Madame de Montespan used these opportunities of dining with the king to slip love potions into his wine and onto his meat—disgusting concoctions of dead baby’s blood, bones, and intestines, along with parts of toads and bats. Suddenly Louis—either because of her sparkling conversation or her potions—fell in love with Madame de Montespan. With no remorse toward the queen or Louise, she triumphantly affixed the seal of betrayal upon the altar of friendship.
After the birth of Louise’s fourth royal bastard in 1667, she never became pregnant again, while Madame de Montespan remained almost constantly in this interesting condition. In order to protect his new mistress from the legal maneuvers of her insanely jealous husband, Louis arranged for Louise de La Vallière and Madame de Montespan to share a joint apartment in the palace. A court joke became, “His Majesty has gone to join the ladies.”9 No one knew for sure which one he visited. Or did he visit both at once? Malicious tongues wagged.
It gradually became crystal clear at court that Madame de Montespan was now the real mistress, and poor Louise just a decoy. Madame de Montespan demanded, with the king’s apparent acquiescence, that Louise assist her with her toilette. Only Louise, she said, could tame an unruly curl, clasp a necklace, adjust some lace to make her exquisite for the king. Though the former favorite must have been humiliated performing these duties for her imperious successor, she never complained. Kind, gentle, as assiduous as any lady’s maid, Louise would send the radiant Madame de Montespan bouncing on her way to meet her royal lover.
The king’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte, safely removed from romantic intrigues, looked on eagerly from the sidelines as if watching a horse race. “La Montespan was whiter complexioned than La Vallière,” she wrote, “she had a beautiful mouth and fine teeth, but her expression was always insolent. One had only to look at her to see that she was scheming something. She had beautiful blonde hair and lovely hands and arms, which La Vallière did not have, but at least La Vallière was clean in her person, whereas La Montespan was filthy.”10
Elizabeth Charlotte noted that “Madame de Montespan mocked Madame de La Vallière in public, treated her exceedingly ill, and influenced the King to do likewise…. The King had to go through La Vallière’s rooms to reach La Montespan’s. He had a fine spaniel called Malice; at Madame de Montespan’s instigation he tossed that little dog into La Vallière’s lap as he passed her, saying, ‘Here, now, I’m leaving you in good company…. So don’t mope.’ ”11 And he left her alone with Malice.
Louise wrote in her autobiography, “I stay on in this world of flesh in order to expiate my sins upon the same scaffold upon which I offended Thee. Out of my sin shall come my penance…. Those whom I adored now act as my executioners.”12
In 1674, either because of Madame de Montespan’s potions or Louise’s humiliation, the rejected mistress retired to a convent. But Madame de Montespan could not afford to stop her potions. The king’s eye continued to wander. His valet Bontemps brought willing young ladies to the royal chambers, many of them pushed there by ambitious mothers and aunts. The chief aim was, of course, for the girl to replace Madame de Montespan as maîtresse-en-titre. But the consolation prizes were not bad. Even after a brief interlude with the king, girls of inconspicuous lineage would find themselves married off into illustrious noble houses.
In 1675 Madame de Montespan—aware of the king’s interest in several of the queen’s lovely young maids of honor—successfully intrigued to have them dismissed and replaced with older dames. According to Primi Visconti, the king’s mistress, who had given birth to seven illegitimate children, was “shocked, claiming that these young ladies were bringing the Court into ill repute.”13
By the late 1670s Louis had been with his mistress for more than a decade. She had grown heavy and lost her bloom; this fragrant rose was overblown, its petals were splayed; but its thorns were sharper than ever. As the duc de Saint-Simon put it, “Madame de Montespan’s ill humors finished it off…. She had never learned to control her moods…of which the King was most often the target. He was still in love with her, but he was suffering for it.”14
Madame de Sévigné wrote that Madame de Montespan sulked petulantly at the success of her rivals, locking herself in her apartments. Sometimes she threw open her doors in desperate fits of sparkling gaiety. Madame de Sévigné predicted the end was near, for “so much pride and so much beauty are not easily reconciled to take second place. Jealousy runs high, but when has jealousy ever changed the course of events?”15
In 1676, the princesse de Soubise was the object of that jealousy. Though tall and beautiful, the princess suffered the misfortune of flaming red hair. Redheads were thought to be the product of sex during menstruation and were believed to exhibit the lack of sexual self-discipline inherent in the ill-timed copulation of their parents. Madame de Montespan’s eagle eyes noticed that the princess always wore the same pair of emerald pendant earrings whenever her husband left court for Paris. The royal mistress instructed her spies to watch the king’s movements as soon as the emerald earrings appeared, and she was furious to discover that they were a signal for a sexual rendezvous. But the king, though initially aroused by the lascivious proclivities advertised in the princess’s hair, quickly lost interest.
The next rival was the beautiful Madame de Ludres, who considered herself Madame de Montespan’s replacement and gave herself airs. She pretended to be pregnant. The great nobles rose when she passed, an honor reserved by court etiquette for princes of the blood and by practice for the king’s maîtresse-entitre. It was this hubbub of nobles rising when Madame de Ludres passed that caused the queen to realize that her husband had yet another one.
Madame de Ludres’s pompous airs soon alienated her royal lover, who then promptly fell in love with the very beautiful, very young Marie-Angélique de Fontanges. Suddenly Madame de Montespan found herself in the unenviable position occupied by Louise de La Vallière a decade earlier—curling the hair and lacing the stays of Louis’s new mistress. But fiery Athénaïs de Montespan did not acquiesce meekly as Louise de La Vallière had. The marquis de La Fare reported that “Madame de Montespan was close to bursting with spite, and like another Medea, threatened to tear their children limb from limb before the very eyes of the King.”16
Since childhood, the breathtaking blonde Mademoiselle de Fontanges was deemed by her family to be fit for a king. When this scion of the petty nobility turned seventeen, her impoverished relatives contributed a purse to deck the girl out in finery and send her to Versailles with this sole purpose. Her family’s investment had paid off handsomely—she was created a duchess and given an annual pension of forty thousand ecus.
But Athénaïs de Montespan’s ultimate replacement was not to be the short-lived Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Justice, balancing her scales, would bestow the king on someone Athénaïs herself had introduced to him. When Madame de Montespan needed to find a nurse and governess for her children with Louis, a woman with whom he might spend a great deal of time, she would never have selected a beautiful young woman. As she cast her long, narrow eyes about, her gaze rested on the pious virgin widow of an invalid poet, the formidable Madame Françoise Scarron. Rattling with rosaries and crucifixes, Widow Scarron always wore black, relieved by trimmings of silver or gold only because court etiquette demanded it. When the Sun King, center of beauty, color, art, and scandal, first met the woman his mistress had chosen to look after his children, he was horrified by the bristling batlike apparition. “I do not like your bel esprit,” he told Madame de Montespan, which must have confirmed her in her choice.17