered his wife’s apartments, soundly boxed her ears, and disappeared. Rumor had it that the marquis was frequenting the vilest whorehouses to catch a disease and pass it on through his wife to the king. If this was true, there was a major flaw in his logic. Madame de Montespan refused to sleep with her embarrassing husband.
One day the marquis drove up to the royal château of Saint-Germain in a carriage draped in black—mourning for his wife, he explained—decorated on the corners with four giant pairs of stags’ horns, the traditional symbol of a cuckolded husband. The king had him imprisoned briefly and then exiled to his estates in the south. But the marquis was not finished. He invited all his friends and relatives to his castle for an elaborate mock funeral for Madame de Montespan, mourning her death “from coquetry and ambition.”24 He stood by the main door with his two small children, all clad in black, somberly accepting condolences on their loss.
Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, noted that the king could have bribed the marquis into complacence. “Monsieur de Montespan is an arrant opportunist,” she wrote. “Had the King been willing to pay off more handsomely, he would have been reconciled.”25
A year after the mock funeral, the crazed marquis attacked a convent to debauch a young girl who was hiding from him. In the scuffle, the girl, her mother, the father superior, and several peasants were hurt. Louis took this opportunity to send the marquis to prison, from which he escaped south into Spain, as the king had hoped. But at the pious Spanish court, the marquis complained so loudly of his wife’s adultery with the king of France that Louis decided he had better pardon him and let him come back to France, where he could not damage his reputation internationally.
This brush with the law effectively subdued the marquis. He remained in the exile prescribed for him in the south of France, managing his estates, farms, and vineyards, hunting, gaming, drinking, and carousing. But Louis had his spies keep a careful eye on him. The king heard rumors that he intended to claim Athénaïs’s numerous royal bastards as his own, born within their marriage, and carry all of them off to Spain, where even Louis’s long reach would not be able to dislodge them. In 1670, when the marquis was permitted to visit Paris, Louis wrote to his minister Colbert, “Monsieur de Montespan is a madman. Keep a close watch on him…in order to deprive him of any pretext for lingering on in Paris…. I know that he has threatened to see his wife…. Get him out of Paris as quickly as possible.”26
That same year, Athénaïs petitioned the courts to grant her a legal separation from her husband so that an abduction, or a claim to her children with the king, would be illegal. The court dragged its feet for four years despite, or perhaps because of, the king’s insistence on a speedy resolution. These moral arbiters were not impressed with the king’s profligate lifestyle. When in 1674 the decree did come through, it read, in part, that Madame de Montespan, “the high and mighty dame…does and shall continue to domicile separately from her husband…. he, furthermore, henceforward…[is] forbidden to frequent or haunt his lady.”27
History must chuckle over the twists and turns of fate. By 1680 Madame de Montespan had lost her position as king’s mistress but stubbornly remained at court. In 1691, at age fifty, she was banished from Versailles and languished at her estates in the country.
Chastened by her long exile, the former royal mistress was persuaded by her confessor to “ask pardon of her husband and submit herself into his hands,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon. “She wrote to him, by her own pen, in terms of total submission, offering to return to his roof if he deigned to receive her; and if not, to betake herself to whatever destination he should prescribe to her.”28
Madame de Montespan was as fortunate with her request as Madame de Pompadour would be a century later. The duc de Saint-Simon reported, “She got credit for the gesture without having to suffer the consequences. Monsieur de Montespan sent back word that he wanted neither to receive her under his roof nor to make any prescription to her; neither to hear from or of her ever again in his life.”29
Surely the most bitter pill that Madame de Montespan had to swallow was her husband’s welcome at court in the late 1690s. While she continued to suffer humiliating exile, the marquis de Montespan, his former recklessness tempered with age, moved to Versailles. The marquis’s son with his wife, born in 1665, was favored by the king, and for the son’s sake the father was welcomed. Court gossips clucked over the amusing spectacle of the marquis, who had created such a ruckus about his wife’s affair, calmly playing cards with her two bastard daughters by the king. As Elizabeth Charlotte wrote, “Even he must have seen the humor of the situation because he would occasionally turn around and give a little smirk.”30