But soon Louis grew to admire this intelligent, kindhearted woman. While his mistress took little notice of her growing clutch of children, it was Madame Scarron who nursed them tirelessly through their illnesses and began their education. She was witty, she was sensible, she was efficient, and her rigid piety appealed to the monarch’s suppressed yearning for religion. In gratitude for her efforts, the king gave her the estate of Maintenon, a moated castle and lands, and she took the name Madame de Maintenon.
As Madame de Montespan’s jealous temper tantrums and rapacious inroads into the royal treasury increased, the king began to see the greater beauty of his children’s governess. “Madame de Maintenon knows how to love,” he once said wistfully. “There would be great pleasure in being loved by her.”18
One day the amorous monarch approached this unlikely object of his desires with the offer to make her his mistress and, for what was probably the only time in his life, was refused on religious grounds. Though her piety was genuine, there was perhaps a bit of cunning behind her refusal. “Nothing is so clever as to conduct one’s self irreproachably,” Madame de Maintenon wrote a friend.19 Her irreproachable conduct merely increased his ardor—as well she knew it would—and by the late 1670s he spent every spare moment with Madame de Maintenon in her exquisite rooms in Versailles, talking about politics, religion, economics, heavy subjects that even the brilliant Madame de Montespan could barely discuss.
The king’s glamorous mistress was positively baffled by her lover’s fascination with such a dry bag of bones as Madame de Maintenon. There were countless stormy scenes between the two former friends, as the once omnipotent mistress felt her power slipping through her perfumed white fingers. One courtier reported hearing Madame de Montespan saying to Madame de Maintenon, “The King has three mistresses. That young hussy [Mademoiselle de Fontanges] performs the actual functions of a mistress; I hold the title; you, the heart.”20
The beginning of the end of Madame de Montespan occurred in 1679, when the Paris police launched an investigation into numerous allegations of poison in the city. Suspects were some of the highest ladies of the land, who—after visiting the witch La Voisin—had become wealthy widows after the sudden demise of disagreeable husbands. Some of the ladies in question fled France immediately rather than face interrogation.
Over the next year, 218 people were interrogated—some under torture—and 36 were executed by sword, rope, or stake. The police investigation was like a giant spiderweb that grew not only wider, but higher. There was one great lady in particular, several of the accused intimated, who was so high and mighty they dared not name her. In 1680 the witch La Voisin went to her death at the stake, categorically denying that any such woman had ever been her client. But shortly afterward her daughter admitted that the lady in question was none other than Madame de Montespan, the king’s mistress of thirteen years, the mother of his children.
The girl reported, “Every time something new came up to upset Madame de Montespan, every time she feared a diminution of the King’s good graces, she came running to my mother for a remedy, and then my mother would call in one of the priests to celebrate a Mass and then she would send Madame de Montespan the powders which were to be used on the King.”21
She described Black Masses in the early years 1666–1668 to win the king’s favor, held in abandoned chapels and officiated over by the defrocked abbé de Guiborg, the holy chalice held on Madame de Montespan’s groin. “At one of Madame de Montespan’s Masses, I saw my mother bring in an infant… obviously premature… and place it in a basin over which Guiborg slit its throat, draining the blood into the chalice… where he consecrated the blood and the wafer… speaking the names of Madame de Montespan and the King…. The body of the infant was incinerated in the garden oven, and the entrails were taken the next day by my mother…for distillation, along with the blood and the consecrated Host… all of which was then poured into a glass vial which Madame de Montespan came by, later, to pick up and take away…”22
At another Black Mass, according to the La Voisin girl, Madame de Montespan called on the demons of hell to assist her. “Hail Ashtaroth and Asmodeus, Princes of Friendship,” she reportedly chanted. “I conjure you to accept the sacrifice of this child in return for favors asked of you, that I should have and keep the love of the King… that the Queen should become barren… that the King should leave her bed and board to come to mine… that he should grant whatever I ask of him, for me and mine… that I should be included in the councils of the King, a party to all state business… and that the King’s love for me should wax and flourish… so that he shall abandon and no longer look upon the face of La Vallière… so that the Queen shall be repudiated… so that the King may marry me.”23 At this point the child’s throat was slit with a knife and its blood drained into the chalice.
Given reports of babies’ bones in La Voisin’s garden, the police started digging. And digging. And digging. They uncovered the remains of twenty-five hundred infants—aborted, stillborn, premature, and those who had been sacrificed alive. There was a small oven in the garden pavilion where La Voisin would burn an infant’s body if it was too large to bury easily.
Louis finally understood why for thirteen years he had awoken with a headache every morning after having dined with Athénaïs de Montespan the night before. He was revolted at the quantities of noxious potions he had consumed over the years, but perhaps he was even more disgusted at the behavior of the woman he had loved. There was no question of allowing the police to interrogate Madame de Montespan—Louis would be the laughingstock of Europe if word got out. Witnesses who had even mentioned her name were either executed or locked in solitary confinement in distant fortresses until their deaths. The former favorite remained at Versailles for another decade, throwing parties and dazzling guests with her brilliant wit. But the king’s visits to her were rare and always in the company of others, and he never ate or drank anything she offered him.
The revelation of Madame de Montespan’s witchcraft sent the king fleeing to Madame de Maintenon for religious consolation. She advised him to return to his wife’s bed, which he did, making the last three years of Queen Marie-Thérèse’s life the happiest ever. After her death in 1683, he secretly married Madame de Maintenon, who otherwise would never have slept with him. The poor widow, the children’s nanny, was now the uncrowned queen of France.
Vipers Nourished in the Breast
Certain royal mistresses, adept at quietly seeking and destroying potential rivals, were blindsided by their own relatives, often poor young women from the country invited to enjoy the pleasures of court.
Madame de Mailly, the first mistress of Louis XV, won the dubious distinction of being unseated by her three sisters in succession. Born Louise-Julie de Mailly-Nesle, she had married her cousin the comte de Mailly and been appointed lady-in-waiting to the queen. Madame de Mailly was a plain, sweet woman who for seven years in the 1730s helped the young king grow out of his painful shyness. Paradoxically, one of her greatest assets in Louis’s eyes was her lack of beauty and grandeur—the bold advances of countless stunning women at court actually frightened the introverted monarch.